Only those with little sense of history or irony would read a glorious victory in the end of the Veerappan saga. Monday’s encounter in the Papparapatti reserve forest in north Tamil Nadu was much too belated. It was preceded by an overlong suspense thriller, featuring one killer thug in a forest hideout ranged against the police forces of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, a special task force, the Border Security Force, the might of the Indian state. All along, except the finale on Monday, this drama was scripted by Veerappan. It will be difficult to congratulate the brave men of the Special Task Force who finally caught up with the famous outlaw without wondering what took them so long.

Veerappan’s evil little empire flourished, unchecked, in the forests of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala for nearly two decades. The terrible statistics he notched in his career — nearly 120 murders, including that of Karnataka’s former minister, H. Nagappa; the slaying of over 2,000 elephants for ivory; looting of sandalwood worth over Rs 200 crore — do not reveal the full horror and shame of how he repeatedly brought the state to its knees. More recently, there was the time in 2000 when he abducted Kannada matinee idol Raj Kumar and carried him away from our country into his own — that impenetrable breadth of forest so difficult to breach for the police, so embarrassingly accessible for Veerappan’s chosen negotiator. The nation was his helpless audience as missives and videotapes inscribed with Veerappan’s demands made their way freely to the public stage while two state governments waited for the emissary’s “cordial negotiations” with the brigand to yield “good news”. A nation watched, also, as the robber attempted to recast his list of demands into a political manifesto. For a while back there, as reports of his association with Tamil separatist political groups were confirmed, it didn’t seem improbable that a politician was waiting to emerge from his jungle lair. A Bandit King to rival the votes polled by the erstwhile Bandit Queen. Would Veerappan succeed in reinventing himself as the messiah of the Tamil cause?