One heartless granite baron and many hearts of stone: The continuing agony of R Veeramani's child victims

In Tamil Nadu’s hyper-transactional political bazaar, tragedy is rarely mourned—it is monetised. The horrifying allegations of systematic sexual abuse of minor girls involving an 84-year-old granite baron have been wrenched out of the solemn sanctity of the POCSO courtroom and weaponised across the dusty campaign trails of Madurantakam and Dharapuram.

That a society should discover an industrial oligarch accused of preying on impoverished children is an unspeakable horror; that its political and media classes should immediately view the wreckage of those young lives as raw electoral capital for an upcoming by-election is an indictment of our collective humanity.

The sordid saga surrounding Gem Granites founder R. Veeramani has ceased to be merely an inquiry into an alleged predatory network. It has metastasised into an institutional mirror reflecting a multi-cornered moral collapse: a police apparatus that suffered what appears to be a disturbingly convenient cataract; a sensationalist media that preyed upon misery for algorithmic profit; and a gladiatorial political class that treats the trauma of exploited children as roadside currency.

Veeramani and the other accused are entitled to the presumption of innocence under criminal law; the children are entitled to protection, dignity, and an investigation unbent by wealth or politics.

The depths of this degradation were laid bare when the Madras High Court was forced to step between the combatants. Hearing a petition filed by the DMK seeking to restrain ruling-party ministers and TVK social media handles from raising the scandal during the campaign, Justice K. Govindarajan Thilakavadi reportedly advised both sides not to politicise the case.

In a functioning constitutional republic, an elected executive should not require a judicial reminder that sexual violence against children is a statutory emergency, not an electoral counter. When political leaders treat high-court corridors as an arbitration chamber to suppress mutual campaign barbs, they demonstrate with terrifying clarity that their sleepless nights are caused not by the agony of shattered childhoods, but by the nervous tremors of their poll balance sheets.THE VOYEURISTIC CIRCUS AND THE 26/11 WARNING

If the political arena displayed cold calculation, sections of the Fourth Estate distinguished themselves by competitive cruelty.

No sooner had the scandal resurfaced than television and digital platforms unleashed a feeding frenzy of salacious sensationalism. In a grotesque parody of investigative journalism, blurry video fragments—material that by every canon of law and human decency belonged in a sealed forensic depository—were brandished on public screens.

Self-styled crusaders dissected the recording under flashing red graphics, turning the unspeakable violation of minor girls into commercial clickbait. A child’s trauma is evidence to be protected, not footage to be programmed.

This voyeuristic carnival finally collided with the judicial bench. Hearing a public interest litigation moved by the Tulir Charitable Trust, Justice V. Lakshminarayanan brought down a necessary sledgehammer of judicial restraint, issuing an interim order restraining media houses and social media conglomerates—including Meta, Google, and X—from publishing or circulating videos connected to the case and warning against parallel media trials that compromise the victims.

In doing so, Justice Lakshminarayanan delivered a chilling and necessary judicial rebuke. Drawing an unsparing historical parallel, the judge invoked the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. Just as live television broadcasts of commando movements inadvertently aided the attackers, the media’s unbridled frenzy in this case actively damaged the administration of justice.

By broadcasting invasive material, the media did not enlighten the public; it fed the prurient appetites of digital consumers, destroyed whatever fragile privacy remained to the victims, and sent a terrifying warning to other traumatised survivors across the State to remain silent, lest their personal agonies be similarly broadcast across the nation.

Press freedom was conceived in our constitutional scheme as a torch to illuminate the dark recesses of executive abuse; in the hands of rating-hungry newsrooms, it degenerated into a blinding searchlight trained upon the very victims it was duty-bound to protect.

Sections of the media appear to have violated the protective purpose of Section 23 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and Section 74 of the Juvenile Justice Act, both of which strictly prohibit the disclosure of a child victim’s identity or any particulars capable of leading to identification.

Depending upon the nature of the footage transmitted, such broadcasts also risk serious penal liabilities under Section 67B of the Information Technology Act governing child sexual exploitative and abuse material (CSEAM). The cruellest theft was not merely of childhood, but of the child’s right to remain unknown.

Privacy is not a curtain drawn across the crime; it is armour placed around the child. In a measured effort to drain the swamp of speculation, the High Court directed the police to issue a weekly official press release detailing the legitimate progress of the investigation.

