Two years ago, when police officer K Arakesh drew a list of the four people who could be Veerappan's prime targets, Dr Rajakumar and H Nagappa both figured on the list. They were subsequently kidnapped by the sandalwood smuggler. The other two names on the list were those of Sudarshan and state minister Raju Gowda.

A doctor and social worker, Sudarshan lives in a hut and started the Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra for Soliga tribals two decades ago. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan for his crusade against corruption in the field of medicine.

His contribution brought him the honorary position as vigilance director for medical education and hospitals in Karnataka. In Bangalore through the week, Sudarshan goes back home to the BR Hills every weekend, and is constantly consulted by the police on the Veerappan case because of his unique knowledge of the jungles that the killer inhabits, and the tribals who move through them.

M D Riti met Sudarshan in his office at the Lok Ayukta at Bangalore.

How does it feel to be the next in line on Veerappan's hit list?

Kidnap list, please, not hit list! Yes, I know I am possibly next. After Rajakumar was kidnapped, the police did excellent mapping of his movements just before he abducted Rajakumar. They found he was around BR Hills for three or four months with the idea of kidnapping me. My staff also confirmed this fact.

Obviously he concluded that it was not worth kidnapping me because it would not get him any money. So he went after Rajakumar and got several crores.

I have now sent a message to Veerappan through tribals that he never need take the trouble of kidnapping me. Any time he wants me, he can just tell me and I will go and stay with him for as long as he wants. It will be a nice sabbatical for me; I would love to do that! But he will not get a single paisa from me or from the government or anyone else as ransom.

You may not have a rich wife who will pay ransom, but the government might pay.

No, they will not, because I will not send cassettes begging for help or asking for money. I would just try to convince Veerappan to surrender, that's all. If he does not oblige, then I would consider the people of Karnataka to be far more important than a single man like me. I would not ask for my release or dictate terms to the state.

Then you should not refuse police protection and allow yourself to be targeted by men like Veerappan. Your being kidnapped would only cause endless trouble to the government and the taxpayer.

I know, but my philosophy of life does not permit me to have police protection all the time. I sleep with snakes under my bed, some times, in the hut where I stay, in my tribal welfare centre in the hills. It would be awkward for me to work with the tribals with gun toting policemen running behind me. However, when I travel to the hills every weekend, policemen escort me from Yelandur up to my hut.

You have actually seen Veerappan once yourself, haven't you?

Yes, when he was caught by the deputy conservator of forests in 1986, and was kept for a while in Boodi Badaga guesthouse in the hills before he was handed over to the police. I was doing mobile medical service in the area at that time, so I caught a glimpse of Veerappan from a distance.

What is your perception of Veerappan?

He was a small thief. The corrupt police and politicians built him up from that to sandalwood smuggling to ivory poaching and so on. They created the problem, and we are now unable to solve it. Sixteen years down the line, I hear that something like Rs 120 crores have been spent on trying to catch him.

The lack of inter-sectoral coordination between the police and forest department also helped Veerappan in the early years. The forest department withdrew from this pursuit a decade ago after Veerappan killed forester P Srinivas.

What do you know of the relationship between Veerappan and Srinivas? What was there between them that made Veerappan torture him so brutally and then decapitate him?

Srinivas and the police were constantly trying to create problems for each other. Some in the police at that time were jealous of what Srinivas was trying to do. He was posted to another district because of all this, but came back to Kollegal, settled down there and tried to reach out to Veerappan and reform him. He even rehabilitated his sister Maari by making her a nurse.

However, Srinivas was also responsible for torturing Veerappan when he was in his custody, to extract information from him. That must have worked on Veerappan's mind. So would the fact that Srinivas had taken Maari away from Veerappan's influence.

Veerappan is a known psychopath. He can be very kind and also very cruel. Remember he even killed his baby daughter. Still, Srinivas went ahead alone into the jungle to meet Veerappan, because Veerappan sent word to him that he would surrender to him. His fault lay in that he trusted Veerappan too much. He was killed.

Could you shed some light on the relationship between Veerappan and the tribals? The general perception is that the tribals are shielding him from the police in the jungles.

First, let me point out that Veerappan comes from a non-tribal village, Gopinatham. Any help he has got is from villagers, not tribals. Fifty per cent of the income of tribals in that area comes from collection of minor forest produce. Tribals encounter Veerappan while collecting honey and gooseberries in the forest.

He threatens them at gunpoint, usually keeps one of them as hostage, and forces them to get him food. If they refuse, he kills them. If they oblige, the police harass them and accuse them of helping Veerappan. This is a very serious problem faced by the tribals.

I have personally seen such a situation on Independence Day a couple of years ago in a particular village. Veerappan had got information that some tribals had given information about him to the police. He caught these particular men in the forest and shot four of them point blank. Then, he took away a 12-year-old boy who had witnessed this incident, kept him in his camp as a prisoner for two days and sent him back with Rs 100 in hand, telling him to go and report all that he had seen to the police.

The boy came back. We took him to our centre and kept him under observation, to see whether he had been psychologically damaged by the trauma of seeing such violent murders. I then went to the village that the men had belonged to. There I saw some STF (Special Task Force) policemen who were completely drunk and harassing tribals of the village, ostensibly seeking information about Veerappan's whereabouts. I directly saw them harassing a woman.

This kind of attitude was largely responsible for the impasse over Veerappan. It is only since one or two years that the STF has realised they need the support of the people to solve such problems. For 14 years they had ignored the fact that they would get nowhere without the information system of the tribals, which they could tap only by winning over their trust.

Before that, anyone coming forward with information would be harassed. So nobody would come forward. If a tribal reported seeing Veerappan somewhere, the police would simply keep him in an inspection bungalow for the whole day and interrogate him on his relationship with Veerappan, instead of simply hunting down Veerappan in the location the tribal had reported seeing him in.

We initiated a dialogue between the police and tribal chiefs over the past year or two. The police have now promised to stop harassing the tribals.

Veerappan does not command any loyalty from the tribals because he has done nothing for them. He might have done welfare work in his village, Gopinatham, that's all.

The police claim their STF camps have always been very tribal-friendly, and they have tried hard to establish good intelligence networks using tribals. What is the truth?

They might have reached out to tribals in one or two stray cases, but by and large, they never befriended the tribals and established any kind of intelligence network using them. The police have harassed the tribals, even the Human Rights Commission has said that. There have been some good STF chiefs, but the methods used till now has been ineffective.

If the tribals have not helped to sustain Veerappan, who is helping him survive inside the forest?

The tribals inside Karnataka only help him out of fear of being killed, nothing else. I do not know whether he enjoys the support of villagers inside Tamil Nadu.

How has this manhunt for Veerappan affected tribal living conditions in your area over the past decade?

The forest cover in this area has increased over the past 16 years for various environmental reasons, satellite pictures of the terrain have proved this. This is certainly beneficial to the tribals, though it has nothing to do with the intervention of the police. However, very little rural development has taken place there, because of this Veerappan problem. People have lost whatever benefits they should have got from government welfare schemes.

However, granite quarrying was stopped in the area because the granite quarry owners were thought to be supporting Veerappan. This has been a great boon environmentally speaking.

Why are the police simply never able to catch him?

Veerappan does not fear for his life. The police do fear for theirs. So he can be very daring and do all sorts of things, and the police are simply unable to catch him.

The Rediff Interviews