Kerala ADM death | A farewell, a death, and a political row Premium

The suicide of Additional District Magistrate K. Naveen Babu who was publicly accused by a CPI(M) district panchayat president of being corrupt has brought to light differences in CPI(M) and become an election issue

Trigger warning: The following article has references to suicide. Please avoid reading if you feel distressed by the subject.

At 6:15 a.m. on October 15, 2024, M. Shamsudeen, a driver at the Kannur District Collectorate, received an unusual call. The person at the other end was the confidential assistant to the outgoing Additional District Magistrate (ADM), K. Naveen Babu. He asked Shamsudeen to check if Babu was at his official house at Pallikunnu, 15 minutes away from the District Collectorate in northern Kerala.

The previous evening, the Revenue Staff Council had thrown a farewell party for Babu, 55. He was to then leave Kannur and reach Pathanamthitta, his native district, nearly 400 km away, early on October 15 to take charge as ADM for the remaining seven months of his service. But when Babu’s wife, Manjusha, reached the Chengannur railway station, close to their home, along with their daughters at 4 a.m., they did not find him. They asked the railway police, who informed them that Babu had not boarded the train. Unable to contact him, the anxious family dialled Babu’s confidential assistant.

Shamsudeen says the drive to Pallikunnu was probably the longest and the most difficult in his 13 years as a driver. He was filled with a sense of foreboding given the time of the call and the confidential assistant’s strange and urgent ask.

On reaching the house, Shamsudeen found the door slightly ajar. He heard Babu’s phone ringing incessantly inside. Alarmed, he did not enter the house. Instead, he called a neighbour, Ranjith, for assistance. Ranjith was equally scared. The two of them contacted the ADM’s gunman for help. When all of them entered the house, they found Babu dead. He was still dressed in the clothes he had worn for his farewell the previous evening.

On October 14, as people milled around and chatted with one another at Babu’s farewell, the District Panchayat President, P.P. Divya, landed at the venue. In an unexpected turn of events, Divya, a district committee member of the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist), publicly rebuked Babu for allegedly delaying the issuance of a no-objection certificate for a fuel station in Chengalai, a village in Kannur. She announced that she would have more to say on the subject in two days and walked out in a huff.

“The atmosphere in the room shifted dramatically,” recalled M.K. Ashwin, a member of the Revenue Staff Council that had organised the event. “We had not invited her, but she came and made these allegations. We were taken aback.”