The message was unmistakable: the public’s right to be informed about institutional accountability cannot be satisfied by tossing the dignity of brutalised children to the wolves of algorithmic voyeurism.THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL: A MICROPHONE AT MADURANTAKAM

While the courts fought to preserve dignity, the political battlefield of the October 6 by-elections in Madurantakam (SC) and Dharapuram (SC) ensured that restraint remained a scarce commodity.

The dam broke on the campaign trail. Addressing a rally near the Athur toll plaza in Madurantakam in support of the TVK candidate, Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay mounted a high-decibel assault on the DMK and former Chief Minister MK Stalin.

“A person had been exploiting little children in Tamil Nadu for several years,” Vijay declared to the crowd, directly questioning whether backroom compromises had shielded the accused. “Those are all young children If you cannot speak outside about their pain, what politics have you been doing all these years? Stalin sir, open your mouth. Why has MK Stalin not opened his mouth on this case?”

Framing the by-election not as a routine legislative test but as a moral referendum on months of alleged administrative suppression, the Chief Minister urged the electorate to send a resounding political message. The POCSO probe had become the campaign's principal battering ram.

Promptly, Stalin launched a biting counter-offensive, brandishing the High Court’s admonition against politicisation while accusing the ruling regime of exploiting children’s trauma for electoral profit. Mocking Vijay’s mantle of leading an untainted “pure force,” the DMK patriarch asked how a moral crusade could be credibly waged with a poached AIADMK turncoat at the candidate’s elbow, before tartly urging the rookie Chief Minister to introspect on the dignity of high office. Invoking power tariffs, inflation, and Karur, Stalin pivoted the battlefield from historical cover-ups back to current governance, while his party rushed to the Madras High Court seeking urgent restraint against TVK Ministers CTR Nirmal Kumar and Aadhav Arjuna over defamatory campaign charges.

The spectacle reached the height of cynical symmetry. The ruling TVK weaponised the renewed investigation to showcase its spotless vigilance, framing the previous administration as an umbrella for corporate depravity. The DMK, wounded and defensive, cried foul over political vendettas, portraying itself as an innocent bystander victimised by election-eve malice.

An election may judge a government. It cannot try an accused. Yet, as politicians hurled invectives over who broke the silence and who engineered the delay, the true subjects of the tragedy vanished from view.

In the high-stakes calculations of Madurantakam and Dharapuram, the child survivors were stripped of their humanity and reduced to inanimate campaign props, their trauma traded for factional advantage in two reserved constituencies.THE ANATOMY OF A FAILED PROBE: THE ‘HD VIDEO’ FARCE

To comprehend how this horror became an electoral football, one must trace the anatomy of the institutional handling that preceded it.

The origins of the scandal date back to October 2025, when a child-rights activist handed over a pen drive containing distressing video recordings to the Central Crime Branch’s Anti-Vice Squad, leading to the registration of an FIR. The digital material allegedly captured an influential industrialist engaging in predatory behaviour with young girls. Here was an explosive statutory trigger handed directly to the protectors of the law.

What followed appears, on the public record, to have been five months of administrative coma.

Instead of deploying the State’s formidable investigative apparatus to track down the accused, secure the victims, and seize institutional evidence, the initial probe languished. That administrative freeze culminated in February 2026 with a scandalous closure report submitted before the Special POCSO Court, recommending that the case be buried on the incredible pretext that the video footage was “unclear” and the victims “unidentified.”

When public outrage erupted, the previous establishment retreated into surreal administrative semantics. Former Law Minister S. Raghupathy argued that the police had acted upon the material available, that the footage lacked sufficient clarity, that the DMK had no ties with Veeramani, and that the investigation could always be revived upon fresh evidence.

The absurdity of this defence was ripped apart by School Education Minister A. Rajmohan with a single, devastating interrogative: “Do you expect an HD video?”

Rajmohan’s retort cut through months of bureaucratic deception. What, precisely, did investigators expect from a clandestine recording documenting the alleged sexual exploitation of minor children? Did they require a cinematic master-shot, calibrated in 4K resolution and equipped with studio lighting, before they could summon the willpower to cross-examine an 84-year-old tycoon?

To demand high-definition video evidence of child sexual abuse as a precondition for action is not a standard of legal proof; it is an open invitation for predators to operate with impunity in standard definition.

When power asks for clearer pixels, justice must ask why its vision failed.

