The legend of Koose Muniswamy Veerappan is such that any story of any aspect of his life is bound to be a gripping read, and it always starts with his simply fabulous moustache on the cover. This is a tale that will be told for many generations. Every narration will add its own bit of intrigue and this one by K Vijay Kumar, the IPS officer who led the Tamil Nadu Police Special Task Force that finally gunned the forest brigand down on October 18, 2004, is no different.
You would expect a book by a professionally distinguished officer who had been involved in the hunt for Veerappan for more than a decade to answer a lot of questions and put a lot of conspiracies to rest. Alas, this is an incredibly tame effort, made worse by the fact that the officer could have been more frank since he has now retired from service.
The book begins as a standard autobiography of an IPS officer, from selection to his various postings. The author highlights the facts that he was among the first batch of the central government’s Special Protection Group and the Tamil Nadu Police’s Close Protection Team, meant to guard VVIPs. He gets chosen for these posts, he says, because of his shooting skills and his organisational ability. But it soon becomes apparent that the author is besotted by the enigma of Veerappan, and his life story is soon entwined with the legend of the brigand.
Where do you begin with Veerappan? It is extremely difficult to pin him down. Elephant poacher, sandalwood smuggler, local mafiosi, insurgent leader... The beauty was that he was sometimes one of those and many times all of those at the same time. The author honestly admits that he is at a loss to pin down what actually drove Veerappan to do what he did. What emerges is a very detailed caricature linked inseparably to the man, the moustache and the persona.
Although you only end up with conjecture on what went on in Veerapan’s mind, you have to give the author credit for his methodical, factual accounts of all the various incidents of violence that catapulted Veerappan to page one news from the depths of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in south India. In a rare feat, the author has gone back to the archives of the Karnataka and Tamil Nadu Police Special Task Force (K- and TN-STF), to dig out after-action reports of famous incidents, such as the killing of IFS officer P Srinivas, IPS officer T Harikrishna and Sub-Inspector Shakeel Ahmed. These incidents brought Veerappan to the notice of the world, and you can read about these encounters in forensic detail. Reams are also devoted to Veerappan’s zenith – the kidnap of Kannada superstar Rajkumar – but there is precious little here that has not been dissected by the new media.
Though not quite as forensic in analysis, the book also presents a good idea of how Veerappan managed to escape the long arm of the law for almost two decades. It is tragic to read of ambushes in the mid-1990s when the state police forces are found to be woefully unprepared to face a cunning adversary who is intimately familiar with the local lay of the land. It is rather strange that the police forces never sent an SOS to the Indian Army or other central armed paramilitary forces, which had vast experience of fighting counter insurgency battles in Kashmir and the Northeast by then, to share knowledge that could have saved lives. Even the few central forces who were rushed in to combat Veerappan find themselves out of depth. But as time wears on, the efforts of the police forces begin to pay off and the end game nears.
One glaring failure of the book is that it never treads near politically sensitive territory. What kind of political patronage did Veerappan have? For years the author was known to be close to one side of the political divide in Tamil Nadu — the AIADMK, which was then led by J Jayalalithaa. There is barely any mention of attempts made to pin down Veerappan when the other party, the DMK, led by M Karunanidhi, was in power. This is the party that is accused of being soft on Veerappan. You would assume the author would take this opportunity to give his take on the patronage that the brigand supposedly enjoyed, but he plays it very safe, only going as far as mentioning an influential “Mr X”, who was the key apparently to bringing down Veerappan.
The endgame begins with an elaborate intelligence game, almost like catching Osama Bin Laden. It ends with Veerappan being caught in a hail of bullets with three of his closest associates. But was it really that easy to get the elusive bandit to come out of his lair? Veerappan might have met a mortal end but his story definitely has not.
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