The bandit, the superstar, the state, and the theoretician
Dailey, Peter
FOR MUCH or the fall of 2000, a sensational crime dominated India's news. At a time when resurgent Hindu chauvinism had already called into question the possibility of a secular pluralistic...
...Herders and farmers inhabit the remote villages on its fringe, and deep within the forest, the Soligas, Irulas, and other aboriginal tribes have their settlements...
...Whether or not banditry may be usefully considered a social movement, there is nothing archaic about it...
...Veerappan now vanished from the news...
...The bandit's native village, situated at the foot of Karnataka's Malai Mahadeshwara Hills, is one of two hundred or so settlements home to herders known as the Padiacchi Gounder...
...It is difficult not to admire the gallant spirit of the aging film star, forced to sleep on the ground and share the meager rations of his captors...
...Perhaps the most productive of Hobsbawm's supremely confident generalizations was the distinction he drew between ordinary outlaws, who prey on the weak and unprotected, and "social bandits...
...However, what Tamil politicians found alarming about the appearance of the guerrillas in the notorious bandit's camp was evidence of their ties to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE...
...If they robbed the rich more often," historian Richard W. Slatta concurs, "it was because the rich had more to take...
...God will punish those policemen," one old woman predicted...
...Intermediaries who met with him in his forest hideaway, however, found few of his former lieutenants or followers present...
...When persons of exceptional courage or recklessness refuse to submit, their defiance can sometimes be heroic, even sublime...
...Insofar as bandits have a 'programme', it is the POLITICS ABROAD defense or restoration of the traditional order of things 'as it should be...
...In fact the Kattabomman had not been sheared off, merely pruned...
...At the end of the twentieth century," Hobsbawm notes soberly, "it looks as though this situation might be coming to an end, and the consequences of this regression of state power cannot yet be foreseen...
...After being allowed to gather a few personal items, the actor was led out and disappeared with his captors into the darkness...
...DISSENT / Winter 2005 • 33 POLITICS ABROAD On late Monday night, October 18, 2004, news came that the legendary brigand had been killed in a shootout with the Tamil Nadu Special Task Force...
...The truth, Blok argued, was that bandits weren't Robin Hoods...
...According to police, after a silence of about a minute, the dreaded poacher and his associates started shooting...
...Her elaborate surrender ceremony was televised and broadcast all over India...
...According to Slatta, when the occasion arose, bandits "also despoiled and pillaged the poor, seemingly with few qualms...
...Few populations are less prone to romanticize violence...
...was even more well known than Rajkumar's...
...Since 1990, the Special Tactical Force (STF), at one point totaling more than 4,500 men whose sole purpose was to hunt down the forest bandit, had been operating on both sides of the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border...
...Veerappan's highly successful ivory poaching and illicit sandalwood logging operations represented one of the few local sources of employment for villagers...
...Reportedly acting on a tip, police had staked out a location on a country road outside of Dharmapuri, where they waited for Veerappan, who was known to be traveling in a white Tempo-Traveller that had been fitted out as an ambulance...
...There was no other means," he claimed, not altogether convincingly, "for our family to survive...
...POSTSCRIPT: Hobsbawm had concluded that "if the authorities really bring in enough troops (the effect of which is not so much to frighten the bandit but to make the life of the peasants who support him miserable), and if a sufficiently large reward is offered, then his days are counted...
...With these events dominating the South Indian headlines, Nagappa's fate was a matter of relative indifference, and in December his body was found in the Karnataka jungle, killed, Veerappan claimed, in an ambush by the Tamil Nadu STF...
...Krishna, the chief minister of Karnataka, aware that the abduction of Rajkumar represented a political crisis of the first order, was waiting at 2:00 AM to receive Rajkumar's wife, Parvathamma, when she arrived back in Bangalore...
...In many regions, the locomotive of History carrying us toward the capitalist dystopia that Hobsbawm foresaw ground to a halt...
...rROM THE START, the campaign of the STF to track down the notorious dacoit appears to have been brutal and inept...
...34 n DISSENT / Winter 2005...
...Those with Veerappan's natural senseless ferocity, Hobsbawm notes, "are heroes not in spite of the fear and horror their actions inspire, but in some ways because of them...
