A night of horror in Vantamuri village of Karnataka

Picturesque mountain-top village of Hosa Vantamuri witnesses horrific mob attack on a woman, 13 arrested including 5 women & a minor boy.

The mountain-top village of Hosa Vantamuri is picturesque. There is a resettlement centre for families displaced by the submergence of Vantamuri village in the reservoir of the Raja Lakhamagouda dam over the Ghataprabha in the late 1970s. It is set in the backdrop of several windmills that line the horizon on the Belagavi-Kolhapur highway.

But this village in the border district of Belagavi, in the northwest of Karnataka, with a population of around 7,000 people (about 5,000 of them from the Scheduled Tribe of Bedar Nayaka) was witness to the horrific mob attack on a woman that shook the conscience of the nation.

Around midnight on December 10, a mob partially stripped a woman in her 40s, tied her to a pole and assaulted her. This was an act of “revenge” by the relatives of a girl who had run away with the victim’s son a day before her engagement to another boy.

Based on the victim’s complaint and eyewitness accounts, police have arrested 13 people, including five women and a minor boy. The girl’s father (Basappa Nayak) and his friend (Shivappa Vannuri), who were part of the group that attacked the woman, face murder charges.

Arrested earlier in a murder case, they were out on bail. Investigators have moved the trial court seeking cancellation of their bail now. After the case was transferred to the Criminal Investigation Department, a team led by Deputy Inspector General Sudhir Kumar Reddy and SPs Rashmi Paraddi and PruthvikShankar is investigating the case. A Karnataka State Reserve Police van full of personnel is stationed in the village.

It all began with a 19-year-old woman falling in love with a man of 23. Both are from the Bedar Nayaka community, and their houses are on parallel lanes separated by a few hundred metres. But the man was a “near pauper living in a two-room house” (as a relative of the woman put it), while her father is a respected community leader who has served as the gram panchayat president twice. The man is a goods van driver, and so is his father.

“Anyone would have done the same if they had suffered such an insult. A girl’s honour is of utmost importance in a village,” said the relative. He had a blank, doubtful look when he was asked if the victim’s honour was any less important.