Years ago, while she was still in the police force, R Sreelekha walked into a sari sale in Thiruvananthapuram. Spotting the other women there, she said with a laugh: “Well, I wonder where to start [shopping] from.” The remark immediately put everyone at ease.
Kerala’s first woman IPS (Indian Police Service) officer, Sreelekha did not fit the tough stereotype often associated with top officials in the force. Instead, she came across as friendly, warm, and approachable.
This little episode gives a preview into her people skills, a factor that might have paved the way for her election victory this December, making her a councillor in the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation.
Sreelekha can be good with people, a people’s person as they say, when she wants to be.
Exactly five years ago, on the last day of 2020 – the year of COVID-19 – Sreelekha retired as Kerala’s Director General of Police, the highest rank in the police force.
Post retirement, she threw occasional surprises at the public, first with startling declarations on her private YouTube channel, and later, entering politics by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Last year’s surprise was the announcement of her candidacy for the local body election from the Sasthamangalam ward in Thiruvananthapuram.
While the news gave rise to debates on the propriety of a retired IPS officer taking on the role of a ward councillor, it was clear that Sreelekha had her ways of charming people, with her fast-paced speech often considered sincere, in interviews and in other public avenues.
But in less than a week of the new Corporation council taking charge, two back-to-back controversies have raised questions about her public relations skills.
On December 21, the swearing-in day of the new Council, Sreelekha left the venue in a huff, as though she wanted her abrupt departure to be noticed. And it was. It suggested displeasure at not being chosen as the mayor of the first ever BJP-ruled corporation in Kerala. The IPS officer had now been reduced to a simple ward councillor.
The next day, she told a reporter on video that she had contested the election under the belief that she would be made mayor if the BJP won. “Intially, my job as state vice president of the party, was to ensure the victory in 10 wards. Then the leadership asked me to contest the election. I was unwilling at first, but then they said they would consider me for the mayor’s post and asked me to be the face of the election. I was under the impression till the last minute that I would be [the mayor], but there appears to have been a change of decision. When the central leadership asks you to be councillor, you can’t say ‘poda pulle’ (get lost) and leave, because there are people who voted for me and I have a commitment [to them].”
Long-time BJP worker and head of the district unit VV Rajesh was chosen mayor, and young Asha Nath was made deputy mayor. “Maybe the party’s central leadership felt they would do better, and if that’s the case, I agree,” said an obviously disgruntled Sreelekha. But a day later, she rebuked the media for “twisting” her words, claiming the mayor was chosen with complete consensus and the “issues” within the party were the imagination of the media.
Within a week, just as the confusion began to subside, Sreelekha was in a tussle for office space with a former mayor and current legislator of the Left Democratic Front ruling the state.
VK Prasanth, who found popularity as the city’s mayor a few years ago, and won the Assembly seat from Vattiyoorkavu, was asked by Sreelekha to vacate his office in Sasthamangalam. As a Member of the Legislative Assembly, he could get an office anywhere, she said. She, on the other hand, insisted that she would like a private office in the very same Corporation building that he was working from for the past six-and-a-half years. After a war of words, and then a show of friendliness (with Sreelekha saying Prasanth was like a brother to her), the MLA said he will vacate the office he had paid rent for years, and find another in the city.
While some saw this as a petty move by the new BJP councillor, supporters of Sreelekha made cinematic videos to celebrate this, with music and captions.
First woman IPS officer ‘unwelcome’ in force
Controversies are not new in Sreelekha’s life. Neither is being in the news.
At first, of course, it was celebratory news, a matter of pride for Malayalis, when in 1987, Sreelekha became the first woman to qualify for IPS and take charge in Kerala. Later, she was made the first woman DGP of the state.
In multiple media interviews, she spoke about the grand welcome she received from the public as well as the media, while her own department remained hostile for years. Like in most male-dominated fields of work, the entry of a woman into their midst was not alluring to some of the men at the top, she said. In an interview with Manorama’s Johny Lukose, Sreelekha said that she even heard of a DGP telling other officials that “a woman was coming to pollute the department”.