...But in rural communities across Karnataka, the roads were clogged as Tamil families threw their possessions in bullock carts or fled by donkey or on foot toward the safety of the Tamil Nadu border...
...On one point, though, Hobsbawm and Blok agreed: even if bandits bear little relation to the legends surrounding them, they play a heroic role in the popular imagination because the drama of the lives of the poor requires it...
...During the course of two hundred films, his roles had ranged from emperors and gods in historical and mythological extravaganzas to hard-bitten Bombay detectives or romantic heroes in more contemporary fare...
...From the start, it was clear that the chances of promptly apprehending Veerappan were not great...
...If Chief Minister Krishna and the Karnataka government were anxious for a resolution to the abduction crisis, their counterparts in Tamil Nadu had powerful incentives to cooperate as well...
...That the bandit-hero might become a prisoner of his own myth was an eventuality neither Hobsbawm nor Blok appears to have contemplated...
...Not surprisingly, a BBC reporter in the heart of Veerappan country found local sentiment very different...
...It is difficult not to conclude that in writing at that particular moment about such people and their millennial and revolutionary hopes Hobsbawm sought to affirm, if only to himself, the reality of human solidarity, the wellsprings of which had been defiled by the spreading stain of Stalin's monstrous betrayal...
...In fact, Blok offers few insights that are not explicit in Hobsbawm's writing as well...
...How do stories like Veerappan's normally end...
...Six weeks earlier Veerappan had crossed the border from Karnataka, setting up camp on the eastern side of the Cauvery...
...Yet in spite of this, in the weeks after Rajkumar's abduction, the forest brigand's fate became a matter of concern for millions...
...Lured by the promise of a reward greater than most of them could earn in a lifetime, the hapless party was sent into the forests disguised as honey collectors...
...The prospect of duplicating such a triumph left the chief ministers of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in an unseemly contest over the breadth of the concessions they might make...
...The impact on local forest communities was ruinous...
...and that he left the bodies of suspected police informants hanging from village trees...
...When the contents of an audio cassette outlining Veerappan's demands were disclosed, they were greeted with incredulity and then ridicule...
...God has fixed twentyfive years of vanavas for me...
...Then, on August 25, 2002, Veerappan struck again, this time taking as his prisoner H. Nagappa, a former Karnataka minister...
...Had he resumed his old hunt for the remaining survivors of Karnataka's elephant population or crossed the Palk Straits into northern Sri Lanka to enjoy the hospitality of the Tamil Tigers in one of their jungle camps...
...Hobsbawm's failure, if that is what it is, was one of emphasis, resulting from a conscious choice...
...At human rights commission hearings in Bangalore during May 2002, more than three hundred witnesses testified about police torture of villagers and forest dwellers as well as killings, disappearances, and the rape 28 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 of hundreds of tribal women...
...EWS OF THIS exploit turned K. Vijayakumar, the fifty-one-year-old —. chief of the Tamil Nadu STF, into a national hero...
...For twenty years, LTTE's terrorist armies had helped to transform the conflict between Sri Lanka's Buddhist and Tamil populations into a civil war of appalling destructiveness...
...The whole notion of "social banditry," he maintained in 1972, was a Marxist fairy tale, fashioned by urban intellectuals ignorant of the dynamics of rural life and the reality of brigandage...
...In practice, the new laws meant the transformation of the forests into exclusive preserves that the rich and politically well connected were free to exploit for their own benefit...
...By late morning, Rajkumar was flown by helicopter to Bangalore...
...Rajkumar's son Raghvendra was quoted as saying that "it is like the killing of a demon...
...Consequently, few people were quite prepared for what happened next...
...surrounding him instead were a dozen men outfitted with all of the equipment and weaponry of a modern guerrilla force...
...AccordDISSENT / Winter 2005 n 27 POLITICS ABROAD ing to Anil Agarwal, the editor of Down to Earth, an environmental bi-weekly, the principal local effect of these "mindless" laws was the creation of a large class of "environmentally alienated" people who were forced to become "robbers in their own lands...
...When Rajkumar had announced in 1999 that he had made his last film, the public outcry was so great that he had been forced to come out of retirement...
...In places around the world where bandits had been hunted into extinction over a hundred years ago, there has been a notable resurgence...
