In a shocking incident, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and member of the Kalya gram panchayat, Santhosh Puthran, was arrested by the Karkala rural police on charges of sexually harassing a minor Dalit girl in Karnataka’s Udupi.
According to reports, the case of sexual harassment was filed at the Karkala rural police station on Tuesday, May 28, under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (Pocso) and Atrocities Against Dalits Act. Puthran was arrested on Wednesday, May 29.
He has been remanded in judicial custody.
In recent years, Karnataka has witnessed several high-profile cases of violence and sexual harassment against Dalit women. These incidents have sparked widespread outrage and calls for justice.
In May 2022, Karnataka police arrested two men for allegedly stripping and attempting to rape a Dalit woman in Araga village near Thirthahalli town in Shivamogga district.
In January 2023, the then-incumbent BJP government in Karnataka was accused of protecting the accused in a rape case of a Dalit woman in Mysuru, with a group representing the community warning of staging a protest.
The engineering graduate victim filed a complaint in Mysuru city’s Vijayanagar police station against the accused K.S. Manjunath aka Santro Ravi, her husband who allegedly had close ties with the state’s BJP leadership.
In February 2024, a minor Dalit girl was allegedly murdered by a youth belonging to an upper caste as an act of vengeance in the Anugondanahalli police station limits in Bengaluru Rural district.
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