To catch a thief

EUREKA MOMENT
FOUR years and nine months later, Veerappan8217;s widow Muthulakshmi8217;s wails rent the air: 8216;8216;I always told him not to come out of the forests. He came out and they killed him.8217;8217;

It8217;s a rather simplistic dismissal of the STF effort. 8216;8216;Operation Cocoon succeeded because there was no publicity at all. The media did not pry into our operation. And the political will of the Jayalalithaa government was crucial,8217;8217; beams jubilant Tamil Nadu STF chief J Vijaykumar.

The Monday night 8216;Breaking News8217; across television channels and the next morning8217;s gory photographs in the dailies were the result of 20 months of intensive sleuthing8212;and one eureka moment. 8216;8216;I realised it was pointless continuing to comb the forests, as we had done for the past 10 years. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. So we decided to get the needle out of the haystack,8217;8217; STF SP N K Senthamaraikannan told The Sunday Express from the Sathyamangalam forests.

Abandoning the unproductive search across 6,000 sq km of forests across Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, the STF8212;in a move uncannily similar to that portrayed in the Kamal Hasan crime thriller Kurithi Punal Bloodstream8212;8216;embedded8217; its men in the Veerappan camp. It was a high-risk operation, but with a far higher potential for success.

Success, when it did come at 10.50 pm on Monday, was the outcome of a meticulously crafted plan. Two other factors played crucial roles: Veerappan8217;s letter to his imprisoned brother Mathaiyan and the two college boys who volunteered to penetrate the bandit king8217;s inner circle to tip off the STF on Veerappan8217;s 8216;8216;psyche, weaknesses and needs8217;8217;.

EMBEDDING INFORMERS
IN January 2003, STF Intelligence wing personnel fanned out in different districts, from Madurai to Tiruchi, Permabalur to Coimbatore, to establish contact with lower-level cadre of Tamil extremist groups like Tamil Viduthalai Iyakkam, Tamil Nadu Liberation Army and the Tamil Nadu Retrieval Troops.

8216;8216;Some of them, we learnt, were acting as conduits for Veerappan. Slowly, we infiltrated the conduits8217; network and realised that Veerappan was looking to strengthen his team,8217;8217; says a senior STF officer closely involved with the search operation.

The first major breakthrough came four months later, when the STF intercepted a letter from Veerappan to his brother, then lodged in Coimbatore jail. The letter asked Mathaiyan to use his extremist contacts to round up some 8216;8216;energetic youths to assist me in the forests8217;8217;.

That promptly send the grey cells in the STF working overtime. 8216;8216;We realised we could train some boys and send them into the forests. But we decided against using STF personnel, as their gait and expressions would give them away and a suspicious Veerappan could even kill them,8217;8217; says an STF SP.

The problem was solved in May 2003, when R Natraj was the STF chief. Four civilians8212;including two college students8212;volunteered to be trained to pose as Muslim fundamentalists and eventually penetrate the sandalwood smuggler8217;s gang. The possible temptation was the Rs 5.5 crore prize money on Veerappan8217;s head.

8216;8216;It was the riskiest part of our mission,8217;8217; recalls the officer. 8216;8216;The two students identities not revealed due to security reasons came forward to help us without even informing their parents. If Veerappan had harmed them, we would have been in big trouble.8217;8217;

Armed with the letter to Mathaiyan, the four youths got in touch with Veerappan. 8216;8216;Fortunately for us, Veerappan bought their story. They lived with him in the forests for 19 days in June 2003, and brought back information crucial to the eventual encounter,8217;8217; says the SP.

ACTION PLAN
IN all, the STF had been on Veerappan8217;s track for 17 years. But even the old hands on the search team were taken aback at the sheer audacity of the jungle lord8217;s future plans.

8216;8216;On their return, the youths told us Veerappan wanted to raise a 300-member army and train them in the Kerala forests. He wanted to use them in kidnappings8212;one of his prime targets was the Kanchi Sankaracharya, for whom he expected a ransom of a whopping Rs 100 crore. If the army didn8217;t materialise, he was quite willing to turn to a mafia gang,8217;8217; says an STF officer.

The four also learnt that Veerappan was battling his own health problems: His eyesight was failing because of cataract and his knees were rheumatic. Possibly because of this, he was becoming increasingly insecure and losing confidence in close aide Sethukali Govindan.

The youths offered to organise an operation for his eyes, but Veerappan turned them down. 8216;8216;Probably he hadn8217;t gained enough confidence in them,8217;8217; muses the officer.

