The Karnataka Police on Monday arrested a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha – the BJP’s youth wing – from the Mudigere region of the state’s Chikmagalur district for allegedly harassing a 20-year-old woman, who committed suicide on January 6, The Hindu reported.
MV Anil and four other Hindutva activists in the region are believed to have harassed the woman, a first-year commerce student, since she said mentioned liking Muslims on a WhatsApp group. They also allegedly accused her of being friends with a Muslim man.
“The five had visited her home on Saturday evening and picked up an argument with the woman and her mother,” Chikkamagaluru Superintendent of Police K Annamalai said. “The group had accused her of roaming with a Muslim man, and thereby, paving the way for ‘love jihad’. Upset over the development, she committed suicide.”
The 20-year-old’s mother Saraswathi Suvarna said in her police complaint that her daughter’s harassment started on January 4 when she received a call from an anonymous person who questioned her about her WhatsApp message, The Indian Express reported. The caller – he later identified himself as Santosh, a Bajrang Dal activist from Mangaluru – also asked the woman why she was wearing a head scarf in some of the photographs she had posted on social media.
Santosh is believed to have called her repeatedly, and on one occasion, he spoke to Suvarna and asked her to “control” her daughter. The group also allegedly warned her that they would post “embarrassing photographs” of the woman on social media.
While Anil was arrested on the basis of the woman’s suicide note, the police have formed two teams to look for Santosh and the other Hindutva leaders named in Suvarna’s complaint.
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