Yediyurappa POCSO case: a mother's relentless fight for justice

Bengaluru: In the recently cropped up POCSO case against Karnataka senior BJP leader BS Yediyurappa, there have been a series of events since March 14. The latest among them is the Karnataka High Court on Friday issuing a stay against the arrest of the former chief minister of Karnataka, who was booked under the Act for abusing a minor while she approached him with her mother for help.

According to the victim's brother, after a case was registered against the high-profile leader on March 14, 2024, there was no follow-up on the case, and the accused was not even interrogated by the probe officials even after two months. Saying that it even took around a month to register a case against Yediyurappa, he said he filed a writ petition in the Karnataka High Court seeking direction to the probing team to arrest and interrogate the BJP leader. The events that followed included the issuance of an arrest warrant against the leader, and now, the high court is issuing a stay on the same.

When all the focus regarding the story is on the senior Kannada BJP leader, the victim and her family have much more to say. The ordeal the survivor went through binds a long fight a mother fought, sacrificing her comfort and life to get justice for her daughter. A mother who had trusted the system with her daughter's life.

The News Minute (TNM) went deep to find what was behind a POCSO case in which a high-profile leader of the BJP was named.

The beginning

According to TNM, the case of the mother approaching the system for justice for her daughter did not actually start on March 14, 2024, but in 2014.

In 2014, the minor victim, who was seven years old then, was living happily with her parents and brother. That year, her father's nephew came to live with them when he got a job in Bengaluru. Her father's family is from Bihar. This nephew, her cousin, sexually assaulted her and threatened to kill her if she told it to anyone. However, the little girl told her mother what she had gone through, but only after two years of abuse when the mother showed her an educational video which explained safe and unsafe touch.

Following this, in November 2015, the two shocked parents filed a complaint with the Electronic City Police. The family was persuaded to withdraw the case by the accused nephew as well as his family. In 2016, the survivor's mother caught doubts that the nephew tried to poison her family with the help of the house help of her own. She filed a second case with the police briefing this. A year later, the survivor's brother was attacked by unknown people near Electronic City here, and the mother filed another complaint. The accused nephew's family was relentless in forcing the survivor's family to withdraw the case during this time, and they started threatening them, demanding the same. The survivor's mother again approached the police in this regard.

In another year, the mother filed another case against the accused nephew's parents as well as her own husband, the survivor's father. In the case, she had accused the nephew's family of pressuring her to withdraw the case using her husband. About this juncture of the chronology of events, the husband- father of the survivor- told TNM that he never doubted the sincere intentions of his wife regarding her efforts for justice for their daughter. He added that he had made it clear to his family that he and his wife are not going to withdraw the POCSO case they filed against his nephew in 2015.

In the same year, 2018, the mother approached every available authority after the prosecutor of the case was appointed as Additional Advocate General and relieved of his duties regarding the case. She wrote letters to the Chief Minister, Home Minister, and the Director General of Police (DGP) in the state. She, along with her husband, met Yediyurappa asking for help. This was the first time the POCSO accused leader appeared in the chronology of events that span over nine years.

Altercations with IPS officer Alok Kumar and Congress leader Ugrappa

In 2019, the survivor's mother decided to meet the Police Commissioner after an NGO worker allegedly asked her to withdraw the case against the accused nephew. However, the senior officer was on leave, and Bengaluru Additional Commissioner of Police Alok Kumar was available.

In the meeting, she had bad experiences. She alleged that Officer Kumar had told her that the NGO worker was influential. Kumar manhandled her later and threatened to jail her if she approached the Commissioner with the same matter. After this, she tried to file a complaint, but the police refused to take it. They registered a complaint against her for creating a ruckus inside Alok Kumar's office. However, the Karnataka High Court quashed the complaint against her, observing that the FIR against her was an afterthought and "a clear abuse of the law", The Times of India reported. When she filed a private complaint with a local court, Alok Kumar obtained a stay from the Karnataka High Court in 2023. Kumar, who is the Additional DGP Training, Traffic and Road Safety now, speaking to TNM, claimed that he tried to help the mother, though it was out of his jurisdiction. He claimed that he didn't know the NGO worker she mentioned, and he didn't manhandle her. He cited the CID inquiry ordered by the DG-IGP and later by the State Human Rights Commission against him and said that he was cleared of all the charges against him.

