Veerappan, the Joint Special Task Force, and the everyday folks caught in the middle.

11 October 2006

Letter to K:

“just got back from a crazy trip to the tn/karanataka border. it's weird
to meet torture vistims and be surrounded by their stories of
brutality, yet not understand what they're saying (since they're
speaking in tamil and/or kannada) and so space out the window thinking of far off places while they converse boisterously, and then after fifteen minutes someone who speaks a little broken english nudges you to explain how the old peasant sitting behind you had nails driven into his feet and under his fingernails and toenails, and the other guy in car was hooked up to electric wires. completely disassociating, and my lack of understanding only makes me feel further away from a phenomenon i dont understand at all. really, in some ways, they just seemed like poor, semi-literate peasants - alternately jovial and stonefaced, and timid around me, but then happy to shake my hand and touch me and have me take their pictures with my digital camera. and then talk loudly about me to each other despite the fact that they know next to nothing about me, and we cant understand each other. And they have this incomprehensible backstory.”

Chat with P:

P: what's going on with you? things getting any smoother?

me: yah, getting better.

hopefully i'll stay healthy for a while, but i got really sick last week.

stomach, dehydration, 103 fever. was on drip in hospital for two days

.

but i did some good traveling for work last two days.

went up to this area near the tamil nadu / karnataka border where there had been this very famous bandit elephant poacher and sandalwood smuggler named Veerappan.

and the state govts set up a joint police special task force to catch him

it took them eleven years, and in the process they arrested, killed, tortured and imprisoned a lot of innocent people.

so i went up to the area and got to meet a lot of those people.

P: holy shit! the sickness fuckign sucks, but you gotta figure it can't last forever. that's a crazy story about the poacher and all the innocent people getting tortured. Not super surprising in India, but shocking none the less. Check out the movie "bandit Queen' if you get a chance classic Bollywood movie about, you guessed it, a female bandit, who cruises around doing shit.

don't remember what happens anymore, unfortunately

me: she got elected to parliament, i think

P: that could be right. probably is

me: this bandit was sort of her cultural heir

he kidnapped a lot of VIP types

kidnapped a very famous movie star at one point,

and

tried to get amnesty and join politics

but ended up with a bullet in his head

P: damn. did they play rage against the machine at the funeral?

me: anyway, my ngo is doing the legal work for these victims, submitting their
compensation petitions to the courts and national human rights commission, is therefore seen as responsible for the outcome

but things are dragging on.

i think i'm going to be working on that while i'm here

not sure about the funeral.

cops tried to burn the body and destroy the evidence, but thefamily objected

P: what's the dragging? slow litigation? no one wants to pay up? evil cops?

me: so he's buried in some village somewhere, not his home village.

foot-draggin I think.

a special commission was formed in 1999, but the previous TN and karna govts didn't even want to admit anything bad had happened.

and then they stopped complying with the process.

finally, someone, the commission i think awarded compensation to 12 people -- whereas about 110 had submitted petitions.

we just went up to have meetings and talk about that with the villagers, b/c thw award has divided the communities a bit, started a lot of rumors that no one else will get paid, and created some ill-will against my org which, by virtue of being the only org that is helping to fight the legal case, is

most of these people are illiterate peasants and tribals. people dont really understand anything, except that they were in a tight spot and terrorize for a long time from both sides. I think. I dont really know.

P: does that mean more people are trying to petition now, since some got recompense.

me: a few new people did come out of the woodwork and present stories to us while i was up there.

This was explained to me as people becoming less afraid

and learning more about the victims' movement that we're trying to generate

i don't really know much about their motivations, personally.

i only understood about 25% of what was going on around me, since i had to get it all through infrequent translation.

and i hadn't read up on the background of all this stuff before i went.

that homework i did this morning when i got to work. things made a whole lot more sense once i'd read about it.

when it was happening, i just felt disassociated cause i didn't know what people were saying, and then i'd get a bit of translation about so-and-so being raped, or given electric shock or having nails pounded under their fingernails.

it was really weird to not be able to feel or understand the things i was being told about, because these people were so different from me and i could begin to understand them.

P: damn. i hear you on the not-being-able-to-understand front. i never got through that wall of 'your lives are really different from mine' in india, but then again i was just traveling around, pretty insulated except for people who wanted money, which made me kind of suspicious of everyone. its mind-boggling, though have radically different ones life experiences can be, especially compared to folks in india, or perhaps more specifically rural india.