She alleged that the gender discrimination was insufferable—she faced everything from humiliating rumours to threats against her life, including a gun being pointed at her by a colleague.
Once, when 11 police officers involved in a corruption case in Pathanamthitta were suspended on the basis of a report she filed, Sreelekha's family members too were put at risk, she alleged, with a kidnapping attempt on her son and a murder attempt on her husband.
After that, when she was offered a posting with the Central Bureau of Investigation, she gladly accepted and took on the role of Deputy Inspector General of Police. By then, she had had it with some of her male colleagues.
Even before that, Sreelekha had a deep mistrust of men, she said in another interview, from the way her mother had raised her and her sisters after the death of their father, telling them stories about how men are dangerous. A History professor at the University College in Thiruvananthapuram, Sreelekha’s father passed away when she was 16. She was the third of four children, with two elder sisters and a younger brother. Her clothes and books were hand-me-downs, she told TN Gopakumar in an episode of Kannadi, adding that she, her mother, and siblings were not treated well by relatives they stayed with after the death of her father.
But they managed to do well at school. Sreelekha went to Cotton Hill School and after that, did her degree in English Literature at the Women’s College. She admitted she was not great in Mathematics, but managed to find a job as a teacher and later with the Reserve Bank of India, before getting selected for the IPS.
It took a decade for her male colleagues to accept her, she said, or perhaps, she merely got used to the ways of the police force. As she rose through the ranks, she began to gain a name for herself, not only for being the first woman officer, but also for her methods.
‘Raid madam’, conflicts, controversies
Sreelekha earned the epithet ‘raid madam’ for the many raids against corruption she conducted. But her reports were not all in good stride, according to journalistic sources. She had allegedly urged mediapersons to confront those she had internal conflicts with. She seemed insecure, sensitive.
Her spat with her IPS batchmate and colleague Tomin Thachankery was no secret, with both officials filing cases against each other. Sreelekha charged Thachankary with a case of disproportionate assets, among others, while he filed a report alleging corruption during her tenure as Transport Commissioner in 2014-15. She was given clean chits for this and other cases, including one on going on a Thailand trip without government sanction while she was Managing Director of the Kerala State Rubber Marketing Federation.
In 2012, as Assistant DGP of Vigilance, she recommended the suspension of Information Commissioner K Natarajan, for allegedly influencing a police official against naming CPI(M) veteran VS Achuthanandan in a land scam. The then Home Minister and Congress leader Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan had put her in charge of the enquiry on Natarajan, after not finding Achuthanandan’s name among the accused.
She also became known for her public reactions to potential troublemakers. During a morning walk in Kochi in 2011, she attempted to nab a suspicious looking cyclist, only for him to flee before she could get to him. Another time in Thiruvananthapuram, she stopped her official car on seeing a drunk man and guessing correctly that he would turn violent, called in a police team to take him into custody.
In 2014, Sreelekha was working as Transport Commissioner when yet another controversy brought her to the limelight. IndiaVision released visuals alleging that officials working under her were transporting materials in official vehicles for the construction of Sreelekha’s new house in Vazhuthacaud in Thiruvananthapuram – a stone’s throw away from former chief minister AK Antony’s residence. The news channel also alleged that Sreelekha used official cars and escorts for other personal purposes, including out-of-town trips.
Sreelekha denied the allegations in a blog post and claimed that officers within the department were slinging mud at her with the help of the media. "There is a lot of competition among the media for exclusive stories. Stories about IPS/IAS officers have a good market, especially if it is a woman officer. If senior police officers tell them a story, they will swallow it whole. If some clippings/video or a bit of paper can be given as the "so-called evidence" then they will telecast/ print the gossip," Sreelekha wrote.
She also attributed her name being linked with criminal spiritual leader Santosh Madhavan, to yet another attack on her from within the department.
