Ravi Kant Veerappan

Which one, Veerappan or Ravi Kant Sharma, is a greater national shame is a difficult question.

File photo of bandit Koose Munisamy Veerappan | Commons

Imagine, for a moment, that R.K. Sharma, wanted for the murder of Shivani, was not an inspector-general of police in Haryana, but an ordinary person from the same state. What would the fate of his family have been if he was at large for so long?

Rather than be allowed to paint themselves on the national radar screen by holding forth on every television channel, they would have been locked up in the nearest police station, and held hostage until the man turned himself in and pleaded for mercy.

A terrible thing, and not something you and I would recommend, or even countenance. But that is exactly the way our policemen behave, particularly so in Sharma’s home state of Haryana. This is probably the way Sharma himself would have acted if he was a serving officer in pursuit of some other commoner wanted for murder.

But, in our country, when you are somebody, the rules of the game change. He can now carry on in hiding, mocking the entire system and the police in two states, and generally telling us all, ‘‘Don’t waste time looking for me. I will decide when I wish to be found.’’

Sharma is at least a senior officer, so you can expect his colleagues in Haryana as well as in Delhi to be a little indulgent. There is, after all, honour among thieves. But why is the same treatment being extended to Veerappan — and not for a few weeks but for years now? He can kidnap film stars and ministers, blow senior policemen who dare to hunt for him up on land mines, slaughter more wildlife in one lifetime than whole dynasties of the maharajas did in the past and, yet, each time ransom is paid, and his quarry released, the government goes to sleep.

It’s been two years now since he hit front-page headlines by kidnapping Kannada film star Raj Kumar and it would be interesting to find out exactly what the police in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have been doing meanwhile to catch him.

Now, the states are demanding central paramilitary forces and L.K. Advani has very generously said he is willing to spare them. But what have all of them been doing meanwhile? Why the search now when he holds a prized hostage? What kind of a manhunt is possible now without risking minister Nagappa’s life?

Now Jayalalitha is demanding remote-sensing equipment and air power to catch him. But all this while her police did nothing to find him, busy as they were filling up their jails with rival politicians arrested under Pota for merely speaking out in sympathy of the LTTE.

How will she fight the LTTE if she cannot even catch one lousy jungle brigand? How will S.M. Krishna convince anybody he runs India’s most modern, most hi-tech, showpiece state if his own VIPs continue to be routinely kidnapped by one doddering man with a funny moustache?

And, finally, how will Advani get anybody to believe his home ministry will bring back Dawood Ibrahim, finish terrorism from Kashmir to Tripura and rid Mumbai of its underworld, if the one police force directly under his charge (the Delhi Police) cannot even catch a man so prominent and well known as R.K. Sharma, hiding in its very neighbourhood, and spinning the legal system around his little finger while his family holds forth, embarrassing the government?

Which one, Veerappan or Sharma, is a greater national shame is a difficult question. Veerappan has shown up our entire law-and-order machinery for nearly a decade now. That shame will be equalled, for example, if the Americans are unable to find Osama for another decade and when Osama, meanwhile, keeps kidnapping their regiment commanders, visiting congressmen and probably Tom Cruise, and extracting ransom in return.

A nation that deploys a million men with tanks, guns, missiles, mines, and nukes in the back, to fight foreign-inspired terrorism in Kashmir, cannot catch one thug roaming around in its very heartland.

Can you really blame the Pakistanis for laughing at us each time we repeat our demand for the list of the 20 men we want from them? Maybe they would have been safer still if they were in India. Now, you might have some remote chance of getting them back from the Pakistanis.

If they were in India, nobody would have touched them. Or, maybe, we better encourage both Veerappan and Sharma to flee to Pakistan. Then we can extend our list to 22 names and blame the Pakistanis for hiding our fugitives. It will not bring our crooks back. But it might salve our conscience.

On my scale of national shame, though, Sharma would rank higher, and here’s why. He is not hiding in our thickest jungles — he is accessible enough to send a telegram from Solan, a district town less than a hundred km away to Chandigarh to extend his leave!

He is not protected by fellow thugs armed with Kalashnikovs and landmines but by friendly governments, batch mates and lawyers. What else can you say when his lawyer, who lives in South Delhi, keeps appearing in court with affidavits signed by him while the city’s police are supposed to be cancelling leave of its officers to join the hunt for him?

He is also no illiterate brigand, whose crimes you blame on his background/upbringing/circumstances or any such mitigating factors that Bollywood usually discovers to make you feel sorry for the crook when he gets his just desserts at the movie’s end. He went to India’s finest finishing school, the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy at Mussoorie, and swore to protect the ‘system’.

He is now telling you he knows better than anybody else how that system works, how to work it to his advantage and how to make the rest of you look stupid.

In one stroke he has made fools out of Advani, Chautala and, most of all, Pramod Mahajan. My lawyer will see yours in the court, my wife and daughters will keep on muddying the waters in the media and I will bide my time. I know what you guys are all about. I will teach you a lesson. Meanwhile, catch me if you can.

Nobody should rush to conclusions in any criminal case, particularly one as complicated and sensitive as Shivani’s murder. But in which civilised country could a senior public figure or official be expected to disappear and hide like this? And if he can do so brazenly, what does it say for our government?

In the US, Congressman Gary Condit, under suspicion after intern Chandra Levy’s disappearance, was constantly available for questioning, not merely by the police but also by the media.

Could he have disappeared and left it to his family to blame half of the Bush cabinet for the crime instead?

How are we going to redeem ourselves from this great, twin embarrassment? Should we get Yashwant Sinha to pick up the phone and speak to Colin Powell to intercede, as we routinely do when the Pakistanis aren’t behaving? Sharma may be too smart for him, but possibly he could work out a deal for us at least with Veerappan.

Or there’s maybe another, simpler, solution. Get Ram Naik to allot petrol pumps to Sharma and Veerappan in any corner of the country. Then leave it to The Indian Express reporters to track them down. We will at least be able to promise you stories, if not convictions.