When R N Ravi, the Central Government’s interlocutor to Nagaland will be sworn in as the Governor of Tamil Nadu on Saturday morning, it would be celebration time for T P Senkumar, former chief of Kerala Police.
Senkumar, a 1983 batch officer of the Indian Police Service, was appointed to the Kerala cadre, his joy knew no bound as he was thrilled at the prospect of training and working under Ravi, an iconic figure among IPS officers in Kerala. “I had great dreams of getting trained under Ravi who was a hero among the people of the State as well as the police officials. But the senior official in charge of taking decision on such things had other ideas and I lost the race,” Senkumar wrote in his autobiography “My Police Life”.
Senkumar told The Pioneer that Ravi left Kerala for central deputation within a few years. “Though he returned to the State after five years, he was again called back to the Centre and he was given very sensitive and significant assignments. I met him many times on an officer-to-officer basis and he was very cordial with me,” said Senkumar who superannuated in 2017. Like his idol Ravi, Senkumar too had excelled in the field of Intelligence and is known as one of the best intelligence chiefs the State had seen.
The new Governor of Tamil Nadu would have many former Intelligence experts for company in Chennai city itself. M K Narayanan, former National Security Advisor who was also a former Governor of West Bengal, ESL Narasimhan, former chief of the Intelligence Bureau and Governor of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, K V S Gopalakrishnan, former special director, IB are some of the leading lights of the intelligence community based in Chennai with whom Governor Ravi would be interacting regularly.