Geetha V P
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s first administration in the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation has been reminded, within a year of taking office, how little separates a historic win from a hostage situation. R. Sreelekha, the former Director General who joined the party in October 2024 and won Sasthamangalam in the December 2025 civic polls, has placed a resignation on the table without quite filing it. The letter went to Mayor V. V. Rajesh on 30 September, citing personal reasons. The ward was told on WhatsApp that a copy would reach the District Collector on 5 October. It has not, so far as the record shows, gone to the Corporation Secretary, the authority competent to accept it. By Sunday the party was insisting she would complete her term, that she was unwell, and that talk of bargaining was unbecoming. The form of the exit is the story.
Sreelekha is Kerala’s first woman IPS officer. She retired in 2020. She had no long association with the organisation she now sits in. After the corporation results — 50 seats for the BJP in a house of 101, a government formed with the support of independent councillor Pattoor Radhakrishnan — she said publicly that she had been reluctant to contest and had agreed only on an assurance that she would be mayor. She was presented as the party’s face in the campaign. V. V. Rajesh was chosen instead. She said she would accept the decision and serve five years. She was later given the Vattiyoorkavu Assembly ticket and finished third. The disappointment was not retired with that contest.
A completed resignation would cut the party from 50 to 49 and force a by-election in Sasthamangalam. The administration already rests on an independent. That arithmetic is why a letter parked with the mayor, rather than lodged with the secretary, is not a private health matter even if ill health is real. CPI(M) leader V. Sivankutty has called it a threat aimed at position. The party has denied any such reading. Readers can judge the sequence: assurance, denial of the office, public grievance, a resignation announced to the ward and withheld from the competent authority, and a swift assurance that she will stay.
Parties are free to induct retired officers. They are not free to pretend that a late entrant recruited for a headline will behave like cadre once the headline is spent. Sreelekha contested on the expectation of the mayor’s chair. The BJP used that expectation and then set it aside. She has now demonstrated what a single dissatisfied councillor can do to a majority of one. Thiruvananthapuram did not need this lesson. It has been given it anyway.