Digital forensics, source tracing, metadata extraction where available, audio analysis, location reconstruction, witness examination, and telecommunications records offered abundant investigative avenues beyond staring at the pixels and surrendering. The contrast raises the gravest suspicion of institutional paralysis—and demands an inquiry into whether it was incompetence, external influence, or both. A closure report can close a file. It cannot close the questions buried inside it.THE ALLEGED PIPELINE: GRANITE, GREED, AND VULNERABILITY

Strip away the political noise, and the central figure in this nightmare is R. Veeramani, the founder of Gem Granites—an enterprise built on excavating and polishing the earth’s most unyielding stone.

For decades, Veeramani walked the corridors of high society, industry federations, and corporate philanthropy as a titan of natural stone. An 84-year-old magnate whose empire exported polished monument stone globally, he cultivated the exterior of a venerable patriarch and benevolent patron whose charitable trusts offered educational assistance and cultural sponsorships.

Yet behind this faade of gilded respectability lay what investigators allege was an organised predatory pipeline.

According to the prosecution's case and court records, Veeramani did not operate in isolation. The remand applications attribute specific facilitating roles to trusted associates: Shanthi, Mahendra Simhan, and his assistant Ganesan, who was separately arrested for allegedly withholding digital evidence.

The mechanics of entrapment described by investigators were ruthlessly engineered. Shanthi allegedly functioned as the procurer, infiltrating economically shattered, marginalised families. The bait was diabolically designed: promises of fully funded schooling, star-hotel dinners, new clothes, and financial relief for mothers struggling to keep their hearths burning.

Once ensnared, young girls—aged between 12 and 16, according to initial complaints—were allegedly taken to rented premises in affluent enclaves such as Teynampet, bound by an allegation whose very architecture appears to have depended upon wealth, access, and gross inequality of power.

The cruelty of this alleged network was fundamentally grounded in class dominance. The victims were not drawn from the sheltered drawing rooms of the urban elite; they were allegedly drawn from households so deprived of social capital that challenging a corporate titan was almost inconceivable. The subsequent addition of provisions under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act added a further harrowing dimension: that caste vulnerability accompanied economic vulnerability.

When philanthropy is allegedly degraded into a hunting ground, stone is not merely what the baron quarried from the hills; stone is what sat inside the chest of the enterprise.THE POCSO COURT THAT REFUSED TO BURT THE CASE

If the initial investigation failed its duty, the Special Court altered the case's trajectory through judicial courage.

On August 19, Special Judge S. Padma of the Chennai POCSO Court looked upon the police closure report and refused to accept it. Declining to ratify the shameful fiction that the case was a dead end, Judge Padma rejected the closure report and ordered further investigation.

What followed was a devastating answer to the earlier investigative alibi.

Under the renewed investigation, a dedicated team achieved within weeks what previous investigators claimed was impossible. They traced the primary survivor, secured her confidential statement before a Judicial Magistrate under Section 183 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS)—the successor to Section 164 of the CrPC—and recovered concealed digital evidence.

While wider reports claim several survivors have since emerged across decades, the police informed the Madras High Court on September 25 that four child victims had been officially identified and their statements recorded.

On September 25, the State government formally announced a high-level Special Investigation Team comprising four senior women IPS officers—Additional Commissioner P. C. Thenmozhi, Joint Commissioner N. Disha Mittal, SP Mutharasi, and DCP Geethanjali—to supervise the expanding probe.

The contrast between the two phases of the investigation is a crushing indictment of earlier lethargy. If a renewed effort could identify victims, recover evidence, and secure the arrest of the industrialist and his alleged enablers, what were the police doing during those five months of inaction? The law will try the accused. History will try the institutions that first looked away.

On September 25, Judge Padma extended Veeramani’s judicial custody till October 9 via video conference. The 84-year-old baron sat behind the bleak walls of Puzhal Central Prison—remanded as an accused in a serious POCSO prosecution, stripped of his corporate comforts.THE UNIFORM IN THE DOCK & THE CLAMOUR FOR INDEPENDENCE

Justice, however, cannot halt at the cell door of the accused industrialist. A reported predatory network of this nature, operating over time and involving vulnerable children, raises an unavoidable question: did it survive through secrecy alone, or through the active assistance or deliberate blindness of people entrusted with authority?

