Marked Similarities between Sandalwood Veerappan and IPS officer K Jairaman

SILIGURI: They are at diametrically opposite ends of the legal divide in society, and yet there are marked similarities between the two — Sandalwood Veerappan, who was gunned down in 2004, and IPS officer K Jairaman, and till recently the police commissioner of Siliguri. Both sport the trademark handlebar moustache and both are daredevil to the core. But, while one lived and died evading law, the other is in a state of coma trying his best to defend it.

Veerappan certainly was much more famous for all the wrong reasons, but Jairaman’s fame as a self-respecting , righteous police officer is just beginning to spread. Indeed, Siliguri remembers no other senior police officer in at least the last 10 years of having received the “honour” that Jairaman got when he walked out of the Siliguri commissionerate, with colleagues pulling back the departing jeep in a rare farewell gesture as if to say “please don’t go” .

Jairaman, as West Bengal found out, was a cop who could run up 13 floors without missing a heartbeat, arrest an IAS district magistrate on charges of corruption and had the audacity to crack open a case that has been lingering for ages , even if that meant taking into custody people very close to the cream of the Trinamool Congress. Of course, Jairaman’s hyper-drive was nipped in the bud, the officer removed from the Siliguri commiserate and put on “compulsory waiting”.

The move has brought the Mamata Banerjee government to further criticism and etched the notion in the mind of the common man that honesty, unlike in the proverb, doesn’t pay always. The Siliguri Jalpaiguri Development Authority (SJDA) had as its CEO, an IAS officer GK Kumar, and Dr Rudra Nath Bhattacharya , a Trinamool MLA, as its chairman , when all hell broke loose with allegations of large-scale misappropriation of funds to the tune of nearly Rs 100 crore happening in the SJDA.

The ruling party swung into action, sent off Kumar to Malda as its district magistrate, replaced Dr Bhattacharya with the Trinamool’s North Bengal Development Minister Gautam Dev and brought in Jairaman as police commissioner and put in charge of the investigation into the financial mess.

At an advance stage of the investigation, Kumar was summoned to Siliguri for interrogation and once at Siliguri, taking everybody by surprise, Jairaman arrested him last Saturday. The rest is history.