Veerappan’s daughter to contest Lok Sabha polls from Tamil Nadu's Krishnagiri

Chennai: Vidhya Rani, daughter of notorious sandalwood smuggler Veerappan whose name spelled terror in parts of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, will test her electoral fortunes from Krishnagiri in the April 19 Lok Sabha polls as the candidate of Naam Tamizhar Katchi, a Tamil nationalist party.

An advocate by profession, Vidhya Rani joined the BJP in July 2020 and was appointed as the Vice-President of its state youth wing but quit the saffron party recently to join NTK led by actor-director Seeman.

“Vidhya Rani will be the NTK candidate from Krishnagiri,” Seeman announced at a public meeting in Chennai, introducing all 40 candidates contesting in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.

Of the 40 candidates fielded by the NTK, whose ideology is controversial for it eulogises slain LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, half of them are women.

Vidhya Rani, an advocate by profession, runs a kids’ school in Krishnagiri and has a deep connection with Bengaluru as she pursued a five-year law course in the city that gave her “life-long friends.”

Though she has met her father only once, the advocate-politician believes it was Veerappan who gave direction to her life, Vidhya Rani told DH in July 2020.

Vidhya Rani was in third standard when she met her father at her grandfather’s house in Gopinatham on the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border.

“That was the first and last time I met him. We spoke for 30 minutes, and the conversation is still fresh in my mind. He held me and asked me to pursue medicine and serve the people. That conversation directed me to where I am today,” she had said.

Though many of Seeman's policies sound impractical and absurd at times, NTK's acceptance among people is growing – from a mere 1.1 per cent vote share in its debut elections in 2016, the party secured nearly 4 per cent votes in 2019 Lok Sabha polls and increased it to 6.7 per cent in 2021 assembly polls, emerging as the third largest party in terms of vote share.

Vidhya Rani’s mother Muthulakshmi is part of a political outfit run by MLA T Velmurugan.

Veerappan, who was killed by the Tamil Nadu Special Task Force (STF) on October 18, 2004, in an encounter, earned notoriety for poaching elephants, smuggling sandalwood, kidnapping high-profile people like Kannada Thespian Raj Kumar and former minister Nagappa, and killing policemen and others who came his way.

The bandit ran an empire inside the forests along the Sathyamangalam forests, spread across Erode and Mysore districts of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka respectively.