SPINNING THE WEB
FROM June, when the four youths returned to civilisation, to November 2003, when Vijaykumar took charge of the STF, the team maintained a low profile. In January 2004, the STF stepped up pressure in the MM Hills, and forced Veerappan and his men to move downhill to the Pennagram forests. Veerappan set up camp under forest cover in the Dharmapuri district, possibly in the hope of recruiting some 8216;8216;youths8217;8217; from the Naxal-infested area.

It was around this time that the STF got lucky yet again: They zeroed in on Veerappan8217;s main tribal conduit and source of supplies. 8216;8216;After we won him over, we sent him back to the forest with the strict instruction not to go out of his way to volunteer help. We wanted him to wait patiently till Veerappan himself asked for help,8217;8217; says the SP.

In March 2004, Veerappan asked the contact to round up some extremist youths for him. 8216;8216;So we sent some pictures of youths posing as extremists through the conduit.8217;8217;

That apparently worked as a confidence-building measure because, next, the conduit was asked to fix up a trip to the Kothagiri forests for Veerappan8217;s eye treatment. 8216;8216;However, at the last minute, he changed his plans. We were very disappointed, but we patiently waited for our next chance.8217;8217;

D-DAY
FINALLY came the day when fuzzy vision scored over precaution. 8216;8216;On October 13, Veerappan asked the conduit to set up the eye surgery. We decided on the date8212;October 188212;and the time, 10.15 pm. The conduit gave Veerappan the registration number of the vehicle that would carry him into town, and told him two Tamil extremists, Vellathurai actually an STF sub-inspector and Saravanan an STF constable would accompany him.8217;8217;

Neither clause raised any suspicion. At the appointed time, Veerappan set out from the Pennagram forest in a Tempo Traveller converted into an ambulance and fitted with an electronic eye that allowed the STF to keep an eye on him.

8216;8216;And so Veerappan moved out of his safe den and into our trap,8217;8217; says Vijaykumar.

LOCAL VILLAIN
BY gunning down Veerappan, the STF has not only added a shine to its brass, but has also raised the sagging image of their political boss Jayalalithaa. However, it is unlikely to improve her political fortunes in the Assembly elections, less than two years away. The PMK, which banks on the votes of the Vanniars8212;to which caste Veerappan belonged8212;and the Tamil extremist groups, may attempt to exploit a shade of sympathy for the bandit.

There is no sympathy, though, where it would be most expected. In Gopinathan, where Veerappan was born and where he launched his crime career as a small-time deer hunter before moving onto elephant-poaching, sandalwood-smuggling and jungle-banditry, the hero continues to be Srinivas. The Chamrajnagar district forest officer was instrumental in Veerappan8217;s capture in 1986.

Fourteen years ago, Veerappan beheaded Srinivas, who had helped build a temple and a school in the village. To the dreaded bandit8217;s one-time neighbours, one worked for peace, the other only to shatter it. And there8217;s no doubt which side they8217;d rather be on.

Dinner with the porcupines

How an illiterate brigand outwitted a succession of highly motivated, trained hunters

SAMAR HALARNKAR

THE porcupine quills were strewn all around a hastily doused campfire. It was February 9, 1990, and Veerappan had flown the coop just hours ago. As his men secured the perimeter of the cave deep in the southern deciduous forests, T N 8216;Rambo8217; Gopalakrisnan relaxed the tense grip on his carbine and removed his sawed-off motorcyle gloves. It was the day Veerappan was dealt his first major blow: the seizure of his sandalwood stockpile, 50 tonnes and six-foot-high.

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After many flops, Op Cocoon succeeded, Vijaykumar says, because there was no publicity about it at all

8216;8216;This is why he stays ahead of us,8217;8217; said Deputy Superintendent of Police Gopalakrishnan, pointing to the quills. 8216;8216;He is like a ghost, a forest ghost.8217;8217; Then, the beefy former wrestler8212;Tamil Nadu8217;s matinee idol chief minister MGR offered him a police job during a felicitation8212;quickly regained the menace that accompanied his trunk-like arms and Veerappan-like moustache. 8216;8216;But I will find him. I will hunt him like a dog. And I will kill him.8217;8217;

The bandit, as always, was a step ahead. More than 1,000 tense policemen and forest officials of two states had just thrashed through the forests straddling the borders of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to splinter his sandalwood-smuggling and elephant-poaching economy. To Veerappan8217;s finely tuned jungle ears, their movements were like blaring sirens. At his cave hideout, was a hastily scrawled sign in Tamil: 8216;8216;You have killed two of my men and burnt two of my trucks and taken away my sandalwood,8217;8217; it said. 8216;8216;This will be avenged.8217;8217;

In the months that followed, Gopalakrishnan and Veerappan played a cat-and-mouse game. Teaching his men to live off a land with no development and no government, Gopalakrishnan8212;a lieutenant of then Inspector-General of Police Walter Dawaram who led the hunt for many years8212;savagely attacked Veerappan8217;s village support structure and continued picking off his men. 8216;8216;I will kill that chicken thief,8217;8217; Veerappan raged later a letters that mysteriously found its way to Tamil papers.

