Karnataka court extends judicial custody of rape-accused seer till Sep 27

A court in Karnataka’s Chitradurga district on Wednesday, September 14, extended the judicial custody of rape-accused seer Shivamurthy Murugha Sharanaru for 14 more days. With the court’s latest order, the seer will be in judicial custody till September 27. Shivamurthy, the chief pontiff of an influential Lingayat math in Chitradurga, was accused of sexually assaulting two minor girls who stayed and studied at the ashram. Based on their complaint, Shivamurthy was arrested on September 1 and remanded to 14 days of custody, which has now been extended.

The minors, who are 15 and 16 years old respectively, said that they were sexually assaulted by Shivamurthy for years. In the police complaint, the survivors alleged that Shivamurthy sexually assaulted one of them over the past 3.5 years, and the other for the past 1.5 years. They approached an NGO in Mysuru, who produced them before the Child Welfare Committee and later the Mysuru police to lodge a complaint. Based on this, six days after the First Information Report (FIR) was registered, the police arrested Shivamurthy. He has been booked under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, as one of the survivors is from a Dalit community.

Hours after Shivamurthy was arrested on September 1, he complained of chest pain and breathlessness, following which he was shifted to a hospital in Chitradurga. However, he was later summoned by the court after the judge said that she was not informed of his being shifted to the hospital. The judge then handed him over to the police and said that his health would be monitored while in custody.

Shivakumar Sharanaru is an influential spiritual leader among the Lingayat community, and with elections in Karnataka due in 2023, leaders have been trying to woo the community. In July, the seer was visited by Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, on whom he conferred the ‘Ishtalinga Deekshe.’