The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Karnataka Police, which is probing a complaint of alleged “secret burials” in the temple town of Dharmasthala in Dakshina Kannada district, on Thursday filed a report with a local court to initiate perjury proceedings against the complainant after finding no evidence to back his claims.
As per the report, the complainant C N Chinnaiah, a former sanitation worker, was allegedly part of a conspiracy hatched by several activists in the region to target the Dharmasthala authorities who wield clout in the administration of the temple town.
The SIT filed the report under Section 215 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) before a magistrate’s court in Belthangady to initiate proceedings under Section 379 of the BNSS, sources with the probe team said.
Chinnaiah, who claimed to have carried out dozens of secret burials of bodies in Dharmasthala between 1995 and 2014, was arrested by the SIT on August 23 after searches lasting over a month proved futile.
The former sanitation worker was arrested in connection with his own complaint of “secret burial” and not in a separate case for providing false information. Chinnaiah, whose earlier bail plea was rejected by a district court in Dakshina Kannada, has filed a fresh plea for release on bail.
The SIT report alleged that Chinnaiah and others conspired to create a fake narrative about the involvement of Dharmasthala temple authorities, a source said. Section 215 of the BNSS, pertains to “prosecution for contempt of lawful authority of public servants, for offences against public justice and for offences relating to documents given in evidence.” It states that no case of perjury can be initiated without a formal report in writing by a public servant of an offence of perjury being evident in a legal proceeding.
“Section 215 of the BNSS leads to Section 379 of the BNSS. It sets the stage for the court to decide whether a charge of perjury is to be initiated against a person,” the SIT source added.
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Chinnaiah had also produced a skull he claimed to have been part of the “secret burials”, but the probe revealed that the skull was allegedly given by one of the alleged co-conspirators whose niece was killed in a 2012 rape-murder.
The SIT’s filing of the report this week comes on the heels of the Karnataka High Court lifting a stay on investigations into the Dharmasthala secret burials case on November 12.
Though the activists have not been named as accused in the original case, they could be if the court orders initiation of a perjury case, sources said.
Several aspects of the “secret burials” investigations, which began in July, have been unravelling on account of the lack of evidence to substantiate the claims made, including that of an elderly woman who had claimed that her daughter, a medical student at Manipal, had gone missing in Dharmasthala in 2003. No FIR was registered in the case after preliminary investigations did not corroborate the woman’s statements.