The long criminal record of the man, who became an elephant poacher at age 15 in this dirt-poor area, is studded with this all-consuming vengeance. Three years later, despite losing many men and living on the run, Veerappan got his revenge. He blew up Gopalakrishnan8217;s convoy deep on a jungle road. 8216;Rambo8217;, now an SP, was crippled and lost 22 men from his elite Tamil Nadu Special Police commando unit. He spent many months in hospital and never returned to the hunt.

8216;Rambo8217; was lucky in a sense. There were many capable, driven officers from both states8212;SPs, sub-inspectors and forest officials8212;who were specifically targeted and killed trying to get the better of the vengeful brigand.

Veerappan8217;s success against well-trained, motivated officers came from a life on the edge. His senses were finely tuned to the jungle, his home since he was a teenager. While his hunters communicated with wireless sets and wore heavy jungle boots, Veerappan communicated with his men through bird and animal calls. From porcupines to berries, he was never far from supplies in the forests of Sathyamangalam-Bargur-Kollegal.

Veerappan was illiterate but possessed an innate ability to learn. Upto 1990, he wielded only blunderblusses, also called muzzle-loaders, ancient 19th century weapons loaded through the muzzle. But he quickly graduated to more modern .303 rifles and AK-47s, mostly seized from slain policemen or armouries he had raided. In ambushes, officers freely admitted, his positioning and planning was worthy of the best guerrillas. That8217;s how he repeatedly vanquished numerically superior and better-armed forces.

The jungle instinct, the ability to learn and adapt, and his philosophy of vengeance made him an enormously dangerous foe on home ground. In ambushes through the 8217;90s, he used mines to blow up police vehicles, then targeted the survivors. In 1990, he fired his blunderbuss8212;with a range of no more than 30 yards8212;defiantly from a nearby hillside when nervous foresters were carting off his precious sandalwood. 8216;Rambo8217; ordered the hillside plastered with machine-gun fire but it was an empty response: The range was too great even for a machine gun. In the distance, you could see Veerappan and five men scrambling through the trees. No one dared follow.

Nearly 15 years on, Additional Director General of Police K Vijay Kumar knew that despite excellent intel, despite the firepower available, the bandit would be hard to beat at his own game. And so the only time Veerappan was bested was the day he was killed8212;outside his sanctuary, where his instincts and his cunning were finally worth nothing.

THE LOST BOOTY: THE WOOD AND THE IVORY
8216;Not too many trees now8217;

ARE the sandalwood forests of Tamil Nadu any safer now that Veerappan was gone?

The not unpertinent question evokes a caustic reply from an STF officer: 8216;8216;But where are the sandalwood trees? Most of them are already gone.8217;8217;

In Tamil Nadu, the Eastern Ghats8212;particularly the Javadu range, covering Vellore, Salem and Erode districts8212;are considered to be rich in sandalwood trees. The Western Ghats make up for their scanty sandalwood wealth by being home to ivory-tuskered pachyderms.

Beginning with the 1970s, both Ghats became the happy hunting ground for gangs big and small8212;some of them acting with political patronage8212;for their respective treasure troves. However, by the 1980s, Veerappan had firmly established himself as the sandalwood don across 6,000 sq km of forests spread over Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Sandalwood trees cut down in the Erode, Sathyamangalam and Kollegal forests would find their way to the sandalwood oil factories on the Tamil Nadu-Kerala border. According to a conservative estimate, the Veerappan gang destroyed sandalwood trees worth Rs 200 crores in the 1980s.

Later, his associate-turned-rival Baby Veerappan, resorted to competitive felling, wiping off vast acres of sandalwood trees in the Eastern Ghats.

In the 1990s, Veerappan shifted to kidnappings for ransom, and the small-time sandalwood smugglers continued with their business, after obediently paying a share to the bandit.

8216;8216;Now there are no big-time sandalwood mafia for the simple reason there are not many sandalwood trees in Tamil Nadu,8217;8217; says a district forest officer. Besides, the Special Task Force presence in the jungles in the past 14 years brought down the smuggling activity significantly, even as their commandos assisted the Forest department in anti-poaching raids.