...How the bandit's customary allegiances came to be subsumed by this larger identification will probably never be known...
...A look at the U.S...
...When Vijaykumar was questioned by the press, he attributed the success of the STF efforts to careful intelligence work...
...Following the afternoon celebration, the actor and some remaining guests spent most of the evening in the old house, across the clearing from his asyetunoccupied new residence...
...Naipaul once said, India is a country of "a million little mutinies," fueled by "twenty kinds of group excess, sectarian excess, religious excess, regional excess" (in which Naipaul paradoxically foresaw a "liberation of spirit" and the "beginnings of self awareness...
...July 30 had been a particularly auspicious date for Rajkumar, the night of the new moon, which the actor's astrologer had determined to be a propitious time for a housewarming party for his recently completed mansion...
...No one knows how many people were killed because the bodies of most of the victims were removed by the police to a mass cremation site...
...He helped poor people...
...This was the easternmost point he has ever come . . . . in the last 20 years," Vijaykumar disclosed...
...Veerappan's desire to exact revenge, more than any other single cause, appears to have been responsible for the bandit's private war against the Karnataka government...
...Although most knew of Veerappan's violent career only from local Tamil newspapers or radio broadcasts, they nevertheless found themselves in ready sympathy with his struggle against what they regarded as the corruption and injustice of the state...
...They act from motives no less complicated than anyone else's...
...The factors that produced social bandits and other primitive rebels in the past are very much part of the presentday world...
...In South India, roving bands of dacoits, carrying out their traditional depredations on the weak and unprotected, DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 29 POLITICS ABROAD had been a part of the rural landscape for centuries...
...A nineteen-member fact-finding panel of human rights activists termed the shootout a "fake encounter" and called for a judicial inquiry...
...Now, in midsummer 2000, visibly relishing the prospect of several 26 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 weeks of uninterrupted leisure, the star had returned with his wife, grown children, and their families to what newspapers described as his "ancestral farmhouse...
...Already, one Karnataka farmer had signaled his disapproval of the most recent High Court decision by drowning himself in the reservoir, a popular form of primitive protest not mentioned in Hobsbawm but frequently employed in South India...
...While subsequent works such as Captain Swing, an account of the English agricultural uprising of 1830, written with George Rude, sought to reconstruct the largely anonymous world of agricultural laborers and their "long and doomed struggle against poverty and degradation," Primitive Rebels investigated the prehistory of such overtly political struggles and the "improvised, archaic, spontaneous movements of resistance" generated by "pre-political people who have not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world...
...Perhaps the most telling of Blok's criticisms of Hobsbawm's remarkable work was that he ultimately failed to penetrate banditry's ideological, discursive, and symbolic dimensions...
...With instructions to report any suspicious incident, they were often left there for months at a time, subsisting on a gruel made from millet...
...Their actions are less a protest against the fact that peasants are poor than an attempt "to establish or re-establish justice or the 'old ways', that is to say, fair dealing in a society of oppression...
...Although Colombia was one of the countries Hobsbawm studied extensively, the mindless violence of guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug-cartel gunmen over the last sixty years almost prompted him to throw in his hand...
...For Tamil Nadu's government to allow Veerappan to be hunted down was also fraught with political danger...
...They reduced the once-plentiful elephant population to a handful of herds and felled great stands of sandalwood trees, often leaving only saplings that, Agarwal warns, may be insufficient to pollinate a future forest...
...But instances such as these pale compared to the virtual pandemic of banditry today in POLITICS ABROAD places like Chechnya...
...Has the world changed in ways that would justify Hobsbawm's note of scholarly pessimism...
...Bandits and highwaymen preoccupy the police, but they ought also to preoccupy the social historian," was Eric Hobsbawm's deceptively offhand introduction to this subject in his 1959 study Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries...
...Hobsbawm consistently overemphasized class conflict or social protest present in banditry, while ignoring the vastly more significant ties between bandits and local landowners or other elites, who often employed them to terrorize their own tenantry...
...It is not surprising then that in numerous villages Veerappan took on the role of the traditional patron or landowner, building temples, blessing weddings, settling disputes between rival litigants, and dispensing small amounts of charity...
...As V.S...
