Kannur: It took a crushing electoral defeat and a change of government for one of Kerala Police’s quietest humiliations to finally come out into the open.

For 10 years, police officers assigned to guard Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s house at Padiyalamukku in Pinarayi worked out of a condemned Tata Sumo parked outside his gate, a vehicle without a battery, incapable of even starting.

The story surfaced only after the CPM-led LDF government was voted out in the Assembly election. The rusting 2014-model Tata Sumo had functioned as a makeshift police outpost following threat assessments and an earlier intrusion into the residence, police officers said.

Even today, the vehicle remains parked close against the compound wall on the narrow road outside the house, leaving barely enough space for another vehicle to pass. The vehicle has not been moved for the decade Pinarayi Vijayan was the Chief Minister.

Inside the seven-seater vehicle are police registers, files and caps. The only relief on a humid day is a portable battery-operated fan. Outside sit two worn-out plastic chairs, broken and unusable. During heavy rain and harsh summer heat alike, officers on duty used the dead vehicle as a waiting room, office and shelter.

Security for the house is handled by the District Police Headquarters, with six senior civil police officers and two sub-inspectors from the Armed Reserve Camp deployed there in shifts throughout the year, said an inspector.

At any given time, one sub-inspector and two civil police officers remain on guard duty. Additional personnel from Pinarayi Police Station were deployed only when Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister, was present at the house. Yet, despite the decade-long deployment, there is not even a toilet facility for the officers stationed outside the house. Police personnel are not permitted inside the residence compound either.

In the initial years, officers depended on toilets in neighbouring houses. Later, after a government-run Triveni Supermarket opened nearby, they began using its washroom facilities. Even now, the reluctance to speak openly remains evident. 

When contacted, a senior police officer declined to comment freely on the conditions. “There is no facility provided at the house,” was all he would say, that too on the condition of anonymity.

What has triggered discussion within police circles is not merely the condition itself, but the silence surrounding it for a decade. Not a single officer publicly complained all these years about standing guard for hours from inside a condemned vehicle without even basic facilities. 

“It took 10 years for this story to even come out,” a UDF social media handle remarked on Facebook.

When contacted, Kannur City Police Commissioner P Nidhin Raj said he was in a meeting and would call back. Senior police officers, however, maintained that the deployment outside Pinarayi Vijayan’s residence was based on threat assessments by the State Security Review Committee. 

"The committee decides the security arrangements for top leaders,” an officer said, adding that any future course of action would depend on the committee’s recommendations. But he added that the Sumo would be removed from the road soon. 

"We are waiting for the government order."

But it was not the security arrangement itself that drew attention. It was the stark image of police personnel guarding one of Kerala’s most powerful political leaders for years from inside a lifeless Sumo with no battery, no toilet and barely enough room to sit upright, and the fact that nobody dared to speak about it until the government itself changed.