Bapugouda Patil, son of VS Patil, a Congress leader and former BJP MLA from Yellapur in Karnataka, has been arrested in a 12-year-old case of rioting and attack on police.
Bapugouda was arrested on Sunday by the Mundgod police after he was tracked down to Bengaluru. A Mundgod court issued a non-bailable warrant for Bapugouda on January 17 after he failed to appear in the case despite multiple summonses.
Bapugouda and 16 others are accused in the 2011 case registered in Mundgod on charges of unlawful assembly, rioting, voluntarily causing hurt and criminal intimidation. He is accused of attacking policemen at a forest guesthouse in a drunken state in March 2011. At the time, his father was a BJP MLA.
Despite being named the first accused in the case, Bapugouda had not appeared in the court to facilitate the trial and a fresh warrant was issued last month for his arrest and production in the court. He was, however, arrested and produced before a magistrate, ahead of the scheduled court production date of February 6.
VS Patil quit the BJP in 2022 ahead of the Assembly polls and joined the Congress after his main rival in Yellapur, MLA Shivaram Hebbar, switched from the Congress to the BJP. Bapugouda joined the Congress in 2019, when the BJP fielded Shivaram Hebbar in a bypoll in the Uttara Kannada region.
Over 200 arrested in old cases in recent months
In the last six months, the Karnataka police have arrested over 200 people as part of efforts to reduce the number of cases pending before criminal courts. The arrested people were absconding despite warrants having been issued for their arrest several years ago.
In January the arrest of a BJP worker in a long-pending case in Dharwad linked to the violence following the demolition of the Babri Masjid resulted in protests by the BJP. The BJP worker, Srikant Pujari was among 36 people arrested in 2023 in long-pending cases of various types—rioting, theft, gambling and accidents and others—in the Hubballi-Dharwad region. Pujari, 60, was among 13 people named in a rioting case in December 1992 and had not been brought to trial, leading to his arrest on December 28, 2023. The BJP, however, accused the Congress government of targeting its worker who was involved in a 31-year-old case.
As of January, there were 10.14 lakh pending criminal cases in Karnataka with 10 long-pending criminal cases that are more than 30 years old, 887 cases that are 20-30 years old (0.9 per cent of the total pending criminal cases) 26,703 cases that are 10-20 years old (2.63 per cent of the pending cases) and 1.64 lakh cases that are 5-10 years old (16.22 per cent), as per data from the National Judicial Data Grid.
Nearly 72 per cent of the cases that have been pending for more than five years are delayed because the police have not arrested the accused people.