...Unfortunately for Nagappa, his capture coincided with a renewal of the Cauvery Dam controversy...
...In addition to tending their herds and growing small allotments of corn, millet, and sugarcane, the Gounder, in times of scarcity, look to the forest to eke out a subsistence...
...Veerappan's family was the first to be targeted: both the bandit's brother and sister died in police custody (his sister swallowed pesticide rather than endure further mistreatment at the hands of her captors...
...Hobsbawm's original essay, elaborated on in his 1969 study Bandits, while profoundly influencing how historians thought about this little-studied phenomenon, attracted critics as well...
...Despite the manifest unsuitability, Hobsbawm acknowledges, of "candidates . . . sometimes cast for the role," the fundamental injustices of day-to-day poverty make brigands and others living outside the law credible and potent symbols of resistance...
...It became more and more easy for us to monitor him...
...It would be wrong to think of men like Veerappan as political or social rebels, much less revolutionaries, Hobsbawm cautions...
...Among the scores of men the bandit is said to have killed, there were thirty-two police and ten forest guards riddled by bullets as their jeeps were ambushed on one of the hairpin turns on the mountainous roads, blown to bits when their buses drove over a homemade landmine, or murdered in their sleep when Veerappan and his men attacked a local police station in the middle of the night...
...For years these local communities lived beyond the protection of the police, and presumably, even without the large rewards the authorities offered, they would have been eager for Veerappan's capture...
...As fans descended on the movie star's Bangalore home, police blocked off the street, making liberal use of batons to beat back the crowds...
...But contrary to most expectations, the forest communities were his active collaborators, regarding him as their ally against the encroachments of a predatory state...
...Situated in a remote hamlet in the state of Tamil Nadu, not far from the Karnataka border, the modest, tin-roofed bungalow stood at the edge of South India's vast Satyamangalam forest...
...Although these groups will survive into the twenty-first century, Hobsbawm asserts, they will "no longer have anything in common with the old bandit myths...
...When the ambulance stopped, a police loudspeaker informed Veerappan that he was surrounded and called on him to surrender...
...Bandit legends, he noted in one transparently autobiographical paragraph, serve as a reminder of "ancient and lost virtue," a "spiritual Indian territory" to which man could "imagine himself 'lighting out' when the constraints of civilization become too much...
...With the gradual establishment of a "fully capitalist society," which Hobsbawm saw as a historical inevitability, "the conditions in which social banditry on the old model can persist or revive are increasingly exceptional...
...Hobsbawm kept the faith...
...As a result, arrangements were made to show the bodies to the press...
...For Rajkumar's fans, the distinction between the man and the characters he portrays has often been elusive...
...The great screen stars of southern India are iconic figures, their faces plastered on Times Square-size billboards visible above the Mysore or Madras traffic...
...Veerappan's wife, Muthulakshmi, was tortured by the police, who subjected her to frequent sexual humiliations...
...The abduction of Rajkumar, a legendary idol of the Kannada screen, by a group of armed men who escaped with their captive into the South Indian jungle, was a radical instance of this phenomenon...
...If the governments of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu wished to see Rajkumar released, the bandit announced, then they should take all immediate steps to have the Cauvery Dam dispute referred to the International Court of Justice in the Hague...
...It is doubtful whether he ever thought of himself as a Tamil or identified with any collectivity greater than the Vanniyars, a "backward caste" of which the Padiacchi Gounder were a part...
...Rajkumar has been released...
...Although no one was able to report ever having been personally helped by Veerappan, they all agreed that he had been fighting for poor people...
...The triumph of the modern nation-state made possible the state's nearmonopoly on violence and coercive authority...
...In many respects, Veerappan conformed to Hobsbawm's prototype...
...their appeal is not that of the agents of justice, but of men who prove that even the poor and weak can be terrible...
...Were it not for Veerappan, 'there would have been attacks on Tamils living in Karnataka,' another admirer ventured...
...Is the army of Shan tribesmen in the remote areas of Burma's northeast running a heroin refinery in order to fund an insurgency or staging an insurgency in order to run a heroin refinery...
...I am fighting for sixty million people in Tamil Nadu," Veerappan announced, and in the days that followed, the bandit's demands proliferated: the release of Tamil activists held under emergency detention legislation, a pay raise for workers at the Manjolai tea estate—no injustice was too trivial for Veerappan to insist that it be set right...
