One morning last June, Subramani and wife Pushpa went on their usual trek up Murugamalai, a bald hillock just outside their village in Kakkanji Nagar, close to Theni, to collect firewood. They saw a bundle covered with plastic and dhoti on the slope, and raised an alarm fearing it to be a dead body.

By evening, when a group of men armed with sickles and wooden clubs arrived at the hill, they found three persons guarding the bundle, claiming to be students on a hike. They said the bundle contained ration for their trek. But when the suspicious villagers uncovered it, they discovered a neat pile of guns, grenades and cartridges.

The villagers tied up the three, one of whom hailed from nearby E Pudukkottai village, and informed the Theni police. The men confessed they were members of the CPI (Maoists) and pleaded with the villagers to either kill them or let them escape. Villagers also learnt that seven others, including V Sundaramurthy, who was later nabbed, and Kalidas, key Maoist leaders, attempting to revive Maoism in Tamil Nadu, had escaped.

The June 26 incident sent panic waves across the state administration, which until now believed that any significant Naxalite movement in Tamil Nadu had been quelled. A worried Government pulled ADGP K Vijayakumar, the former STF chief popular for heading the operation that killed Veerappan, from an inconsequential post, and handed him the brief to flush out Maoists hiding in the state’s forests.

Six special police teams were formed to comb the forest ranges in Chennai, Madurai, Salem, Coimbatore, Dharmapuri and Krishnagiri where it was believed that the Maoists were hiding. “Seven persons are still absconding. We believe there is only a handful of these men, who now call themselves CPI (Maoists), fashioning themselves after the Naxalites of Andhra Pradesh,” said Q branch sources.

... contd.