Where Have All The Jobs Gone
Old jobs are being slashed and new ones have slowed down to a trickle. With corporate India shedding staff faster than ever before, the worst sufferers are freshers and middle-level managers.

Preparing For Musharraf
Administrators, securitymen and hospitality merchants gear up to ensure that it's not just the Taj that will impress the visiting
Pakistani President.

Adviser Raj
Bureaucrats don't retire. Their terms are extended or they are reappointed to counsel political mentors.

Out Of Luck Now
It will take more than voter-friendly symbolism to ensure victory in UP.

Hard Cover Up
The Government is perturbed by a cop's unreleased book on Rajkumar's kidnapping.

Connecting Bharat
It's a project to bridge the digital divide. But sources of funding are not known.

STATES: KARNATAKA

Hard Cover Up

Not since the mythical story of Ravana whisking off Sita to Lanka has a kidnapping been so written about in India. When sandalwood smuggler Veerappan took off into the forest with film star Rajkumar on July 30 last year, it was an event that launched a thousand news articles. Now it is the subject of a book by Chingleput Dinakar, Karnataka's director-general of police at the time, and the general hullabaloo the matter has begun to raise once again even before the book's release should have the villain grinning through his thicket of whiskers.

The 108-day kidnap saga had ended then with Veerappan releasing Rajkumar for no apparent reason. His main demand that 51 TADA detenus and five Tamil nationalist militants be released was not met. All sorts of theories about the possible cause of the release were proffered, including the goodness of Veerappan's heart. Now The Inside Story of Rajkumar's Abduction threatens to tell all, in 350 pages, on the deal the governments of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu had struck with the bandit. It reportedly involved payment of several crores of rupees. Veerappan's and then chief minister K. Karunanidhi's enemy J. Jayalalitha is in power in Tamil Nadu, and she should have no objection to seeing in print what can only be embarrassing testimony to the two governments' capitulation. Not so in Karnataka, where S.M. Krishna, who was chief minister during the kidnap, is still in charge.

Shortly after word of the book leaked out in mid-June, the state's Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (DPAR) sent a notice to the Bangalore-based Dinakar asking for his book's draft for pre-publication approval and threatening action under the All India Service Rules and the Indian Official Secrets Act if he failed to comply. The pugnacious Dinakar refused.

"Why is the chief minister afraid of my book?" says the policeman-turned-advocate. "He thinks he is a smart cat, but I am not a frightened mouse. I know the law and nobody need teach me. All I am doing is exercising the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19(A) of the Constitution." It is a right many people don't want him to exercise; Dinakar has found himself unable to get from the Government the Rs 10 lakh in gratuity and pension due to him. It is another act he ascribes to the "spinal problems" of bureaucrats who "are made to bend in all directions". State government officials say they have nothing to do in the matter as it is "between him and the Centre". Dinakar refuses to buy that line and has promised to take the issue to the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT).

Not all the action is official. "I have been getting threat calls but I am not scared," says Dinakar. His police guard was withdrawn after he filed a petition against Krishna, state Home Minister Mallikarjun Kharge and Law Minister D.B. Chandre Gowda in April. "But I am not bothered because I always have two loaded revolvers with me," he says.

Courage and indeed a measure of bombast have always been Dinakar's trademarks. He has long been battling the powers that be. Even his appointment to the post of DGP followed a protracted legal battle against the Krishna Government. "They are trying to scare me but the word fear does not exist in my dictionary," he says. Many people in the government must have hoped his retirement in February this year would remove his presence from their lives, but Dinakar returned as a legal activist who takes on cases, primarily against the establishment, for free. And he began to write his book.

Despite his guts and his two guns, he may find himself without many friends in his struggle. His no-nonsense approach was never geared towards winning friends in the establishment. Now indications are that even the few officials who have openly associated with him will find it difficult to continue doing so. Already, R. Vishwanathan, DGP, Telecommunication, Transport and Modernisation, has been packed off to remote Gulbarga as an inquiry officer to probe the sale of Lambada children. "This is a job for a police inspector," says a senior police officer. "The Government wanted to teach Dinakar and Vishwanathan a lesson so they shunted him out." Dinakar had taken Vishwanathan's case for appointment as CBI director to the CAT.

The one ally he can be sure of in his fight is a man with whom Dinakar has much in common. Abdul Kareem, a retired deputy superintendent of police, is also writing a book to expose the "pro-Veerappan lobby of sandalwood smugglers, quarry contractors, Rajkumar fans associations and Tamil extremist groups". Like Dinakar, Kareem had opposed the move to release TADA detenus to secure Rajkumar's release. It was his petition the Supreme Court responded to when it prevented the Karnataka and Tamil Nadu governments from giving in to Veerappan.

The Government may be scared Dinakar will expose their shameful act," says the 78-year-old Kareem. His son Shakeel Ahmed, a police inspector, was killed by Veerappan on Independence Day nine years ago. He had gone on one of the numerous operations to nab the bandit. Kareem's book will be released on August 15 this year.

Dinakar's book should be out "in a month or two", he says. A non-disclosure clause keeps him from divulging too much but the book deals extensively with "both kidnapper Veerappan and captive Rajkumar besides the inside story of the kidnap", he says. "I am not a traditional laundry man but I have an immense capacity to wash dirty linen in public, including the designer clothes that Krishna wears." That Krishna does not relish the prospect is obvious. There is already talk the Karnataka Government might ban the book if Dinakar refuses to show the draft to the DPAR because, according to a senior Home Ministry official, it might have "sensitive information which might jeopardise the safety of the state and its people". Officials say that as the state police chief during the sensational kidnap, Dinakar had access to very sensitive information and records.

Koose Muniswamy Veerappan, killer of over 120 people and 2,000 elephants, casts a long shadow.

MetroScape

Mumbai Tribal Art: Murias

Pune Multiplex:
City Pride

Long considered politically naive, the Gujarat chief minister is a wiser man now. But the shrewdness would prove worthier if employed in matters of state, writes INDIA TODAY's Special Correspondent Uday Mahurkar in
Misplaced Guile