...S.M...
...The first press photos showed the jubilant STF members milling around in the shattered glass that covered the road, posing next to the outlaw's corpse like hunters at the end of a successful outing, and exchanging high-fives...
...But what has happened since...
...Arrayed in a hairpiece, luxuriant false mustache, and eye shadow, a look of ferocity and determination animating his countenance, Rajkumar had rarely been less than convincing...
...By 1980, Hobsbawm himself seems to have had intimations of this, venturing that a number of recent events suggested that his study was in fact "more than an exercise in antiquarianism or in academic speculation...
...International Monetary Fund programs of "Enhanced Structural Adjustment" are capable of disrupting the settled way of life in quasi-traditional societies with an abruptness and on a scale hitherto achievable only by war or some natural calamity...
...By all accounts, the depredations of Veerappan's men, and those of rival gangs roaming the South Indian jungles, were an ecological disaster...
...Veerappan frequently insisted to interviewers that his criminal career evolved inexorably out of the traditional way of life of his community and the predicament in which they found themselves...
...When in the late 1980s, its founder, Thamizharasan, an engineering student, decided to launch a Maoist-style revolution in Tamil Nadu and returned to his native village to rob the local bank, he and four associates were lynched by irate townspeople...
...By dawn the next morning, however, they were forced to acknowledge that Veerappan had once again slipped away...
...In fact, there was recent precedent for this in the case of the outlaw Phoolan Devi, champion of the lower castes of Madhya Pradesh and the subject of Shekhar Kapur's internationally acclaimed film Bandit Queen...
...Although statutes regulating the hunting of elephants had been on the books since the nineteenth century, these regulations were superseded in the early 1980s by new, draconian forest and wildlife laws...
...AS AUGUST AND September of 2000 passed, with no sign that Veerappan was prepared to release Rajkumar and increasingly pointed questions being raised by opposition spokesmen in the Lok Sabha, the sense of urgency in government circles mounted...
...Over the course of the next decade, the surviving members contented themselves with periodically blowing up a television tower or railroad station...
...However, the failure of the monsoon had made the allocation of water from the Cauvery a matter of life and death for thousands of drought-stricken farmers on both sides of the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border...
...Suddenly a group of men, wearing military fatigues and armed with Kalishnikovs, came through the door...
...Failed national states multiply, leaving warlords, criminalized militias, or less definable hordes to roam the countryside in the name of Socialist or People's Liberation Fronts, each indistinguishable from its enemies, all dealing out their own brands of justice...
...Though seemingly inaccessible, the South Indian jungle is not empty...
...It was widely believed that after twenty years as a fugitive Veerappan, aware of rumors that the government might be prepared to grant an amnesty and reparations amounting to millions of rupees, was ready to negotiate his sur30 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 render...
...For the New Delhi government, facing insurgencies in Nagaland and Tripura, caste wars in Bihar, and formidably armed groups of Maoist-style rebels like the Naxalites, the TNLA barely warranted an afterthought...
...They are not so much men who right wrongs, but avengers, and exerters of power...
...In addition, astrological signs were not auspicious...
...Inspired by his example, representatives of farmers' organizations had DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 31 POLITICS ABROAD formed special squads to maintain a twentyfourhour vigil over the dam, vowing to commit suicide at the first telltale trickle...
...From its headwaters in Karnataka, the Cauvery River, often described as South India's Ganges, runs its five-hundred-mile course through Tamil Nadu before emptying into the Bay of Bengal...
...Motorists venturing south of the Rio Grande who find themselves in the state of Sinaloa should be wary of all strangers, particularly those wearing police uniforms...
...No one seemed to know...
...I shall see you all soon...
...In addition, the Karnataka government would have to declare Tamil the official second language of Karnataka, unveil a statue in Bangalore of the eleventh-century Tamil poet Thiruvalluvar, which had been kept swathed in burlap since the 1991 riots, and provide reparations to the rioters' Tamil victims...
...At the time of the Rajkumar abduction, his once-formidable gang of more than a hundred and fifty numbered no more than a dozen...
