This is the first story in our series on Police Impunity in India.
On April 1, 2025, around 6 pm, a few Mysuru police officers stood at the Madikeri bus stand, waiting for a woman who was supposed to have been murdered.
When the bus pulled in, the officers boarded and walked down the aisle, scanning faces until they found her. “Are you Mallige?” they asked. The woman in pink chudidhar nodded.
Mallige’s reappearance wasn’t just a twist in a criminal case — it destroyed the case. Her husband, Suresh, had already spent 18 months in jail for her murder. The police had filed a chargesheet, presented a body, and declared Suresh guilty. And now, the supposed victim was standing alive before them.
That night, the woman was handed over to the police. The next day, Inspector Prakash BG, the officer who had once told the court, under oath, that Suresh had killed her, produced her in court.
On April 23, when Judge Gururaj Somakkalavar of the 5th Mysuru District and Sessions Court acquitted Suresh, he did not mince his words. “This entire case is built up by the investigating officer (Prakash BG), and accused (Suresh) was made a villain and he has been falsely implicated.”
The judge’s words were damning. Officer Prakash had concocted a story, fabricated evidence, manipulated documents, and falsely implicated a man — all to close a case they never investigated. There was no DNA match, no credible proof. Just a body, an easy scapegoat, and unchecked authority.
When Suresh saw Mallige in court, he could not believe his eyes. “I hadn’t seen her in years. And suddenly, she is standing there, alive. Everything they said I did — none of it was true,” he said. “They locked me up for a crime that never even happened.”
In this report, we trace the brutality that Suresh, a daily wage tribal labourer, was forced to endure at the hands of the very system he trusted — and how his case raises uncomfortable questions about time lost, injustice endured, and compensation granted.
Suresh and his wife, Mallige, hail from Kushalnagar, a small hill town in Karnataka’s Kodagu district. Home to about five lakh residents, roughly 10.4% of the region’s population belongs to tribal communities.
When Mallige went missing, the police didn’t try to find her. Instead, they found an unidentified body and declared it hers — without DNA confirmation, without even matching clothes. Then they pinned it on Suresh. This was after Suresh repeatedly told the police that she might have run away with another man.
The case exposes one of policing’s darkest equations: give officers unchecked authority and a crime to solve, and they will manufacture guilt to match. They weaponised their power, misled the court, and committed fraud upon the justice system by filing a fabricated chargesheet. The facts weren’t uncovered — they were arranged to fit a pre-decided story.
A marriage, a disappearance
At 14, Mallige was married to Suresh. For 19 years, the couple lived in a small village in Karnataka’s Kodagu district. Their two children, Krishna and Keerti, are now 15 and 19 years old.
Both Mallige and Suresh belong to the Jenu Kuruba tribe, which falls under the Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) in Karnataka.These communities are among the most marginalised even within Scheduled Tribes (STs), facing extreme poverty, low literacy, limited access to services, and stagnant populations. These challenges contribute to their vulnerability to exploitation, systemic neglect, and wrongful prosecution.
The couple worked as daily wage labourers, travelling to plantations around their village, earning no more than Rs 600 a day.
In the final years of their marriage, Suresh discovered that Mallige was having an affair with a man named Ganesh, from the same village. The suspicions led to frequent arguments. But “which couple doesn’t fight?” Suresh asked this reporter, outside the 5th Additional District and Session Court in Mysuru.
On October 19, 2020, Mallige left for work and never came back. Ganesh also went missing the same day. For 25 days, Suresh and his family desperately searched for her. His father, Kurubara Gandhi, told TNM that a few days after Mallige disappeared, she called them once. “She said she wouldn't be returning home, and after that, her phone became unreachable,” he said.
Finally, on November 13, an exasperated and distressed Suresh walked into the Kushalnagar police station to file a missing person report. He believed the police would help him find his wife.
Instead, his faith in the system marked the beginning of his nightmare.
A body surfaces
On November 12, eight kilometres away from Suresh’s village, an event entirely unrelated but crucial to this story unfolded. Natesh, a 51-year-old farmer, was grazing his cattle near a canal when he noticed a foul smell coming from a nearby bush. He immediately alerted the Bettadapura police.
When the police arrived and traced the source of the odour, they found a decomposing body.
This is what they noted down: Most of the body had decomposed and had been eaten by animals, leaving behind skeletal remains. Scattered nearby were pieces of clothing, including a flower-patterned red saree, a black and green striped sweater, a blue petticoat, and a blue blouse.
There was no name. No identification. Just bones and fabric.The police registered the case as an Unnatural Death Report (UDR), signed by Natesh, who the police claimed had found the body.
The next day, the police preserved the femur (thigh bone) and skull for DNA testing and cremated the rest of the body.
“In this case,” the police later wrote in the chargesheet, “information regarding the unknown dead body was published in newspapers. However, nobody has claimed the same.”
