Veteran journalist of Kerala Rajan case fame Sam Rajappa passes away
G Babu Jayakumar | Chennai
16-January-2022
Sam Rajappa (Photos: TWL Archives)
Sam Rajappa, whose name was synonymous with The Statesman newspaper in South India and a senior to all the veteran English journalists of Chennai, passed away Sunday morning (Indian time) in Canada.
He had gone to Canada recently to spend some time with his son Sanjeev’s family. His other son Manoj lives with his family in Australia and his wife Grace predeceased him.
Sam Rajappa’s repertoire of news stories had a wide range of issues and datelines, covering the four States of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and the erstwhile united Andhra Pradesh, in each of which he has lived and reported from.
It was during his stint in Trivandrum, now renamed as Thiruvananthapuram, that he brought to light some facts relating to the sensational Rajan case that rocked Kerala and the rest of the country in the mid-1970s.
During the Emergency, police indulged in indiscriminate arrests of people and one of them was P Rajan, a student of Kozhikode Regional Engineering College.
When Rajan’s father Eachara Warrier filed a habeas corpus petition the entire State came to know about a student going missing after being taken into police custody, along with a friend. However the police did not reveal anything about his fate.
It was then, Sam Rajappa, with the help of some officials got himself lodged in the same jail where Rajan’s friend was locked up.
| Sam Rajappa (centre) with P C Vinoj Kumar, Editor, The Weekend Leader, and Justice K Chandru, former judge, Madras High Court at a TWL event |
He managed to speak to the friend, who was the only witness other than the police personnel concerned to have witnessed Rajan’s death due to extreme torture, and filed a story on it, which put an end to the police denials and enabled Warrier get justice subsequently.
Sam Rajappa, who was posted in Chennai with a mandate to cover the entire South India for The Statesman in the last leg of his longish journalistic career, was once thrown out of Sri Lanka when the Sinhala government found his reporting on the initial stages of the ethnic conflict unpalatable to it.
He was in fact an authority on Sri Lanka, having written widely on the ethnic issues for a very long time, since the early stages of the conflict and was familiar with the political dynamics in every State that he reported from.
Before landing in The Statesman, he had worked in newspapers like the Free Press Journal, and even later he shifted to other publications for short stints only to return to The Statesman whose top editors were always willing to have him with them.
When India Today was launched as a fortnightly, he was their Bangalore editorial representative. Prior to the launch, the group was bringing out an international magazine for circulation among the Indian foreign missions and Sam Rajappa would be flown to Delhi to clear the pages every month.
Later on, in the mid-1990s he became the Editor of AP Times, a newspaper that was launched in the united Andhra Pradesh by a local business group.
The newspaper was growing under his stewardship – some reporters whom he trained there are holding top positions in newspapers now – when it was closed down due to a family feud among the shareholders.
So, he was back in Chennai, helming The Statesman. His wide experience in the profession, rich knowledge of politics, impeccable command over the English language and remarkable writing skills made many young and also senior journalists look up to him.
As a remarkably amiable person, he befriended young journalists with absolute ease and was popular in the community and as a senior journalist who had worked with him said; ‘We all have good memories of Sam.’
Apart from his sociable and gregarious nature, he was a walking encyclopedia, who could reel out information at the drop of a hat. His knowledge about South Indian politics was nonpareil and many young journalists drew inspiration from his friendly conversations.
He was an advisor to the Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi when the paper launched its Chennai edition.
Sam Rajappa was a well sought-after teacher at the Statesman’s Journalism School in Kolkata, guiding aspiring journalists. He was consulting editor for The Weekend Leader, and has been associated with the magazine since its inception in 2010.
He is the paternal uncle of the late social scientist of international renown, M S S Pandian, for whom he was a main source of inspiration.
Born in Marthandam in Kanyakumari district, Sam Rajappa had left home to pursue a career in journalism in the north but was deeply attached to his family and even his hometown.
His marriage to Grace, a Fijian, was solemnized at the church in Marthandam though he was working in Delhi at that time.
The writer G Babu Jayakumar, a senior journalist and Political Editor of Deccan Chronicle, wrote this article on invitation.
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