On June 23, 2011, a trial court acquitted a group of 11 dominant caste men and women on charges of attacking eight Dalit people in a village in Karnataka’s Tumakuru district. One of the many implausible reasons the trial court gave for its verdict, was that two of the victims of the attack could not be believed because they were the complainant’s sons and so, would naturally testify in her favour. Twelve years later, the Karnataka High Court overturned the trial court’s verdict and convicted the attackers. In August 2024, the Supreme Court upheld the High Court’s verdict. Even though it has been more than two months since the conviction was upheld, the attackers have still not been arrested.

Had it not been for the complainant Lakshmamma and her lawyers, the case would have become ammunition for those inclined to use statistics to stereotype Dalits as ‘liars’ who foist cases, and dominant caste people as the victims of such ‘false cases’. It would have been yet another instance of statistics being manipulated to turn victims into aggressors and aggressors into victims. 

Not only is obtaining a conviction in crimes against Dalits very hard, but overturning an acquittal is almost unheard of. But this was possible in the Tumakuru case because one of the victims of the attack, Lakshmamma, appealed the verdict when the state government failed to do so. For more than 13 years, she fought against the trial court’s verdict, first in the Karnataka High Court and later in the Supreme Court, and won.

Eleven years after the appeal was filed, the High Court noted that Lakshmamma and others were attacked “for the simple reason that though they belong to the Scheduled Caste, they had the courage or audacity of complaining against a person belonging to the forward community”.

The assault

On August 14, 2008, a group of 11 Lingayats and Vokkaligas – three women and eight men – turned up at the Dalit colony in Dunda village in Tumakuru district and attacked the residents with clubs and stones. 

The provocation for the attack was a complaint that had been filed with the police, barely two hours before the incident. Two Dalit men, Shivamurthy and Dilip, from the colony had gone to work for a dominant caste man named Gopalkrishna. During that time, Gopalkrishna’s cousin Sudeep (the main accused) picked up a fight and assaulted Shivamurthy, who filed a complaint with the police around 4 pm. One-and-a-half hours later, Sudeep had turned up with 10 others to the colony and launched an attack.

When the mob barged in, Lakshmamma’s family, whose house is the second one in the colony, were their first targets. One attacker landed a blow to her son Govindaraju’s head with a club while three others, also armed with clubs, hit him on his back, forehead, and legs. When Lakshmamma rushed to her son’s aid, they attacked her too. Narasimhamurthy, Lakshmamma’s other son, too was attacked when he went to help his mother and brother. 

During the assault, which lasted about 30 minutes, the group hurled casteist abuses and attacked everyone in sight, inflicting serious injuries that caused bleeding on seven Dalit women and men. Three people who were hit on the head lost consciousness due to the force of the blows. The attackers’ shouts made it clear to the Dalits why they were being attacked.

After the attackers left, the injured people sought medical attention and later filed a complaint at the Dandinashivara police station, which booked the attackers for assault with weapons and rioting under the Indian Penal Code, and offences under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. 

“For three months after the attack, there was a police van outside our colony,” Lakshmamma told TNM. 

Gangadhar, a resident of Dunda village who escaped the assault that day, said, “A lot of politicians came, they said the honour of the village was at stake and asked us to withdraw the case.” But the Dalits of the village weren’t deterred. “Just because they give us work, should we continue to put up [with the casteist ill-treatment and violence]?” Gangadhar asked.

Dunda village has around 300 houses, of which about 150 belong to Lingayats, 100 to Vokkaligas, and the rest to other castes. Dalit houses number around 30 and a handful of these families own land, that too, half-an-acre at most. The Dalit residents of the village used to be dependent on the landowning castes – Lingayats and Vokkaligas – for work. But the attack changed all that. 

Nearly three years after the attack, on June 23, 2011, Sachidananda Prasad, the then third Additional Sessions judge at Tumakuru and the Special Court for trial of cases filed under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, rejected all the evidence, cast aspersions on the motives of the victims, and acquitted all the assailants. 

After the verdict in 2011, Govindaraju reached out to advocates Clifton D Rozario, Maitreyi Krishnan, and Raghupathy S in Bengaluru through local activists in Tumakuru. They filed an appeal in the case in the Karnataka High Court that year asking the court to set aside the acquittal and convict the attackers. Ideally, it should have been the state government that filed the appeal. 

It took the High Court 12 years to convict the attackers. Asked if she had thought of giving up, Lakshmamma said, “See how badly they assaulted my son,” pointing to photographs from the days after the attack when Govindaraju was hospitalised. “We kept going from one hospital to another. I still shudder when I think about it. Even now when I hear the siren of an ambulance, I shudder. How could I have spared them?” she said.

Govindaraju died in 2016, long before the High Court convicted his attackers in 2023 or the Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 2024. 

Seeking justice, facing retaliation

Complaints of crimes against Dalits have remained high in Karnataka since 2016, the year from which disaggregated data is publicly available, but the conviction rate has remained poor. 

