Rasheed murder: Book chronicles case that rocked B’luru

V Sudarshan’s ‘Dead End: The Minister, the CBI and the Murder that Wasn’t’ is based on documents provided by an investigator who went all out to nail the guilty

A new book chronicles one of the most sensational murder cases to rock Bengaluru.

‘Dead End: The Minister, the CBI and the Murder that Wasn’t’ by V Sudarshan, delves deep into the case of M A Rasheed, a small-time advocate from Kerala, whose murder caused a political storm in Karnataka, although his body was found in Tamil Nadu.

Rasheed was travelling to Bengaluru from Kerala in August 1987, when he was kidnapped and later found dead in Salem district, Tamil Nadu, as per the charge sheet. News reports said he had been murdered at the behest of R L Jalappa, then a powerful minister in the Ramakrishna Hegde cabinet.

Jalappa and all those involved in the case were acquitted. Jalappa died in December 2021.

The murder took place in 1987, just two years after Sudarshan had started his journalistic career. “I was in Chennai back then, but I remember the story breaking in Bengaluru. It was a Page 1 story,” he says.

He started working on the book in 2020, after he read a monograph on the case by retired CBI officer K Ragothaman, who had investigated the murder.

“The monograph was about 30 pages long and when I read it I immediately knew I had to write the book,” Sudarshan told Metrolife.

His fascination came from his curiosity about crime reporting. “As a journalist, I used to cover the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi and that was my primary sphere of interest in journalism for a long time. But I have always wanted to be a crime reporter. So, when the opportunity to write this book fell into my hands on June 27, 2020, I knew I had to take it up,” he says.

After interacting with Ragothaman every day for a month, Sudarshan was all set to write a book on a murder investigation that had dominated crime reporting in south India for months. Ragothaman had preserved all the important documents pertaining to the case, which he shared with the author.

“He was deeply dissatisfied with the way the case ultimately turned out. To help me understand the case better, he shared with me the CBI deposition, and the material objects related to the case. Plus, the court documents are all publicly available online. I didn’t need to go looking for other sources,” adds Sudarshan.

As the case was closed over 30 years ago, the author did not run into legal and bureaucratic hurdles.

Another factor that helped Sudarshan was that the crime took place in south India, where he has worked as a journalist and is familiar with the areas.

A news report focuses on the most important details of a case, a result of the dearth of space, while a book has the luxury of exploring the nuances of each character. “My book ‘Adrift’, about a group lost at sea, only appeared as a five-paragraph report in the news pages. Especially today, with all the design changes, there is no space for the whole story in newspapers. By the time you have answered the five W’s and one H, there is no space left for anything else,” he says.

He hopes the book will inspire law students, journalists and police officers. “This is about a man who is fighting not only the Karnataka police department but also the home minister and the CBI, and about the cracks through which justice falls. It is a story of hope, where despite the obstacles, a man keeps doing his job meticulously. I just hope Ragothaman were here to see the book come to life,” says the independent journalist. Ragothaman died in May last year.

*Published by Hachette India, ‘Dead End: The Minister, the CBI and the Murder that Wasn’t’ is priced at Rs 499. Available online and in bookstores across the city.

A body on the tracks

P Sadasivan, running an educational society in Bengaluru, and the then home minister Jalappa were feuding as both were trying to get approvals to establish a medical college in Kolar.

Rasheed, an advocate from Kerala, was on Sadasivan’s side. Jalappa got Rasheed kidnapped and murdered, according to the CBI.

Rasheed’s body was found on the railway tracks in Salem district, Tamil Nadu. Jalappa was arraigned in the murder case, along with a senior IPS officer and several policemen from the High Grounds police station in Bengaluru.

According to DH reports, all of them were acquitted as there were “infirmities” in the prosecution’s case.