...The ferocity with which the Tigers hunted down and murdered political rivals in the Tamil community—village school teachers characterized as defeatist potshotted as they rode their bicycles down a Jaffna lane, bribetaking notaries tied to a lamppost and shot in the head, opposition militants crucified or dispatched by similarly low-tech methods—continued to cause South Indian politicians to wake with a start in the middle of the night...
...His physician reported the next day that he was in good health, but a little disoriented, having been prevented from sleeping by the fireworks set off throughout the night by his celebrating fans...
...Of gravest concern was the prospect of a renewal of communal violence directed against Karnataka's Tamil minority...
...I am being looked after well here," he ventured, in an audiotape addressed to his family...
...As it approached the crossroad, a truck loaded with sugarcane pulled out, blocking the road...
...Hunting him," one police official complained, "is like chasing a phantom...
...State Department travel advisories suggests the extent to which banditry has found a new lease on life: Tourists in Siam Riep are advised to forgo viewing the temples at Angkor by moonlight...
...Veerappan's death coincided with the Dasara festival, which celebrates the cosmic triumph of good over evil, and one newspaper described the incident as "a Dasara gift to the nation...
...For twenty years, Veerappan had confounded such calculations, but reports that Veerappan's associates had had a falling out and that the bandit himself was in failing health, blinded by cataracts in one eye, all suggested that a crisis was building...
...These twentyfivehundred-year-old epics fully encompassed his understanding of the world—Karnataka, after all, is the setting for episodes in both— and he found in these tales ready analogies to their own situation and to most of the practical or moral problems that faced them: "Fourteen years of vanavas (forest exile) was for Rama," he explained, "twelve years of vanavas was for the Pandavas...
...In addition to the ban on ivory hunting, the Indian government nationalized all sandalwood trees (whose aromatic bark is used in perfume) regardless of whether they grew on public or private land...
...Dinner had been served earlier, and the actor had stripped to a sarong and shirt, fixed himself some betel leaf, and was settling in to watch the television news...
...Of the four STF men who had gained Veerappan's confidence, two accompanied him on the ride to town, and their statements helped to cast doubt on the official police story...
...The STF man who had driven the ambulance said that after he and his colleague hopped out at the roadblock and lobbed a stun grenade back inside, the STF opened fire, expending more than a hundred rounds, and that Veerappan never got a shot off...
...Hitherto, he had always cast himself as the protector of his family, friends, and village neighbors...
...The Veerappan saga may just be about to end," late-breaking newscasts announced...
...Please do not worry about me...
...I'm enjoying the atmosphere of the forest and seem to have forgotten food and sleep...
...Over the first few days, despite police blockades on the road and other efforts to keep away the public, at least a thousand people visited his grave, some taking away handfuls of earth...
...Generally, the fall monsoons are sufficient to replenish the river's tributaries in Tamil Nadu and provide irrigation to farms along the river's basin...
...They share the area with other "backward" castes and half a dozen "scheduled" tribes, as they are designated by the Indian Constitution...
...Not altogether...
...Though they rarely succeed, people continue to resist these processes with whatever means are at hand...
...And that was how it seemed on the Friday night of September 5, 2002...
...No one needed to ask who the tall wiry figure with the enormous mustache was...
...Throughout all of this, Veerappan and powerful local interests were active collaborators...
...Irrelevant to the globalizing economy, numerous former colonies in Africa and Asia have been permanently marginalized...
...The police killed him.'" • PETER DAILEY is a New York attorney and writer...
...Given a choice between the police or forest patrols and Veerappan, local inhabitants apparently preferred to take their chances with the bandit, who, although not given to throwing money around, usually paid for what he took, and whose violence was somewhat predictable...
...As Bollywood film music blared from giant speakers, Phoolan, accompanied by her men, climbed the twentythreefoot-high platform on which the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh was seated and, before a wildly cheering audience of more than ten thousand, laid her rifle down, knelt, and touched the GM's feet...
...The sheer vastness of this area—the Satyamangalam forest alone is the size of Connecticut—and a difficult terrain that spreads over mountain ranges and deep gorges as well as forests allowed Veerappan to vanish seemingly without a trace...
...Readers were reminded that the brigand was reputed to have killed 124 people...