In 2018, there was another episode of a Congress leader, VS Ugrappa, threatening her to withdraw the case against her husband's accused nephew. She had approached the leader for help when he was leading the expert committee set up to look into violence against women and children.

Mother's fight

TNM writes that the mother faced many altercations similar to what was mentioned above, and such incidents became common over the years that followed. The efforts she put in the fight had affected her both mentally and physically over the years and resulted in breaking her trust in the system. The mother had survived kidney cancer in 2010, and she developed lung cancer in 2023, which took her life in May 2024.

The brother of the sexual assault survivor told TNM that his mother kept believing in the system and always leaned on her thoughts that the authorities would do something for her and her daughter. But the point came where the mother and father had to get divorced. The case hit them so hard, taking the family through such deliberate situations. The survivor, who was still going to school, saw her grades slipping and dropped out of school.

The mother stopped trusting people, a prosecutor who dealt with the case for her said. He added that many prosecutors had dealt with the case for her, which could be because she would get angry and accuse them of colluding with the accused in the case. She was even chided by a judge in an open court, he said.

The case had taken a good toll on the family's financial condition. However, the mother took everything into her own hands- since the father was not closely involved in it after 2018. She handled the case in one hand while making efforts to make a living on the other. She wanted the one who abused her daughter for around two years to get punished.

Entry of Yediyurappa and the 2nd POCSO case

In 2024, the mother decided to knock on a fresh door again for her daughter's case. On February 2, the mother, who is a staunch BJP supporter, decided to meet BS Yediyurappa once again at his house. Yediyurappa is the biggest leader of her community, Lingagayat. She hoped that the BJP leader could help her get the government to form an SIT to look into the 2015 POCSO case she had filed against her husband's nephew. She went to meet the leader with her daughter (the survivor) at his house, where the leader asked the minor daughter to go to a room where he molested her, she alleged.

After the FIR was filed against Yediyurappa, a video surfaced on social media in which the mother could be heard confronting the leader, “Appaji what did you do? What did you do to my daughter inside the room?”

Yediyurappa then responds, "She is like my granddaughter. I have seven grandchildren, and she is like one of them. She is a smart child. Nanu nodi, check madi (I saw and I checked.)," TNM quoted.

In the video, the mother could be heard saying that she has been fighting the case for her daughter for nine years. She has 54,000 call records, along with other necessary proofs with her, she says, before she asks the leader to form an SIT to probe everyone, including police, lawyers, rowdies, etc., who have harassed her and her daughter. The video, which runs for 15 minutes, ends before Yediyurappa purportedly calls Police Commissioner B Dayananda and tells him that he is sending a person to his office and the officer should help her since it is a genuine case.

After the case was filed against Yediyurappa on March 14, the mother wrote to the Chief Justice of the Karnataka High Court on April 2, saying that the investigation on Yediyurappa was shoddy. She had also written to the police, alleging the same. The mother died on May 26.

Now, the father and the brother of the survivor decided to pursue the case for her. The father told TNM that it is also important for him that the studies of the survivor be resumed.

How the mother was painted as a routine complainer of influential people

According to TNM, after the POCSO case was registered against Yediyurappa, the media flocked to his house. The journalists were given a document which contained a list of 50 complaints that the mother of the survivor apparently filed with the police. The document was prepared by someone in the police department and was also given to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. Later, the document made headlines, and it gave the impression that the mother had a routine of filing police complaints against influential people and filed 59 such cases.

However, TNM closely examined all the complaints and found that she had filed a total of six cases, and the remaining 53 were petitions seeking action on her complaints. Four of the six cases were filed in connection with the sexual assault on her daughter, while the remaining two were cheating cases in business.

Based on The News Minute story