Bengaluru: In mid-1986, a handcuffed rowdy-sheeter asked the police officer who arrested him for a favour: to be taken to the city corporation so he could deposit Rs 10,000 for a tender for a road construction project. Hoping this might be a step towards prisoner reform, the officer agreed to escort him to the BBMP head office in handcuffs. “If you try to escape, you will be shot,” he warned the rowdy-sheeter, then in his early 20s.
The prisoner did not try to escape and eventually secured the tender to build a road from Bengaluru city to Nandi Hills, a distance of roughly 50 km. This particular stretch was laid about two months before the second SAARC summit was to be held in Bengaluru in November 1986, when heads of states of six SAARC member nations took this road to reach a retreat in Nandi Hills, as planned by then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The rowdy-sheeter in question was Munirathna, now the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Rajarajeshwarinagar, and the police officer, B.B. Ashok Kumar. “He [Munirathna] then started getting more government contracts, became a city corporator, MLA and even a minister. But then these allegations started coming out,” Kumar told ThePrint.
Last week, a 40-year-old woman accused Munirathna and four of his alleged aides of gang-raping her in 2023, urinating on her face, injecting her with a virus and threatening to kill her entire family if she were to disclose the treatment to anyone. In this case, they have been booked under IPC sections 376D (gang rape), 270 (malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life), 354 (assault or criminal force against a woman), and 506 (criminal intimidation), among others. “This is a case we have sent for the transfer of the SIT, because already an SIT has been established and a request has been made to transfer that case,” said a senior police officer who did not wish to be named.
ThePrint reached Munirathna for comment but calls to him went unanswered. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
As of Sunday evening, the the four-time MLA had not been arrested in this case.
Over the course of his political career, Munirathna has faced a host of other serious criminal charges—from rape, election rigging to trying to inject a political adversary with HIV-infected blood. He is out on bail in most cases.
On his part, the former corporator has levelled serious accusations against political adversaries, particularly D.K. Suresh, the younger brother of Karnataka Deputy CM D.K. Shivakumar.
On 25 December last year, during a programme to celebrate former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s birth anniversary, an egg was hurled at Munirathna. He had then claimed that it was an “acid egg” and blamed the DK brothers for attempting to kill him. “D.K. Suresh, D.K. Shivakumar and the defeated (MLA) candidate Kusuma and her father Hanumantharayappa, all of them…about a hundred people tried to kill me in a group,” he told reporters while sitting on a dharna at the spot where he claimed he was attacked.
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Cases against Munirathna
In September last year, Munirathna walked out of Bengaluru’s Parappana Agrahara (central jail) where he had spent three days in connection with an SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act case for allegedly hurling casteist abuse against a former corporator. In a recording of a purported phone conversation between Munirathna and a contractor, the BJP MLA was heard using casteist slurs and threatening to ‘finish off’ the former corporator.
But minutes after he stepped out of the central jail, he was arrested again; this time in a case in which a 40-year-old woman accused him and six others of rape, sexual harassment and culpable homicide.
In her complaint, the woman alleged Munirathna raped her, filmed the act and used the video to blackmail her. According to the complaint, she was also forced to help Munirathna ‘honeytrap’ his political rivals. Investigators have filed a chargesheet in this case.
The Siddaramaiah-led Congress government formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the serious and recurring charges against the MLA, who was elected to the Assembly on a Congress ticket in 2013 and 2018. Police filed a 2,481-page chargesheet which accused Munirathna, along with a police inspector, of trying to inject then revenue minister and now Leader of the Opposition in Karnataka, R. Ashoka, with HIV-infected blood.
“This is an explosive situation. I am not sure if this is true or not and the police should probe this. But if this is the situation in politics, no leader can survive and no minister can carry out their duties. We meet thousands of people every day, accepting hundreds of garlands and bouquets. How do we trust anyone?” Ashoka had told Power TV at the time.
Controversies involving Munirathna go back several years. On 1 June, 2010, a 17-year-old girl was killed when a wall at a veterinary college near Bengaluru’s Mekri Circle collapsed on her as she was trying to shelter herself from the rain. Munirathna was then a newly-elected corporator from Yeshwanthpur and had overseen the construction of that wall.
The issue was debated for days in the city council but he did not face any charges. Three years later, he successfully contested on a Congress ticket from Rajarajeshwarinagar seat.
On the eve of the 2018 assembly polls, Munirathna was booked along with 13 others in connection with the recovery of nearly 10,000 fake voter ID cards from an apartment in Jalahalli. Police have filed a chargesheet and he is currently out on bail in this case.
In 2019, Munirathna defected to BJP. He was among the 17 legislators who walked out of the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) alliance that led to the collapse of the H.D. Kumaraswamy-led coalition government. He was made junior minister for horticulture, as well as planning, programme monitoring and statistics in the B.S. Yediyurappa and Basavaraj Bommai-led BJP governments that followed.
While he is now with BJP, Munirathna is still seen as being close to Siddaramaiah and has at times broken with the party line to praise the incumbent Congress government.
According to B.B. Ashok Kumar, he is among the many rowdy-sheeters of Bengaluru who entered mainstream politics. Among other things, he is also a movie producer.
In the early 1980s, Munirathna was a close aide of Kotwal Ramachandra, a notorious criminal who features in almost every story about Bengaluru’s brief tryst with the underworld. Munirathna’s brother, Korangu Krishna, too was a rowdy-sheeter.
Kumar recalled that after Kotwal died, Munirathna spent many nights at the police station out of fear of being targeted by former boss’s rivals.
Munirathna’s rise in politics also coincided with a surge in his declared wealth—from Rs 28 crore in 2013 to Rs 293 crore in 2023, according to affidavits submitted to the Election Commission. Given his sizable victory margins, Munirathna remains a force to reckon with.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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