At first, there was no connection between this unclaimed human remains and Mallige’s missing person complaint. They were two separate reports in two separate stations. However, for the police, the timeline was too tempting to ignore — a missing woman, a body with no name, both in neighbouring districts, both within 24 hours of each other.
“In missing person cases, it's routine for neighbouring police stations to share information,” said Suresh’s lawyer, Pandu Poojary. “But in this case, they didn’t share facts, they shared assumptions.”
Manufacturing an investigation
Nearly eight months after Mallige left home, in early July 2021, the police took Suresh to the neighbouring Bettadapura police station — the same station that had discovered the skeletal remains of the unidentified body.
There, he was shown a few bones and asked to identify if they belonged to his wife, Mallige. Naturally, he couldn’t. Suresh was then unlawfully detained for eight days and repeatedly pressured by the police to identify the bones as hers.
“They kept saying, ‘Confess and we’ll go easy.’ But how do you confess to something that didn’t happen?” Suresh told TNM. Eventually, he recalled, the police told him to find Mallige and Ganesh. “If I failed to do so, they said they would pin the case on me. If cops can’t find Mallige, am I god to find her?”
Suresh also said that from the very beginning, he had told the police that his wife had likely left him for another man, Ganesh. But the police, he said, were not interested in probing this angle.
He was eventually let go, and the police next summoned Mallige’s mother, Gowri, and son, Krishna. They too were shown the skeletal remains and the clothes. In the chargesheet, the police stated that both mother and son identified the clothes as Mallige’s, and based on Gowri’s complaint, they registered an FIR for murder and destruction of evidence.
With that, the Bettadapura police launched a probe, headed by investigating officer Prakash BG, into Mallige’s murder.
Gowri’s blood sample was taken for DNA testing, to see if it would match the femur bone of the unidentified body.
On May 22, 2022, Suresh was arrested for Mallige’s murder. The police claimed he had confessed to killing his wife with a wooden club and had even led them to the crime scene to help recover the alleged weapon.
Two months later, officer Prakash filed a chargesheet stating that Suresh and Mallige used to have frequent fights about her alleged affair, and that Mallige left home on October 19, unable to tolerate the harassment. Ten days later, according to the chargesheet, Suresh met her at a bus stop and tried to pacify her. It further stated that the couple then boarded a bus and made their way to a nearby bar, where they “purchased four tetra packs of 90 ml of original choice deluxe whisky. Both consumed alcohol from two tetra packs.” After this, the chargesheet said, they took an auto to the canal, where they continued drinking.
According to the police, Suresh once again argued with Mallige about her relationship with another man. Finally, he “took the club lying beside and assaulted on her head and killed her. In order to conceal the offence, he hid the body in a bush and also hid the club used to kill.”
The chargesheet filed by Inspector Prakash ran 156 pages. Suresh was booked under Sections 498A (cruelty by husband), 302 (murder), and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
In 2022, two years after Mallige had gone missing, the trial was set to begin.
Things fall apart
While Suresh waited in jail, it was his 60-year-old father, Kurubara Gandhi, who refused to give up. “They all said, ‘Your son has confessed, the case is over.’ But I knew my son didn’t kill anyone,” Gandhi said. “I kept saying that my daughter-in-law is not dead — just find her.”
Gandhi went from lawyer to lawyer, pleading with them to take his son’s case. Most refused. In May 2023, an advocate named BS Pandu Poojary finally agreed to represent Suresh pro bono.
“When I read the chargesheet, something felt off,” Pandu told TNM. “The DNA report wasn’t attached, and yet they were pushing for a murder trial.”
He was referring to the DNA test that was meant to determine whether the bones of the unidentified body matched Gowri’s blood sample.
Advocate Pandu’s first move was basic but critical: he filed an application asking the police to produce the DNA report. In 2023, two years after the skeletal remains were found, the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) report concluded that the femur bone was insufficient for DNA profiling. This meant it could not be confirmed whether the remains were that of Mallige.
With that, the narrative built by officer Prakash began to fall apart.
In 2020, the post-mortem report of the unidentified body initially listed the deceased as “unknown.” Suspiciously, this was later struck out and replaced with “Mallige.”
The report also remained inconclusive about the cause of death, but added: “However, death due to head injury cannot be ruled out.”
On August 22, 2023, the trial began.
First, the key witnesses, Gowri and Krishna, turned hostile. They denied ever identifying the clothes as Mallige’s and said the police had pressured them into signing statements they didn’t fully understand. In fact, Gowri told TNM that she had actually told the police her daughter was alive, and that the clothes shown to them did not belong to her.
In court, both deposed that they believed Mallige was not dead and had run away with Ganesh.
Another crucial witness, Natesh, said that unlike what the police claimed, he had never found a body — only a foul smell. The police had said Natesh signed the unnatural death report, but in court he testified that he had never filed any report. “They (police) asked me to come back the next day and show them the place again. I signed a blank paper. I didn’t know what it was for. Then I heard they took the body. That’s all I know.”
