The police say it was a supari killing, executed by an Andhra-based hit squad. Two of the alleged killers are in custody and the third, Sreenivasa Reddy, who blazed away at the don with revolvers in both hands, is expected to surrender in a day or two, they add.
But ex-CM Naidu won’t buy any of that. He claims the cops had organised Ravi’s killing, for CM YSR Reddy and his son Jaganmohan Reddy.
‘‘Ravi was shot many times, even his post-mortem report was a sham. Only one bullet was recovered, of the same calibre as the ones in service revolvers. I have authentic information that a bunch of cops of the Andhra Pradesh Special Police battalion in Anantapur, made up of many who had recently retired and a few who were suspended earlier from service, have been organising or doing the killings for the CM,’’ Naidu told The Indian Express.
At last count, 41 TDP workers have been killed in Andhra since May 2004, when the Congress came to power after nine years in the wilderness—20 were shot, hacked or bombed to bits in Anantapur itself.
And Ravi was the most high-profile of them all.
According to top police officers, Ravi was known to be different from the many feudal mafia dons—officially called ‘factionists’—lording over Rayalaseema’s killing fields that averages over three murders every day.
He did not inherit a feudal estate or riches, but was armed with the legacy of his father and his younger brother, both full-fledged Naxalites, both gunned down.
Ravi used that equity, which has great resonance in this arid area, to successfully bond power politics with underworld money-making. And all, with a ruthlessness that left him trailing 54 serious criminal cases—16 of them murder—and a few dozen more in which he was prime suspect, but not charge-sheeted. ‘‘He was never convicted in any case, naturally, since witnesses would invariably turn hostile in court, refuse to testify, or simply vanish,’’ says a senior police officer.
The other possible reason: The Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC) has documented cases in which police officers joined Ravi’s men to engineer murders that were written off as encounters.
Ravi’s father, Paritala Sreeramulu, was a Naxalite leader close to Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, supremo of the then-monolithic People’s War Group. That was until G Narayana Reddy, a factionist and Congress MLA, and Sane Chenna Reddy, another factionist who later became a Congress MLA, had Sreeramulu killed in 1975.
Ravi and his brother Paritala Hari escaped that attack.
Says Vara Vara Rao, Andhra’s best-known Naxalite poet and official spokesman for the People’s War (Maoist) movement: ‘‘Hari was our active worker, but Ravi sought shelter from those gunning for him. He was never involved in the movement, but managed to gainfully use its label later.’’ Rao says the Maoists even circulated a pamphlet warning sympathisers about Ravi exploiting the Naxalite tag.
The cops gunned down Hari in 1982, giving Ravi two ‘martyrs’ to avenge. Soon, the movement led by Seetharamaiah went under a series of vertical splits and Ravi had one of its own, the Re-Organising Committee of People’s War or PW (ROC). He maintained it as a private army, under his lieutenant Pothula Suresh. And then began his reign of terror and killings.
Predictably, among the first batch of his victims were his father’s killers.
In 1983, ex-MLA Narayana Reddy was chased all over Anantapur town and killed in broad daylight. In 1991, three men quietly walked upto MLA Sane Chenna Reddy reclining on an easy chair and shot him through the newspaper he was reading.
Then, Ravi targeted their families.
In 1993, Ravi’s men came to know that Narayana Reddy’s widow had sent her TV to a shop in Anantapur town to get it repaired. They got a gelatine bomb planted inside the TV at the shop. When the family switched on the ‘repaired’ TV, it blew up Narayana Reddy’s wife, son, daughter, daughter-in-law and a servant.
The only survivor was Reddy’s other son, Suryanarayana Reddy alias Suri, who vowed to get Ravi.
Five years later, Ravi and his lackeys were walking out of a studio in Hyderabad’s Jubilee Hills after the muhurat shot of a film he was producing on his dead father. A car nearby, loaded with explosives, blew up 26 of his people. Ravi escaped with minor bruises. Suri tried twice more, according to police sources. ‘‘In 2000, he tried a suitcase bomb, which we defused. Next, he hid a bomb inside an ice cream cart. It didn’t go off.’’ By then, Suri’s time had run out. He was arrested for the car bomb blast, and is now serving life in Cherlapalli jail. He is also suspected of engineering Ravi’s killing, from within the jail. Meanwhile, another front was opening up against Ravi. The son of slain MLA Sane Chenna Reddy, Ramana Reddy, had dropped out of his B.Tech course to become his father’s successor, along with his brother Obula Reddy. Their principal target: Ravi.
After Ramana was elected Congress MLA from his father’s seat, the brothers zeroed in on Ravi’s followers, killing some two dozen. That spree lasted till 1996, when some women in burqas walked up to Obula one afternoon at Banjara Hills in Hyderabad, whipped out revolvers and shot him dead. Of course, the women were all men.
Two years later, Ramana was found hacked to death. By then, Ravi had officially quit his extremist garb with much drama, surrendering to police in 1993. The next year, the legendary N T Rama Rao gave him the TDP ticket from Penukonda. He won, and went on to be Andhra’s labour minister.
But two years later, he fell out with NTR and quit as MLA. Later, he was persuaded to stand for re-election the same year, which he duly won. There was no looking back thereafter.
Ravi diversified into land-grabbing, mica mine takeovers, abductions and even rigging contracts.
‘‘Such was his dominance that not a single major government contract in Rayalaseema went to anyone other than his nominees until TDP went out of power. Even huge corporates with clout in Delhi had to pay him a cut,’’ claims a senior IAS officer.
A police officer says Ravi’s massive Rs 5-crore home in Anantapur was a ‘‘protection offering’’ by one of India’s largest corporates involved in many megaprojects in Andhra during the TDP regime. ‘‘He was worth about Rs 300 crore by the time he died,’’ the officer says. Ravi brooked no opposition, either. Police sources say at least 120 local Congress leaders and workers were killed in Anantapur by Ravi’s private army from 1994 to 2004. ‘‘Some were killed because they came in the way of his business concerns, others for party or factionist interests,’’ the sources said.
But some claim the police were on Ravi’s side, too. ‘‘Anantapur police had shot dead 41 people in encounters from 2000 to 2004. All of them, without exception, were people in Ravi’s rival camp,’’ claims Dr S Seshaiah, APPCL General Secretary.
Ravi also made sure that Anantapur elected six TDP MLAs, including himself, in the last Assembly polls, even as the party was routed by Congress everywhere else. But for all his power and proximity to NTR and later Chandrababu Naidu, Ravi was a man on the run. He owned a fleet of Tata Sumos, all of identical colour, and at least three of them bullet-proofed.
Three months ago, he told reporters that the Congress was out to kill him. His patron Chandrababu Naidu too had been vocal about saving Ravi.
None of that, however, helped on January 24, as Ravi was coming out of a TDP meeting at the party office. His security officers and hirelings could only watch as three young men walked upto the don and pressed the trigger. -SOURCE INDIAN EXPRESS
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