The only thefts that occur nowadays happen with political and official patronage. Last year, a 120-year-old tree was cut down from a Forest bungalow in north Tamil Nadu. And eight years ago, during the Karunanidhi regime, a forest depot packed with sandal logs worth over Rs 60 crore caught fire in Tirupattur. The local district forest officer8217;s probe pointed to the involvement of a local DMK MLA. The Opposition cried foul, but the government refused to order a CBI enquiry. The result: A Commission of Inquiry gave a clean chit to the MLA.

8216;8216;Unless the vigil is tightened, we may lose the few sandalwood trees that are left in our forests. And we may have more Kutty Baby Veerappans to deal with,8217;8217; warns a senior STF officer.

Radha Venkatesan

THE SEARCH MENTOR:
WALTER DAWARAM

Sixty-five-year-old Dawaram, who spent four years in the forests with the vow to hunt down Veerappan, on why his protege Vijaykumar had to succeed

8216;8216;IT is your destiny. You will get him,8217;8217; I told Vijaykumar when he was redeputed to the Special Task Force last November. And I am very happy my words have come true.

I never had any doubts that Veerappan could be caught. But four factors were crucial for the success of the operation this time: the voluntary nature of the Tamil Nadu STF8212;all the men volunteered to join the force, they weren8217;t ordered to8212;the brilliant leadership of commando Vijaykumar, the secrecy with which the operation was conducted and, equally important, the support of Chief Minister Jayalalithaa.

The planning and execution of the operation was simply brilliant. Veerappan was a highly suspicious fellow. He had killed 12 people in a village in 19938212;immediately after we caught his wife8212;doubting their loyalty. But a sub-inspector managed to infiltrate the Veerappan gang, which was a brilliant and daring piece of work.

When I went into the forests in 1994 for an operation to hunt down Veerappan, we only conducted manual searches. But we reduced Veerappan8217;s gang from 105 to just five, and successfully conducted two rescue operations.

But it was Vijaykumar8217;s original, unique idea to penetrate the Veerappan gang that finally helped in completing the mission. Some people ask me if I regret that I did not catch Veerappan. I have no regrets and I am only happy that he has been caught.

THE UNSUNG HERO: N K SENTHAMARAIKANNAN
8216;It was the riskiest operation ever8217;

RADHA VENKATESAN SATHYAMANGALAM

8216;8216;HE is the real hero of the operation against Veerappan,8217;8217; bellows a large group of STF personnel at the Dharmapuri police office, just 10 hours after gunning down jungle bandit. And they lift their hero on their shoulders, the perfect photo-op for the waiting mediapersons.

But even in his vantage position, there is no smile on the face of Superintendent of Police N K Senthamaraikannan. Veerappan scalped, the STF Intelligence chief8217;s thoughts have returned to his father, battling for his life in the intensive care unit after a heart attack.

8216;8216;I was quite tense. It was the riskiest operation in my life,8217;8217; he says, and, for a moment, one isn8217;t sure whether this is the son talking or the officer.

As the in-charge of STF Intelligence, it was this 41-year-old promotee IPS officer who worked quietly in the shadows of his flamboyant commander-in-chief K Vijaykumar to mastermind Operation Cocoon.

Born in a remote hamlet in Virudhunagar district, south Tamil Nadu, Senthamaraikannan realised as long ago as 1988 that there was no point in 8216;8216;combing the forests8217;8217; for Veerappan. 8216;8216;But at that point I was just an assistant superintendent of police with the STF, not one of the decision-makers,8217;8217; he says.

The chance to prove his theory came in 2003, when he returned to the STF as SP, Intelligence. With credible investigations in sensitive cases like the 2000 Dharmapuri bus burning behind him, 8216;8216;I got a free hand to draw up new strategies,8217;8217; says Senthamaraikannan.

For about a year, he says, he 8216;8216;virtually did a Ph.D on Veerappan8217;s psyche and his weaknesses. And I concluded he was a coward who had a great fear for his life.8217;8217; For a few months, he 8216;8216;moved closely with Tamil extremists who acted as conduits to Veerappan8217;8217; and won them over to the STF.

And finally, a conduit was lured out of the forests and Veerappan was gunned down. 8216;8216;It was one of the riskiest operations. None of my family members knew where I was or what I was doing. But for ADGP Vijaykumar8217;s support we could not have achieved it,8221; he says.

Operation over, he says, he is not 8216;8216;overly elated, because we only did what was expected of us8217;8217;.

But now that Veerappan has been laid to rest, Senthamaraikannan is happy he can spend time with his four-year-old son. 8216;8216;When my wife told my son that I had shot down Veerappan, his response was: 8216;So, Appa will spend more time with me now8217;,8217;8217; he smiles.

Oh, and Senthamaraikannan, too, can spend more time with his father, now recovering from the heart attack.