In 2023, there were 1,923 cases of crimes against Dalits registered in Karnataka – that’s an average of five cases a day – and 12,178 such cases were pending before the courts, including 10,466 from previous years. Of the 1,104 cases in which trials were completed that year, the courts acquitted the accused in 1,074 cases. Only a mere 24 cases, that is 2.2%, ended in conviction. 

Sachidananda, the Additional Sessions Judge who heard the case at the trial court, acquitted the attackers for four major reasons: he did not believe that the complaint itself was genuine; dismissed the testimonies of all the witnesses, including the people who were injured; ignored the motive for the attack that the prosecution had established; and threw out the medical evidence as well. 

For the most part, the court did not adequately explain its reasons for rejecting the evidence, and where the court did give explanations, they were rather shocking. 

Advocates who handle atrocity cases say they routinely see cases fall apart in court for the above said reasons, and that too only if victims do hold out during the trial. However, many victims of atrocities end up compromising with the aggressors out of fear, or due to the failure of the police and the district administration in implementing the protection measures outlined in the Atrocity Act for the complainants. 

In the appeal filed in the High Court, Lakshmamma’s advocates argued that the acquittal should be set aside because the trial court had failed to appreciate the evidence and presented detailed arguments as to why the court had erred. 

The FIR

To start with, the judge rejected the first information report (FIR) itself. One of the reasons for this was that the date of offence – August 14, 2008 – was written in a handwriting different from the rest of the complaint, which he interpreted as indicating that the date was “inserted to create a case against the accused persons”. 

Lakshmamma’ advocates, however, argued in the High Court that the mere existence of over-writing on the FIR was not enough to treat the whole complaint as suspect.  

Going through the sequence of events and the documents on record, the High Court said that the insertion of the date did not in any way prove that the FIR or the complaint were false and that the attack had indeed occurred on the said date. The High Court said that the trial court had erred and “thrown away the entire prosecution case as false and set up” without examining all the evidence. “The trial court cannot stop by just making an observation that the complaint and FIR are anti-dated. It has to state as to how the prosecution is benefited by it or the accused are prejudiced,” the High Court said. 

Witness testimonies denounced

In their depositions before the court, each of the eight victims of the attack said that the attackers – whom they knew by name – entered their colony, hurled casteist abuses at them, and attacked them. They also described their injuries, which were corroborated by the wound certificates. 

The judge however, raised doubts about their testimonies for various reasons. 

For instance, he dismissed a man named Kempaobalaiah’s testimony and called him a “set up” witness because his mother had taken him inside their house during the attack. “This admission shows that he has not seen the alleged incident,” the judge observed. However, his deposition clearly showed that he had seen the attackers enter the colony and that his mother took him inside only after he got injured. 

Similarly, the judge found issue with the “demeanour” of Manjunath, one of the injured men, and dismissed him as a “created witness”. “His demeanour shows that he is a created witness … His demeanour has been noted down in the deposition.” The judge also rejected Manjunath’s testimony saying that he returned to the colony after grazing goats only at 6 pm, and so it was “doubtful that he was present at the time of the alleged incident”. The court ignored Manjunath’s statement in his deposition that on the day of the attack, he had left home early and therefore returned early by 5.30 pm and had not only witnessed the attack, but had also been injured.

The judge rejected the testimony of another witness, Umesh, saying that although he had said that the attackers had damaged a bicycle, the police had not seized it. “This type of investigation by the police also creates a lot of doubt in the prosecution case.” In effect, the judge dismissed the testimony of this witness because the police had done a shoddy investigation. 

Possibly the strangest reason Sachidananda gave for rejecting two of the witness’ testimonies is that they were Lakshmamma’s sons. “[Govindaraju and Narasimhamurthy] are the sons of the complainant. Naturally they depose in tune with their mother (sic).” 

The High Court however, went into each of the testimonies in detail, and touching on the motive for the attack, said, “The cumulative reading of the evidence of the injured witness clearly prove the complicity of the accused persons and the reason for the assault carried out on them is the fact that [Shivamurthy] and [Dilip] choose to complain [against] the high-handed act of accused No 1 Sudeep in assaulting them when they went to work in the land of [Gopalkrishna]. They were angry that [Shivamurthy] and [Dilip] had the audacity to complain against them despite belonging to the Scheduled Caste. Being injured, their presence at the scene of the occurrence is guarantee the evidence of these witnesses lend support to the prosecution case. Absolutely, they have no motive to falsely implicate the accused persons. (sic)”

Motive ignored

Several witnesses told the trial court that they were aware of the reason for the attack because the attackers had shouted versions of “How dare a Dalit man file a complaint against us?” However, judge Sachidananda disregarded this and interpreted the first assault as a land dispute between Gopalkrishna and Sudeep. The judge concluded that Gopalkrishna had set up the complainant and others to take revenge against Sudeep. 

