A whodunit from Tamil Nadu's tea estate of doom

There was yet another intriguing episode in the never ending political theatre of Tamil Nadu as the Kodanad Estate was broken into. The circumstances were dramatic enough in a guard being done to death and a trail of rooms broken into with a factor of mystery that would have done Hollywood proud in the tradition of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, apt enough an allegory as one of the Estate’s prime part-time occupants is dead and the other incarcerated in somewhat reduced circumstances in a prison cell in Parpana Agrahara in neighbouring Bengaluru.

The trail of destruction the break-in led to made it all the more sensational, what with there being mysterious deaths on the roads. The conspiracy theorists have had a field day thanks to there being plenty of ammunition for the crowd that believes every unnatural death is a ‘hit’ job carried out by hatchet men prepared to go to any level to guard these great state secrets. As irony would have it – and irony is always aplenty in these affairs of State – the burglars seem to have failed to spot the big safe unless they were so dim witted as to believe money is only kept in suitcases.

Reports used to circulate once that Kotagiri had one of the healthiest climates in the world and to pick up an estate about 20 kilometres off may even have helped the former chief minister with her health issues that would have given enough material for a compendium for doctors and nature cure specialists who used to be frequent visitors from across the State border to Kodanad. The spectacular views from just outside the Estate compound of the plains below with the river Moyyar flowing for miles on end were sufficient to make the trip worthwhile just to check what the buzz was all about around the Kodanad tea garden.

Out in Pakistan they were a little miffed that the judgment on the Panama Papers in the case involving their Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif should quote The Godfather, rather a quotation in the book that is a prelude to the novel and is by Honore de Balzac about there being a great crime behind every great fortune. The Indian courts did not say it in so many words but there were hints aplenty about this particular tea estate in Kodanad that was said to have been purchased out of ill-gotten money. There was even talk of having to auction it if the fine first spoken of in the special court judgment had to be paid, but then the death of an accused changed everything subsequently as the charges abated.

Impressive as it seemed in its spick-and-span maintenance thanks to the personality who used it as a health resort, there was always this aura of intrigue about the estate. The people round the estate fought for years over an access road and that sort of dragged on considering it wasn’t going to be easy to fight against a chief minister’s property. What used to be a heavily guarded fortress must have slipped now into just another private estate because the thieves got in so easily and unobserved as the CCTVs were switched off too. That brought into the picture the dismissed driver, curiously from the Edappadi region, whose plot to rob one of the homes of DA case accused had a kind of reverse Robin Hood psychology to it.

Knowing how probes have gone in history when it comes to such matters, let us just say that the Kodanad break-in will remain another unsolved mystery much like many cases on which light is never shed in a State somewhat well known for its opaque administration and the servility of many in office matched only by the sycophancy of many who paid obeisance to one woman’s power to attract the public vote and hence clung on to her in the hope of getting coveted public office with its concomitant capacity to earn money of the kind that could possibly buy votes to sustain the power that flows through a ballot box.

Had the Kodanad robbers been a little more sophisticated they may have achieved what Honore de Balzac actually said - The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed. He also went on to say, The secret of a great fortune made without apparent cause is soon forgotten, if the crime is committed in a respectable way. The last quotation is particularly relevant in India today as there are too many crimes that seem to have been respectable in the past, but are being exposed now as simply graft.

Only the gullible would believe that a few inexpensive watches with Jayalalithaa’s picture embossed and an ugly looking crystal rhinoceros were all that the criminals got for their effort of breaking into a famous treasure house, but which also became a bungalow of doom considering what happened to its two best known occasional occupants. This is another Tamil Nadu whodunit to test the cerebral capacity of a modern day Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot.