High Court stays sanction given to prosecute Kalladka Bhat in hate speech case

Mangaluru, Jul 14: In what can be termed as a legal victory for RSS veteran Prabhakar Bhat Kalladka, the Karnataka High Court of Karnataka on Thursday stayed the sanction granted by the State government for prosecuting him in a case of delivering a communally provocative speech in 2015.

The High Court also stayed the summons issued to him by a local court in Puttur which had taken cognisance of offence based on a charge sheet. Justice Aravind Kumar passed the interim order on a petition filed by Dr Bhat.

Puttur Town police had registered a case on January 23, 20015 against the petitioner based on a complaint given by a member of Popular Front of India’s (PFI) district committee.

The Puttur court had issued summons to him on June 24, 2017 based on the charge sheet filed by the police after the State government on March 18, 2017 granted sanction for prosecuting him based on a request made by the police on March 8, 2017.

Terming the allegations as false, it has been claimed in the petition that the Forensic Sciences Laboratory’s report given in January 2016 had stated that the “electronic evidence collected by the police during the course of the investigation is not original and the same is tampered and edited one ...”