Raghupathy and the other advocates submitted before the High Court that the trial court had wrongly interpreted the incident as a dispute between the attackers and Gopalkrishna. They said, “It is submitted that no such suggestion that Gopalkrishna had set up the complainant was made [by the defence] and the trial court has come to this finding with no evidence whatsoever to this effect.” 

They also pointed out that Shivamurthy - who ran away in fear when he saw Sudeep and others enter the colony - and Dilip were witnesses to the first and second assault, which the trial court had failed to appreciate. 

As Raghupathy observed, “It is important to establish the motive in criminal cases. Or else, the case can fall apart.”

Medical evidence disregarded

The trial court judge also rejected the medical evidence and the testimony of Dr Jagadeesh who issued the wound certificates. Sachidananda dismissed the certificates which corroborated the injuries described by the men and women who were attacked. The reason — the doctor had conceded to the defence counsel’s suggestion that the injuries could have occurred while doing agricultural work. 

In their submission to the High Court, the advocates pointed out that seven people had been injured at the same time and that the injuries on the victims’ heads and foreheads were not related to occupational injuries that could occur while doing agricultural work. 

Legal principles wrongly applied

As though the dismissing of evidence and testimonies weren’t bad enough, the trial court had even wrongly applied legal principles, as Lakshmamma’s advocates pointed out in the High Court. 

Remarking that neither Lakshmamma nor the other injured witnesses knew the exact number of people who had participated in the rioting and assault, the judge said, “In the case of rioting, in particular in this case, there is possibility of many innocents [being] arrayed as accused persons and many actual assailants, who have committed atrocity [being] left out by the police without chargesheeting them. It is an established principle of criminal law that even 10 guilty persons may be acquitted, but one innocent should not be convicted. This principle is squarely applicable in this case. In this background, the evidence of the witnesses have to be scrutinised.”

Advocates representing Lakshmamma submitted to the High Court that this principle “has no application in this case in view of the fact that the evidence on record clearly points to the guilt of the accused.”

They also said that the trial court had “failed to conduct itself in the required manner in dealing with criminal cases … [E]ven cursorily glancing through the records of the case, it is unmistakably noticed that the justice-delivery system was being taken for a ride and literally allowed to be abused, misused, and manipulated by subterfuge. The court appears to be a silent spectator, mute to the manipulations, and preferred to be indifferent to sacrilege being committed to justice.”

When the single judge bench of the Karnataka High Court delivered the verdict on the appeal October 31, 2023, Justice JM Khazi said, that without examining the oral and documentary evidence placed on record, the trial court had “hurriedly come to a wrong conclusion that the prosecution failed to bring home guilt to the accused”. 

Calling the trial court’s view “wholly unreasonable” and not “plausible” Justice Khazi said, “Certainly, there is non-consideration of evidence placed on record. There is also palpable misreading of evidence and consequently, the conclusions arrived at by the trial court is perverse.”

Justice Khazi convicted 10 of the accused (one of them had died by this time) and handed out sentences for the various offences, which are to run concurrently. It also imposed fines, which are to be given to Lakshmamma as compensation. 

The attackers then approached the Supreme Court, which dismissed their appeal on August 13 this year, upholding the High Court’s verdict. The maximum punishment applicable for the offences is one year of jail. Since the attackers had spent some time in jail, they will have to serve the balance as part of their sentence. 

Even though it has been more than two months since the Supreme Court upheld the conviction, the attackers are still at large. “They’re all going about the village,” Lakshmamma told TNM on Monday, October 28. 

Tumakuru Superintendent of Police Ashok KV could not be reached for comment. This story will be updated if and when he responds. 

The aftermath of August 2008

The attack permanently altered life in the village. The Dalits of Dunda village no longer work for the Lingayats and Vokkaligas there. Instead, they do agricultural work in the neighbouring villages. “While the dominant caste people of those villages don’t do anything to us, they still ill-treat the Dalits of their own village,” Gangadhar said. 

Sooner or later, they will be arrested, but after they serve their sentences, they will return to the village. “The fear is there, but where can we go? We just want them to leave us alone, leave our kids alone,” Lakshmamma said. 

Their fears are not unfounded, as even after they filed the appeal in the High Court, the attackers tried to scuttle the case, and Lakshmamma came close to losing the battle without her knowledge. 

Advocate Raghupathy spoke to TNM about this unexpected roadblock. “When the case came up for hearing, the advocates representing the accused told the court that a compromise would be reached with the victims. But we had no such instructions from our client. We were unable to reach Govindaraju, so we filed a legal notice based on the address we had, and contact was established again,” he said. 

Govindaraju and Lakshmamma did not want to compromise, and so, the case continued in the High Court. As Lakshmamma recalled, “The advocates’ letter saved us.” 

For now, she said, the attackers’ arrogance has been buried under the surface. “They don’t say anything to us openly because of the case. There’s a slight change in attitude.”