A death in Belagavi, and a trail of corruption  

A contractor from Belagavi district was found dead after making allegations of corruption against a minister in the Basavaraj Bommai Cabinet, who has since stepped down. K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj and Rishikesh Bahadur Desai explore the issues surrounding the death and the larger rot in the system that it exposes.  

Hindalga in the border district of Belagavi is one of the most picturesque villages in Karnataka. The hamlet, which is within 20 km of the Western Ghats range, is home to around a thousand people as well as an early 20th-century heritage prison where some of the country’s most notorious criminals, including death row convicts, are incarcerated.

After a century, the postcard village recently celebrated the local temple fair for which it got a makeover. Its patchy roads were re-laid amidst a slew of development works. But these very projects that the villagers had enthusiastically welcomed appear to have cost one of its residents his life. An alleged suicide of a resident of this little village has blown the lid off the underlying rot in the larger system.

A short stroll from the prison leads to ‘ Kanasu’ (dream), a newly built house in Samarth Nagar. This is where 40-year-old Santosh Patil, a civil contractor and Hindu Yuva Vahini leader, planned to live. Before moving into the house that embodied his dreams for a prosperous future, he had planned to host a house-warming ceremony on May 3, which marked the Basava Jayanti this year. Unfortunately, that future was cut short. Patil was found dead in a hotel in Udupi on April 12.

Six weeks prior to his death, Patil had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi complaining about the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Karnataka government’s delay in releasing ₹4 crore towards 108 civil works for the village. It had been executed without work orders, allegedly on oral assurances from then Rural Development and Panchayat Raj (RDPR) Minister K.S. Eshwarappa, in the run-up to the temple fair. In the letter, he alleged that Mr. Eshwarappa’s ‘agents’ were demanding bribes to clear the bill. He warned the Prime Minister that he would be left with no option but to end his life if the bills were not cleared.

When Patil went public with the letter, Mr. Eshwarappa claimed the contractor had not carried out any works in Hindalga, and filed a defamation case against him. Days before his death, when Patil spoke to The Hindu, he recounted how he, along with a delegation of BJP workers from Hindalga Gram Panchayat, met Mr. Eshwarappa and asked him to re-lay roads in the village prior to the Lakshmi Temple fair. “The Minister immediately asked me to start the work and assured me that he would take care of regularising it by issuing work orders and clearing the bills when it was completed,” Patil had said at the time.

When asked if he was aware of the risk of verbally agreeing to such a large undertaking without due process, the contractor claimed that it was how government works were executed. “After all, I was a member of the ruling party. What could go wrong?” he said.

Nagesh Munnolkar, president of the Hindalga Gram Panchayat, who led the delegation, concurred with Patil’s version of what transpired in the meeting. Roads in the village had been re-laid, though he had subcontracted the works. Concerns had been raised about the quality of the roads. Patil told The Hindu that he had paid a “commission” of around ₹15 lakh to various middlemen. He alleged that despite this, Mr. Eshwarappa and his agents were demanding more commission without clearing his bills. While his wife, Jayashree Patil, said she was unaware of all the details, she confirmed that her husband often spoke about the Minister and his agents harassing him for kickbacks. She admitted that he sold her jewellery to take out loans from acquaintances.