Sreelekha would often say that by becoming the first woman officer in Kerala, she had taken all the ‘thorns’ along the way, clearing the path for the women who followed in her footsteps. While she is known to have made attempts to take more women in the force, no stories emerged of the lasting female friendships she made within the department. Even with her contemporary, B Sandhya IPS, it seemed to be a silent competition of sorts, with both of them having similar interests in literature and the arts.
‘Saviour’ of women turns supporter of Dileep
It was around the same time as the IndiaVision exposé that Sreelekha was put in charge of Nirbhaya, a state government initiative to combat sexual violence against women and children. She had by then earned a name for her involvement in such cases, especially in the Kiliroor case of 2003, in which a minor girl was raped by multiple men over a period of time, four of whom were convicted. The girl died after giving birth to a child in 2004.
Sreelekha famously revealed in the Johny Lukose interview that she hit one of the accused women, Latha Nair, who had trapped the girl with offers to act in films. In a broken voice, Sreelekha said that the girl had, in her hospital bed, asked if “aunty could slap that woman”. Sreelekha added that she regretted being able to hit her only once, for the woman had passed out.
Deposing before the CBI court, Sreelekha said that no VIP was involved in the case, despite the fact that names of certain United Democratic Front leaders had cropped up during the investigation. She said that her deposition was made on the basis of the victim's statement.
In her columns in the women’s magazine Vanitha too, Sreelekha would reinforce her image as the voice of unheard women languishing in prisons. She called her column Marupuram – the other side – to voice the side of the women prisoners. In her writings, though, Sreelekha sometimes compromised on privacy. A family in Thiruvananthapuram was shocked to find a domestic affair they had told the officer in confidence written about in the magazine, withholding only their names but sharing details that gave away their identity.
But what really shattered her image as a fighter of women’s rights is her public support of actor Dileep, who was accused of masterminding the kidnapping and sexual assault of his female colleague in 2017. On multiple occasions, Sreelekha spoke emotionally of encountering Dileep in a sorry state in prison – when he was briefly arrested in the case – and termed the evidence the police had collected as fabricated. These came as part of the videos she posted on her Youtube series Sasneham Sreelekha (With love, Sreelekha), and began with her trademark ‘Salute’ greeting.
When she was asked about her support for the survivor, she said it was of course there, but only after adding, “If such a thing happened”. The survivor filed a contempt of court plea against Sreelekha citing her public remarks supporting an accused. However, after Dileep was acquitted by the trial court last December, Sreelekha said that she had always been with the survivor and wanted the criminals who were now convicted to have been punished much earlier, without the delay of so many years.
Sreelekha’s approach in different cases of sexual abuse appears to vary, since she has sided with Dileep through the years, despite admitting that she has not met the survivor. On another occasion, Sreelekha alleged that a former woman colleague had complained to her about sexual advances by senior male officers, an allegation that brought some strong reaction from the police force.
After she posted her video about Dileep in 2022, activists Bindhu Ammini, PV Vijayamma, and Jomon Puthenpurackal alleged that Sreelekha had filed false cases against them earlier, because of personal grudges.
From khaki to saffron
Sreelekha’s Sasneham videos began to take on a different flavour after she joined the BJP in 2024. The topics turned to the ‘nepotism’ favouring Rahul Gandhi and the ‘import’ of Marxism that she dubbed a foreign ideology. She also posted a detailed video about the assassination of Gandhi, stating it is a lie that the Rashtriya Swayamsevakh Sangh had anything to do with it. According to Sreelekha, “RSS is one of the biggest NGOs in the world, it does not have much to do with the BJP.” Also according to her, “Hindutva is not about religion, it is about culture. Hindus imply Indians, not the people of a particular religion.”
In her fervent campaigning for the local body polls, Sreelekha, a privileged caste Hindu, hardly mentioned religion. She stuck to attacking corruption, advocating development and technology, and occasionally, dancing on the campaign truck.
For the next five years, she has said, she will remain nothing but a ward councillor, and not contest in the Assembly elections slated for this year.
