Bekal fest scam: CPM-led society registered using forged lease deed; lakhs in secret account unaudited

Kasaragod: Right from its first edition in 2022-2023, the Tourism Department's Bekal International Beach Fest, intended to promote Kasaragod as a tourist destination, has been dogged by allegations of corruption, financial irregularities and lack of transparency.

So far, the financial decisions surrounding the festival were largely presented as collective ones. But now, Youth League Kasaragod district treasurer Adv T K Haseeb has released 18 of over 30 documents he got through RTI that put C H Kunhambu, former CPM MLA from Udma, in the middle of the alleged financial scam.

The documents include a Tourism Department inspection report that found serious financial irregularities in the functioning of the Kunhambu-led organising committee. The report found that the first edition did not account for ₹45 lakh received from three sources: ₹10 lakh each from Bank of Baroda and Kasaragod City Gold, and ₹25 lakh under the event-management contract.

Yet, at Kunhambu's request, Bekal Resorts Development Corporation (BRDC), headed by Shijin P, gave ₹50 lakh to the organising committee to cover a purported ₹86-lakh loss suffered in the second edition. The money was given despite opposition from the corporation's finance officer, as shown by documents.

"I have been after these documents for a long time but got them only after the change in government. The LDF government sat on its own inquiry report without any action. Now we are demanding a vigilance probe into each of these irregularities," said Adv Haseeb.

Forgery at the core
Kunhambu is accused of forging a lease agreement to register a society to organise the first edition of Bekal International Beach Fest from December 24, 2022 to January 2, 2023. When the State GST Department found out that the building owners did not sign the lease agreements submitted by Bekal Tourism Promotion Society, it cancelled the society's registration, said Adv Haseeb.

Onmanorama reached out to the owners of the building, Ramla Basheer and her husband P M Abdul Basheer. Their son-in-law Jouhar said Basheer was recuperating after heart surgery. But after checking with them, Jouhar said the "lease agreements were forged".

Six of the seven members of Bekal Tourism Promotion Society, headed by Kunhambu, were CPM leaders. The seventh member and treasurer of the society was Shijn P, managing director of Bekal Resorts Development Corporation (BRDC), a public sector undertaking set up to develop the coastal region of Bekal. Until Adv Haseeb released the documents, Kunhambu had always maintained that the Bekal fest was organised by an all-party people's organising committee.

​The Bekal Tourism Promotion Society opened a bank account with Punjab National Bank's branch in Pallikkara, and Bekal International Beach Fest Sangadaka Samithi (organising committee) opened a bank account with the CPM-controlled Pallikkere Service Cooperative Bank.

Both accounts received sponsorship money and revenue generated by the festival. "The only difference is the society's bank account with Punjab National Bank was till now a secret account never subjected to auditing and inspection by the Department of Tourism," said Adv Haseeb.

"The fact is, when the government accepted BRDC's proposal for the Bekal beach fest on September 28, 2022, it asked the corporation to anchor the festival. Neither the BRDC board nor the government order authorised an organising committee headed by Kunhambu or the Bekal Tourism Promotion Society to take charge of the event's finances," he said.

According to the RTI documents, Kunhambu and Shijin registered Bekal Tourism Promotion Society on November 21, 2022, two months after the LDF government gave BRDC the green signal to organise the Bekal fest. Shijin was a member of the personal staff team of the then Tourism Minister P A Mohamed Riyas before he was made the managing director of BRDC.

DYFI leader K Manikandan, the then Kanhangad Block Panchayat president, was made the society's secretary. (He lost his post after he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison in the Periya double murder case.) The other members were the then panchayat presidents of Pallikkara, Udma, and Ajanur, all controlled by the CPM then, and K Ravi Varman, president of the CPM-controlled Pallikkkere Service Cooperative Bank.

"If their intention was clean, they would have made Chemnad panchayat president also a member. Chemnad is the biggest coastal panchayat in Udma assembly constituency but is controlled by the UDF," said Adv Haseeb.

Ramla and Basheer's family said they had given their building in Pallikkara to BRDC on lease. But first Manikandan and then Kunhambu signed two lease agreements on behalf of Bekal Tourism Promotion Society purportedly with Ramla and Basheer, respectively, in February and March 2023. Manikandan's lease agreement came into effect retrospectively from October 2022. "The documents were forged," said Jouhar.

'GST Intelligence caught the society'
The Bekal Tourism Promotion Society's existence came to light after the State GST Intelligence Unit sought the festival's accounts from BRDC. In his reply dated March 13, 2023, Shijin informed the department that the festival had been organised by the Bekal Tourism Promotion Society, headed by Udma MLA C H Kunhambu, with K Manikandan as its secretary. He sought 30 more days to furnish the accounts. Shijin was himself the society's treasurer.

The existence of a separate bank account for the society emerged when Manikandan left a paper trail. On April 24, 2023, he wrote to the manager of Punjab National Bank's Pallikkara branch, requesting the transfer of ₹25.5 lakh from the society's account to that of the festival's organising committee at the Pallikkara Service Cooperative Bank. "If not for this letter, we would not have known that the society was collecting money in the name of the festival. We still do not know where that money came from a​nd how much the society collected. The transactions must be investigated by the Vigilance," Haseeb said.

Unaccounted revenue, conflicting accounts
The Tourism Department formed a five-member inspection committee, headed by Additional Secretary Jagadees D, to look into Bekal fest's accounts based on Youth Congress District President B Pradeep Kumar's complaint. The committee found a discrepancy of ₹21.54 lakh in the income and expenditure accounts at different stages. It also found that ₹45 lakh had not been included in the revenue.

Both were pointed out by Pradeep Kumar. But the inspection team did not call for the bank account of Bekal Tourism Promotion Society. "I suspect that the inspection team agreed to Pradeep's allegation to avoid digging deeper and coming up with more dirt," said Adv Haseeb.

All the LDF government did with the report, submitted in March 2025, was to issue guidelines on how to organise the beach fest.

Ticket sales
Haseeb alleged that ticket sales in the first edition were under-reported by nearly 60%, with the organising committee providing five different figures for ticket revenue. He pointed to the minutes of a meeting held ahead of the second edition, attended by senior bureaucrats from the Chief Secretary to the District Collector, which recorded that the first festival had generated ₹2.47 crore.

Yet, the organising committee's account at Pallikkara Service Cooperative Bank showed only about ₹1 crore in revenue, he said. At ₹50 a ticket, even four lakh tickets should have fetched ₹2 crore. At the end of the first edition, the organising committee had claimed that 10 lakh people visited the venue.

Shijin's world tour
Adv Haseeb also raised questions about Shijin's foreign travels. In the four years Shijin headed the BRDC, he travelled to several countries, including the US, Mongolia, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Russia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador. "All were official trips," he said. Shijin was made the BRDC MD on January 6, 2022. He resigned soon after the LDF lost the election in May 2026.

Kunhambu, meanwhile, refused to give a detailed reply to the allegations against him. Instead, he dismissed them as political. "The Bekal International Beach Festival was managed by a people's committee, and every monetary transaction was documented and audited. Let them go to court to prove the charges," he said. The UDF has been making these allegations for some time. "Now, they are in power. Let them investigate," Kunhambu said.