‘Dead End’ to murder investigation, but with a ray of hope

Jupinderjit Singh

An ambitious businessman, P Sadasivan runs a couple of colleges under the aegis of his Jawahar Bharti Education Trust in Bangalore in the 1980s, and plans to open a medical college using a favourable scheme of the Janata Dal government in Karnataka. After a green signal from Chief Minister P Guddu Rao, he starts buying land. But the state Home Minister, RL Jalappa, also eyes the same project.

As the conflict between Sadasivan and Jalappa got ugly in August 1987, a small-time advocate from Kerala, Mohd Abdul Rasheed, unknowingly walked straight into a crucial make-or-break moment. Jalappa had moved to take control of Sadasivan’s Trust to force him into submission. Rasheed had come to Bangalore to meet Sadasivan through a middleman, Joseph, to secure a seat for his brother in an engineering college. Also, his friend’s daughter needed help for a favourable re-evaluation of poor grades in the BEd course run by Sadasivan’s college.

Five days later, Rasheed’s body was recovered near a railway track.

Corrupt politicians and policemen, it was alleged, combined to kill Rasheed and passed it off as an accident. Typically, eyewitnesses were scared off. Even an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), asked to probe following protests by the Bar Councils of Karnataka and Kerala for justice in the mysterious death of a fellow advocate, reached a dead end due to an uninterested investigating officer.

Enter Kuppuswamy Ragothaman, a CBI officer who has never investigated a murder case before. He braves threats and snubs baits. He earns such name and fame that from an officer unfamiliar with murder inquiries, he is later deputed as the Chief Investigating Officer in former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination case.

In the court trial, the accused have a battery of influential lawyers, including Ram Jethmalani, to defend them. Ragothaman still manages to get many accused convicted, but the prized scalp of Home Minister Jalappa eludes.

Seasoned journalist V Sudarshan, in his book ‘Dead End — The Minister, the CBI and the Murder Case that Wasn’t’, brings to light the story of Rasheed more than three decades after the events unfolded. In his racy narration, Sudarshan fills us with hope even if full justice is not met in the case.

The hope is that wherever the system is compromised by a corrupt police officer helped by master politicians, another police officer will restore faith in the system.

Sudarshan’s account is based on his interviews with Ragothaman a few weeks before the CBI officer died. The book also reflects a journalist’s challenge in transitioning from a news reporter to an author.

A news report is a direct account where critical information is told first. But in a book, one has the liberty of detailing the character’s nuances, the minute details and the story’s movement from one frame to another. V Sudarshan’s book has to be read and understood in this light.

He achieves this to some extent by describing the temperamental advocate Shivappa and the plotting politician Jalappa, especially in the iconic scene where he reaches Ragothaman’s house with a suitcase full of money. “Almost single-handedly, he battled the system,” writes Sudarshan about the CBI officer. And yet, he depicts the officer’s pain in a courtroom, clutching on to the only suit he bought for special occasions when the accused cops sneer and joke as the judge rules in their favour. The court verdict may have come as a setback, but as long as journalists like Sudarshan keep the pot boiling, there is hope for justice.