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Where's the moolah?

I was doing some simple maths the other day. I took the number of elephants that Veerappan has killed over the years, estimates of which vary between 2,000 and 2,500 and calculated the number of tonnes of ivory they would have yielded. Then I multiplied that by the current price of smuggled ivory. To that I added the number of sandalwood trees he has hacked down and multiplied it by the price of sandalwood as it is today and slashed that figure by roughly 50 per cent to account for the fact that he has been selling this over four-and-a-half decades, when the prices were not so high.

I am not so sure my calculations are 100 per cent accurate but, give or take Rs 50 crore, our friend Koose Muniswamy Veerappan should have made a neat killing of Rs 700 crore. Not bad for 45 years of pretty rigorous labour, working the forests of Tamil Nadu.

Now, assuming that the clever man did not inherit anything from his criminal mentor Salvai Gounder and that he invested at least half this money as he earned it, in the most conventional low yield securities, he should now be easily worth Rs 2,000 crore. Money in our banks double every seven years and we are, here, talking about a criminal career spanning 45 years. But the question is: Where is this wealth? Where has Veerappan stashed away his Rs 2,000 crore?

Veerappan's wife Muthulaxmi, 32, runs a tiny grocery shop in Mettur and certainly does not give the impression that she is well off. His daughter Vidyarani looks like any eight-year-old from a lower middle class family. Veerappan himself lives with his gang of not so merry men in the dismal forests of Tamilnadu in conditions that are not exactly princely. Their guns are largely old muzzle loaders and double barrel 12 bores, with a few .303 and 7.62 rifles. Even the Mumbai underworld is better armed. Plus, they are always on the run. They do not dress in JJ Valaya suits and the way the moustachioed brigand looks, one would have thought he could do with more frequent baths.

In other words, he is not exactly the cool dude he is made out to be, flashing his Rs 2,000 crore in hard cash. After all, the banks are not going to keep his earnings and, as far as police records go, he has no landed property either. His wife is not exactly dripping with diamonds. So what does he do with all his cash?

Some of it, of course, goes in staying out of reach of the Special Task Force. But what about the rest? It has not changed his lifestyle. It has not manifested itself, as illgotten wealth invariably does, in land holdings, bank accounts, huge amounts of jewellery, or a better quality of life for his family. He has not set up a factory. He has not sent his daughter to a public school in Ooty. He has not bankrolled his brother into politics. His only indulgences appear to be an old tape recorder, a black and white television and a few dirty movie cassettes apart, of course, from his ugly, ill fitting clothes and a funny moustache.

Are we then overassessing his wealth? Or is he working for an unknown political master who throws him a few crumbs and keeps the rest for himself? The idea does not appear all that preposterous if you look at the facts as they are. Can anyone escape the police of three states for 45 years unless he has a very powerful godfather in politics who tells him exactly when and where to hide? Who, then, deliberately misleads the police so that they go looking for him in all the wrong places?

If a journalist who does not have the enormous clout and resources of the State to back him can find Veerappan so easily, if the emissaries can reach him whenever they want, how come the cops can never track him down? If a lone guy can go into the forests armed with a tape recorder and come back with messages and pictures of him chatting up the brigand, how come entire battalions of policemen cannot track him down with their sophisticated equipment and deadly fire power?

Surely there is something fishy about the way Rajakumar was freed. Where did this mysterious lady called Bhanu come from? How did she manage to rescue the actor so easily when the police failed for more than 100 days? And who is this P Nedumaran who succeeded in convincing Veerappan that he should let Rajakumar go? And now, if you add the Rs 50 crore that some say was paid as ransom, then where has that money gone? To join the missing Rs 2,000 crore?

Frankly, I have no answers. All I am saying is that this jigsaw does not fall into place any which way you look at it. There is something that stinks out here. The police, the politicians, the emissaries, the media out there: everyone seems to have a hand in the cover up and the way Veerappan the sandalwood smuggler, the killer of elephants, the kidnapper and fugitive from the law is slowly emerging as a putative Tamil freedom fighter speaks volumes for the way his image building exercise is being planned and executed by a team of brilliant media managers. The question is: Who is behind it all?

It is important to find this out because the story of Veerappan is not going to end here. This is just the beginning, I would say, of a much larger, much bigger game where the security of India could well be at stake.

Pritish Nandy

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