On 16 March 2015, Karnataka was left shocked as news came in of a young IAS officer found dead in an apartment in Bengaluru.
For many weeks following this, DK Ravi’s suicide dominated national headlines; the Karnataka assembly was stalled multiple times with the opposition blamed Congress ministers and other powerful people of driving the officer to commit suicide.
Following incessant demands from the opposition and DK Ravi’s family, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah handed over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
Many months after they started their investigation, the CBI has now handed over its final report to the Karnataka Police. The report concludes that Ravi faced no threats, but was troubled by personal and financial problems. He was depressed due to these problems and the trigger for his suicide was his relationship with a woman IAS officer that seemed to be going nowhere.
The News Minute has a copy of the report and we are quoting from it:
The CBI in its 40-page report traces the last few months of the career and personal life of DK Ravi, a man who was both ambitious and hardworking, but entangled in many relationships.
The report briefly traces his birth, education and entry into the civil services. It says:
DK Ravi as a person was intense, highly sensitive, impulsive and aggressive on issues affecting common public. According to his friends, he would always like to see his view point accepted. He used to get frustrated on the face of failures.
The report says that Ravi was happy to get married to Kusuma in July 2010, she being the daughter of a politician; Ravi believed that the alliance could help his career.
The CBI report also speaks about the welfare measure that Ravi adopted to ensure that people were not inconvenienced while going to government offices. As the Deputy Commissioner of Kolar, he followed rules and came down heavily on people who didn’t.
He was actively involved in stopping illegal mining from the lake beds of Kolar and also encouraged youngsters, says the report. It also says that DK Ravi got into a controversy when he initiated action on Confident Group in 2011 for encroachment.
In October 2014, he was posted in Bengaluru as the Additional Commissioner, Enforcement Wing, Commercial Tax. When DK Ravi’s death dominated news headlines, it had been reported that the Congress government had transferred him as he had become a thorn in Kolar. However, the report says that Ravi himself sought the transfer and that Kolar MP Muniyappa helped him secure it.
During his tenure, Ravi targeted many leading builders and forced them to pay taxes, but he also made sure that he was in the media’s eye, says the report.
The CBI report categorically rules out any threats from builders or others and says that he had never complained of any danger to his life. So why then did DK Ravi commit suicide?
The investigating officer of the CBI traces the reasons to two troubled relationships that Ravi had.
The less complicated one, according to the CBI, was an affair with a masseuse working with Taj Vivanta in Bengaluru. The report says that he would seek her services every time he was at the hotel and would make the booking in the name of his friend. The duo had been seeing each other from February to November 2014, after which the masseuse resigned from her job and left with some money that he had deposited in her account.
The other relationship, a long drawn one, was with an IAS officer and a batch-mate. The CBI report extensively traces Ravi’s obsession with the woman, though it makes no mention of how she reciprocated. The two had met a few times in 2014 at various places like Mysore and the report says that Ravi persistently followed her.
It also says that his insistence to not break ties with the IAS officer lead to friction with his wife, who'd also confronted the woman officer.
During November 2014, when his relationships with both women – his wife and the IAS officer – were fractious, he asked a chemist friend whether he could buy potassium cyanide.
In this period, Ravi also made it clear to his friend that he wanted to work in the real estate sector after resigning from his job. After registering a real estate company, he also made it clear that he wanted to establish another company with money made legally.
Between November 2014 to March 2015, his troubles increased. A land deal that Ravi had got into worth Rs 2 crore was not going according to plan and the IAS officer had started distancing herself from him. Ravi had also put pressure on the IAS officer to invest more money in his land.
The tension between the two reached its peak on 14 and 15 March, when the IAS officer refused to speak to him and in one occasion handed over the phone to her husband.
DK Ravi nursed an infatuation for the IAS officer from his academy days. These feelings came out once the communication between them became frequent.CBI Report
The report notes that he used to speak to her for extensive period of times and more during any signs of trouble in his life.
On 15 March evening, the two spoke to each other after Ravi sent a message threatening to take a “nasty decision with his life”.
After the call he sent a message to her saying:
Don’t call or try to talk or don’t tell anybody about my love. If at all there is a next life, we will be together, I am quitting.
The duo then spoke to each other one last time on the night of 15 March.
The next day ,16 March, he had breakfast with his father-in-law, said goodbye to his wife and left to his office.
On the way to his office, however, he sent a message to the IAS officer.
The long message which the CBI says must have taken him a considerable amount of time to compose said that he had failed in his life. The message also said that he did not wish to disturb her married life and therefore had deleted all messages and photographs from his phone.
After a meeting with Deputy Commissioners at his office, he left for his apartment at around 10:40 am.
Around 11 am, Ravi reached his building and proceeded to his flat located in the 9th floor. Around 11:12 am, he made a call to the woman IAS officer, which was attended by her husband on her request as she did not want to take the call.CBI Report
Ravi’s driver, Elangovan waited outside the apartment, for a couple of hours and in the evening when he did not receive any response, in spite of ringing the bell repeatedly, he contacted Ravi’s wife.
Ravi’s wife and her father reached the apartment around 6:40 pm and found Ravi hanging from the fan in his bedroom.
The report says that forensic examination had said that it was a classic case of suicide.
The report concludes that while there were multiple factors that impacted Ravi and affected his psyche, the immediate trigger was the response of the woman IAS officer and her act of handing the phone to her husband made him decide to end his life.
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