...In the long-running conflict, replete with casualties on both sides, Veerappan appears to have gotten the worst of it...
...On her release from prison several years later, Phoolan Devi was elected to Parliament, where she served until her murder by rival gangsters in 2001...
...This evidently was hot and boring work, and when Veerappan came across the men frolicking in a forest pool, and noticed their clothes and laminated police IDs resting on the bank, he seized a hatchet and cut down eight of them...
...Wielding clubs, iron bars, and "choppers," they burned Tamil shantytowns, dragged Tamil women out of their homes and raped them and, with the aid of computer printouts provided them by the government, sought out the homes and businesses of prosperous Tamils and set them on fire...
...However, the STF also paid a steep price...
...Perhaps the most formidable was Dutch anthropologist Anton Blok...
...Should Rajkumar fail to survive his detention at Veerappan's hands, Karnataka's Tamil population could anticipate more of this, and worse...
...Over the years, the state of Karnataka had built four dams, diverting water into a series of reservoirs...
...The ambulance in which Veerappan had ridden to his doom had been rigged out with a hidden camera, allowing the police to monitor the inside...
...pRIMITIVE REBELS was evidently undertaken in 1956, the year of Nikita Khrushchev's "revelations" about Stalinist crimes...
...It was not, Veerappan said, until he stopped making payments to the politicians and police that his former allies turned murderous...
...Ambulances and special medical units were called in from neighboring towns, and the inspector general of police was there to supervise personally...
...The initial press reports were greeted with disbelief, particularly after it was disclosed that the body in police possession lacked the Kattabomman—Veerappan's trademark mustache...
...The face of Veerappan, India's most notorious dacoit—"the forest brigand," as the Hindustan Times put it, "with the deadly mustache...
...Although the government had ostensibly refused to meet any of Veerappan's demands, there have been persistent reports, based on police department sources, that a large ransom was paid to the bandit by the governments of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu as well as by the Rajkumar family, and additional rumors that V. Prabhakaran, the Tamil Tiger chief, received a substantial sum to intercede on Rajkumar's behalf...
...Primitive Rebels was meant to do "historic justice" to those whose struggle "had been overlooked or even dismissed just because they tried to 32 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 come to grips with the problems of the poor in a new capitalist society with historically obsolete or inadequate equipment...
...On the Tamil Nadu side of the border, he was hailed as Velu Muruga, Son of Lord Shiva...
...The rest of their lives are rarely carried out at the same heroic pitch...
...The years after 1973, Hobsbawm subsequently wrote, were those in which the world "lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis...
...To be a tragic hero everything about him must be pared away, leaving him silhouetted against the horizon in the quintessential posture of his role, as Don Quixote is against his windmills...
...Although nothing suggested that a resolution of the kidnapping crisis was imminent, on November 16, 2000, the 109th day of the stalemate, then-prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who had been handed a note while addressing a New Delhi audience, announced, "I have some good news to share with you...
...The police returned fire, killing Veerappan in the ensuing fusillade...
...For many of Hobsbawm's political and professional associates, the legacy of the post-Stalin era was political agnosticism, a despair over the possibility of knowing the truth...
...At a time when resurgent Hindu chauvinism had already called into question the possibility of a secular pluralistic nation, this affair threatened to topple the governments of two South Indian states and set off a renewal of intercommunity conflict, exposing new cracks in the Indian federation's increasingly fissiparous foundation...
...Raghuram describes the unfortunate fate of a group of villagers, persuaded to act as police informers, who fell into the outlaw's hands...
...Violently, as often as not, either because the hero has been betrayed or because, trapped and exhausted, he is finally hunted down and overwhelmed by superior numbers...
...STF men infiltrated the neighboring villages, taking jobs as hawkers, bus conductors, barbers, and waiters at tea stalls...
...The tone of Hobsbawm's original essay was almost elegiac...
...By all accounts Veerappan was a terrifying figure, though less because of his monstrous mustache and baleful stare than his hair-trigger temper and murderous rages...
...The treatment meted out to local bystanders by the STF appears to have further fueled Veerappan's sense of outrage...
...He wrote: "There the outlaw and bushranger Ned Kelly still rides, as in the paintings of the Australian Sydney Nolan, a ghostly figure, tragic, menacing, and fragile in his home-made armour, crossing and re-crossing the sunbleached Australian hinterland, waiting for death...
