Advantage Veerappan

Advantage Veerappan

It is intriguing that `Sandalwood' Veerappan's list of demands should read like a veritable political manifesto. But perhaps the reason why his charter sounds like a launching pad for a future career in politics is that it is actually meant to serve that purpose. Meanwhile, the state is a helpless bystander, even an accomplice. It took all of a two-hour closed-door confabulation for M Karunanidhi and S M Krishna, chief ministers of the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, to consider Veerappan's 10-point charter and to accede to his "major demands". As India's most famous outlaw boldly demands and the state capitulates with unseemly haste, it is embarrassingly clear that in this confrontation, Veerappan holds all the aces.

A charitable interpretation of the state's weak-kneed response would be that it flows from the fact that a precious life is at risk. After all, Kannadiga icon Rajkumar has been in Veerappan's custody for the last one week; India's own Silicon Valley has been holding its breath since the kidnapping. This, however, is inadequate alibi for the failure to summon even a show of resistance in the face of the outlaw's blackmail. The truth is that the state's surrender to Veerappan today is part of a larger, older pattern of response. Over the years, Veerappan has time and again cocked a snook at the might of the state and its pathetic inability and/or unwillingness to nab him. Not all the state's policemen, nor all of its special task force -- over a thousand strong and formed eight years ago -- have been able to breach the dreaded Veerappan country; the last six years alone have seen five dramas of the kind being staged now. The state has made no small contribution, therefore, to the outlaw's formidable aura ofinvincibility over almost two decades. Now, by kidnapping the popular film star, the bandit is only trying to cap a stunningly successful career with a final flourish. And the state can do no more than yield -- as it has always done, and almost by rote. This time, though, the outlaw is playing for the big prize. His list of demands makes no mention of amnesty or ransom. It is a compendium instead, of touchingly selfless and wholly Tamilian desires -- the implementation of the interim order of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, compensation and protection to Tamil victims of the 1991 riots in Karnataka on the Cauvery issue, the release of "innocent" persons kept in Karnataka jails, the immediate unveiling of a statue of Thiruvalluvar in Bangalore et al. The notorious sandalwood smuggler, ivory poacher and cop-killer, it is clear, is making a play for a more comfortable career now that he is getting on in age. It is politics now for the Bandit King.

Ironically, by themselves, Veerappan's demands are not all unreasonable. In fact, many of them have been made by mainstream political parties at different points of time. It will be a sad travesty though that an ageing criminal may well be responsible for accomplishing through blackmail what legitimate political players have been struggling to achieve for so many years.