Kerala's Chief Minister Suspends Senior IPS Officer M R Ajith Kumar Over Allegations of Interfering with Police Probe

Senior IPS officer and ADGP M R Ajith Kumar was suspended from service on charges of illegally interfering in and undermining the police probe into the attack on Youth Congress workers by the personal security staff of then chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan in 2023. This comes after Chief Minister V D Satheesan ordered a re-investigation two months after coming to power. Two Youth Congress workers — one of them now MLA A D Thomas — were brutally attacked by the police, including Vijayan’s staff, for showing black flags to the chief minister’s convoy. Vijayan had then called the police action a “rescue operation”. A court in 2024 had ordered a probe into the incident, but the CPI(M) government did not take any action. An SIT ordered by the current Satheesan government allegedly found ADGP Ajith Kumar, considered close to Vijayan, had meddled in the police probe against the CM’s security staff and directed his subordinates to tailor reports to shield the cops involved. According to officials, the decision to suspend Kumar was taken by the chief minister after consulting Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala. Three other subordinate officers will face departmental action. Pressure has been mounting on the government to take action against Kumar, who is slated to be promoted to the DGP rank after DGP (Fire and Rescue) Nitin Agarwal retires on August 1. Kumar landed in many controversies during the previous LDF regime, the most prominent among them his April 2023 meeting with RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale. Critics later linked that meeting with the fiasco at the Thrissur Pooram festival the following year, alleging that the festival was deliberately disrupted in order to ensure the victory of BJP’s Suresh Gopi from that parliamentary seat – a historic first for the party in Kerala. In 2024, Kumar was probed by the police chief on his role in the Pooram fiasco, but the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led government initially denied the Opposition allegations before eventually stripping him of his Law and Order portfolio.