...These misfortunes were compounded by the criticism of her husband, who let it be known that her failure to kill herself had dishonored his family...
...Sometimes, in the forest at night, Veerappan's men would gather around him by the fire as he read to them stories from Tamil versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana...
...According to Sunaad Raghuram, author of Veerappan: India's Most Wanted Man, the bandit's "strange unblinking eyes" were "frightening in their intensity...
...Although the sylvan idyll he describes sounds worthy of Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest, the truth was that the long forced marches—during Rajkumar's 108 days as a prisoner, Veerappan's men shifted camp more than 80 times—left him severely exhausted, a state aggravated by insomnia and the ill effects of his captors' sparse diet...
...Hobsbawm's encounter with bandit legends while traveling in Italy, Spain, and Latin America fifty years ago moved him to undertake his project in the first place...
...Similar questions could be asked of a dozen conflicts around the world with as little purpose...
...Unlike the STF, most of whom were recruits from the north and unable to speak or understand the local languages, Veerappan and the native inhabitants shared what Hobsbawm terms "a common and inherited set of values and beliefs about society so strong as hardly to need, or be capable of, formal articulation...
...The bandit, who had once ranged over eighteen thousand square kilometers of jungle, in which, as Ragnuram notes, "his writ was all-pervasive," was said to be pinned down in an area with a radius of one to two kilometers in the Dinnahalli forest, surrounded by a force of four thousand...
...that on the birth of his third daughter he had strangled the infant, feeling that two was enough, a reaction far from uncommon in that particular stretch of backcountry...
...Despite the determination of the New Delhi government, the police were no closer to capturing Veerappan than they had been at the beginning of their fifteen-year hunt...
...Subsequent attempts to hunt him down were no more successful...
...By dawn, a crowd of more than four thousand people had gathered outside the Dharmapuri hospital, and police had to force its gates shut and call out security personnel...
...Indeed, in the poorest of the former "developing" nations it reversed itself, and is now hurtling back in the direction from whence it came...
...However, apart from their courage and defiance, little about bandits is exemplary...
...Veerappan offered no explanation for his abrupt change of course...
...When news of the kidnapping POLITICS ABROAD broke, it brought the city of eight million to a standstill, shutting down public transport and the majority of schools and businesses...
...Their stories, for the most part, belong to remote places—the forests of Tamil Nadu, the mountains of Transcaucasia—outside of the world's gaze...
...In December 1991, mobs of thugs, angered by a decision of India's High Court ordering Karnataka to release water to Tamil Nadu, went on a rampage in Bangalore that lasted four days...
...At times when traditional agrarian or pastoral societies have been disrupted by the forces of capitalism and modernity, Hobsbawm argued, men like Pancho Villa, the Sicilian Mafioso Salvatore Giuliano, or the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, rightly or wrongly, came to exemplify for rural peasantry "the resistance of entire communities or peoples against the destruction of their way of life...
...For more than fifty years, the seventy-two-year-old actor and singer has been venerated by millions who filled theaters in Bangalore, as well as hundreds of cinema tents in small villages all over Karnataka, as the princely state of Mysore is known today...
...THE Tamil Nadu Liberation Army, ostensibly fighting for an independent Tamil homeland, possessed little political following...
...It is so enchanting...
...Veerappan's emergence as an avatar of Tamil nationalism had nothing inevitable about POLITICS ABROAD it...
...The formation of bandit myths, Blok concedes, is itself a form of social protest...
...In 1970, he remained no less convinced that "Robin Hood is on his way to extinction...
...Hobsbawm, who remained a Communist Party member, recently acknowledged that "it is difficult to reconstruct not only the mood but the memory of that traumatic year . . . . Even after practically half a century my throat contracts as I recall the almost intolerable tensions under which we lived month after month . . . the sense of lurching unwillingly but irreversibly, down the scree towards the fatal rockface . . . . Probably the simplest way of putting it is that, for more than a year, British Communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown...
...If few of them are known today, Hobsbawm suggested earlier, it is because "to become a public legend a man must have simple outlines...
Vol. 52 • January 2005 • No. 1
