The Karnataka High Court has quashed the case against Kannada actor Sanjjanaa Galrani and two others in a 2020 drug case. The accused, including Sanjjanaa, realtor Shivaprakash alias Chippi and financial manager of a tech company Adithya Mohan Agarwal, had filed a petition challenging the legality of the chargesheet filed against them by the Bengaluru police in 2022.
Two years later on March 25, 2024 Justice Hemanth Chandangoudar passed the order quashing the case, a copy of which was released recently. Recalling that the court had quashed criminal proceedings against party organiser Virendra Khanna in January 2022, Chandangoudar said that “continuation of the criminal proceedings against the petitioners will be an abuse of the process of law.” The court had quashed proceedings against Khanna on the grounds that the police should have registered separate FIRs for past offences and filed separate chargesheets after the investigation.
The court noted that the original FIR registered in 2020, included alleged offences committed in 2015, 2018, and 2019 in the chargesheets. Referring to the court's previous ruling in the case of Khanna, Justice Chandangoudar pointed out that the same procedural errors were present in the cases against Galrani, Shivaprakash, and Agarwal. The court also took into consideration that drugs were not recovered from the accused.
The infamous Sandalwood drugs case came to light in September 2020 when the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) arrested a person, who had alleged that high-profile drug parties were organised in Bengaluru. As part of the investigation, the city police arrested several drug peddlers, and subsequently, led to the arrest of actor Ragini Dwivedi first, followed by Sanjjanaa Galrani a week later.