The tremors shook the highest echelons of the Tamil Nadu police. In an abrupt administrative purge, two senior IPS officers—ADGP A. Arun, who served as Greater Chennai Police Commissioner when the initial complaint was lodged, and Coimbatore City Police Commissioner N. Kannan—were placed on "compulsory wait". While these administrative orders are not findings of culpability, they nevertheless show that the handling of the complaint has become serious enough to reach the highest levels of police administration.

The rot runs deeper than bureaucratic lethargy. Allegations surfaced from within political corridors, led by Tamil Nadu Congress Scheduled Caste wing leader Ranjan Kumar, asserting that explicit complaints regarding the allegations had been submitted to senior police brass as early as November 2024—nearly a year before the October 2025 pen drive became a flashpoint.

Equally troubling are the financial shadows trailing the initial investigation. Investigators are currently scrutinising property sales amounting to approximately 36.52 crore and 43.72 crore executed around the time the first probe was buried. The subsequent movement of funds requires fearless forensic auditing. Investigators must establish whether they were ordinary commercial transactions, legitimate litigation expenses, or connected in any way with attempts to influence witnesses, purchase bureaucratic silence, or muffle media scrutiny. Until that financial trail is rigorously proven, suspicion must not masquerade as destination.

This institutional tangle has led advocates C Rajasekaran and Varahi to seek transfer of the investigation to the CBI through public-interest petitions before the Madras High Court. The petitioners point to photographs and videos showing political figures across party lines, including personalities associated with the DMK and the present ruling establishment, sharing rostrums and social pleasantries with the granite baron.

A photograph may prove proximity, never complicity; but proximity to power makes independence in investigation indispensable. Whether the High Court transfers the case to the CBI or keeps it under the stern gaze of a court-monitored Special Investigation Team, one truth is self-evident: the uniform is as much on trial as the tycoon.WHAT HAPPENS TO THE CHILDREN NOW?

Amid the roar of political loudspeakers and the clash of high-court petitions, an urgent question remains largely unasked: what is happening to the children?

The POCSO Act was engineered not merely as a penal code to punish the guilty at the end of a trial, but as a protective statutory fortress to insulate survivors from the moment an offence is reported. Has every identified child been offered, and wherever required assigned, a qualified support person under the POCSO Rules? Have they received comprehensive, trauma-informed psychological counselling, immediate medical assistance, independent legal assistance, and emergency interim financial compensation?

Furthermore, are these young girls and their economically fragile families being actively protected from intimidation, harassment, and social stigma? A child-centric justice system does not subject traumatised survivors to repetitive, exhausting rounds of interrogation by shifting teams of investigators. The law demands that their rehabilitation, schooling, and housing be insulated from retaliation by powerful interests.

Equally critical is the unanswered question of the evidentiary leak. The unauthorised dissemination of the pen-drive footage into the public domain was not an incidental breach; it was a catastrophic failure of privacy and forensic custody that exposed survivors, risked contaminating testimony, and alerted other suspects. Who had access to the material while in institutional custody? Establishing chain of custody, verifying forensic hash values, and holding every official who handled that digital file accountable is as vital to the rule of law as arresting the perpetrators depicted in it.

Evidence escaped from custody; the children must not be made prisoners of its circulation.

Sections 29 and 30 of POCSO permit the Special Court, once the prosecution establishes the necessary foundational facts, to draw statutory presumptions against the accused at trial. Sections 23 and 33(7) protect the child’s identity, while Section 37 requires the trial to be conducted in camera. The statutory architecture is clear: prosecute firmly, try fairly, and protect the child throughout.WHEN THE CAMPAIGN LEAVE, THE CHILDREN REMAIN

Soon the electronic voting machines will tally the ballots of Madurantakam and Dharapuram. Ministers will claim vindication, defeated candidates will discover conspiracies, and television studios will move swiftly to their next emergency.

Stone was the business from which the accused built his corporate stature. Stone also became the tragic metaphor of the institutions that allegedly failed to see, pursue, and protect: an initial investigation prepared for premature burial, newsrooms that converted protected evidence into spectacle, and politicians who weighed childhood trauma against electoral arithmetic.

The accused must be tried by evidence, not campaign rhetoric. Police culpability must be established by an independent inquiry, not partisan assertion. The children, however, should not have to await either verdict before receiving privacy, protection, rehabilitation, and dignity.

The final measure of this sordid saga will not be how loudly Tamil Nadu condemned an accused industrialist from an election truck. It will be whether the State protected the children after the microphones had left.- Ends

TR Jawahar is a senior Chennai-based journalist.