With an inconclusive DNA report and crucial witnesses turning hostile, the foundation on which officer Prakash had built his entire case began to crumble.
On September 27, 2023, the Karnataka High Court granted Suresh bail on the grounds that the case was “based entirely on circumstantial evidence,” with “belated witness statements” and no prior criminal record. Despite this, Suresh remained in prison for another year, unable to afford the bail bond of Rs 1 lakh.
It was only in September 2024 that Suresh finally stepped out. His fight, though, was far from over. Determined to clear his name, he went back to the police — the very system that had jailed him — and asked them to help trace his wife.
“I kept telling them, please find her, she’s alive,” he said. “But they just looked at me like I was wasting their time.”
The final nail in the coffin was struck down later.
Return of the ‘dead’
On April 1, 2025, a friend of Suresh walked into a roadside hotel in Virajpet, about 40 kilometres from where Suresh lived. He was stunned to see a familiar face. There was Mallige, dressed in a pink chudidhar, sipping tea with Ganesh.
He pulled out his phone, recorded a video of her, and sent it to Suresh.
Stunned, Suresh rushed to his lawyer, who immediately informed the police. The police swung into action, intercepted the bus Mallige had boarded, and took her to the Madikeri police station.
The next morning, officer Prakash walked into the 5th Mysuru District and Sessions Court and presented before everyone the very woman he had insisted, for years, was dead.
For the first time in five years, Mallige spoke. “I left with Ganesh in 2020. We have been living and working in T Shettigeri village. Nobody killed me.”
After Mallige was found alive, the Superintendent of Police (SP), Mysuru, was asked to submit a detailed report explaining the investigation. The report was furnished with Prakash sticking to his version of events. However, the court dismissed it, calling it inadequate, and stating that 'there was no accountability.'”
An ‘honourable’ acquittal
On April 23, 2025, Judge Gururaj Somakkalavar delivered a 94-page judgement. Suresh was granted an ‘honourable acquittal’, awarded compensation of Rs 1 lakh, and ordered to have his name cleared from all police records.
Though the term ‘honourable acquittal’ is not defined in law, courts have held that it applies when an accused is acquitted after full consideration of the evidence, and the prosecution’s case is found to be entirely untrustworthy — not merely due to technicalities or benefit of the doubt. In Suresh’s case, the alleged crime had never even occurred.
Rahul Machaiah, a Bengaluru-based lawyer, explained: “While the CrPC (Criminal Procedure Code) doesn’t formally distinguish this, it’s crucial in practice. For example, someone acquitted on suspicion may still be denied a government job, but if it’s an honourable acquittal, the court gives the person a clean slate. In Suresh’s case, the court found no crime, and cleared him of all involvement.”
The court came down heavily on the police, highlighting several glaring investigative lapses.
First, it noted that even though the unidentified body had been partially eaten by animals, the clothing recovered by the police suspiciously bore no tears, scratches, or holes. “Though the garments appeared old, they were unusually clean and undamaged, raising serious doubts about whether they were in fact recovered from a decomposed body,” the judgement read.
Secondly, the judge pointed out how “none of the witnesses’ statements align with the police story. These contradictions raise serious questions about the reliability of the investigation. It appears these statements were fabricated to support a false case.”
The court concluded that “this is not a case of bona fide mistakes. It is a case of deliberate and systematic fabrication of evidence with the intention to implicate an innocent man in a murder that never occurred.”
Suresh, the judge noted, was arrested “without a preliminary inquiry or even an iota of evidence. From that point on, the case was built backward. The evidence was created after the arrest. The charges against the accused have fallen apart, but this opens up troubling questions about the police’s intentions.”
According to advocate Rahul Machaiah, it has become a common practice for police officers to file chargesheets without conclusive reports from the FSL. “Because of that, a lot of wrongful incarcerations happen. Even in this case, had they waited for the DNA report, they would have figured out that this skeleton wasn’t Mallige’s.”
The judge named the investigating officers and directed the Inspector General of Police, Mysuru Division, to initiate departmental action against four of them — Prakash BG, Jithendra Kumar, Prakash Yattinamani, and Mahesh BK — for fabricating evidence, forging mahajars, and misleading the court.
He also ordered that a criminal complaint be filed against Prakash under Sections 229 (punishment for false evidence) and 231 (giving or fabricating false evidence with intent to procure conviction of an offence punishable with life imprisonment) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS).
A source within the police department said that an internal probe had already been initiated before the court order demanded it. However, following the judgement, a fresh departmental inquiry will now be launched against the officials.
“This is not a police-filed case,” advocate Rahul Machaiah explained. “It’s a private complaint, which must be filed by the court’s administrative officer in Mysuru. Once that happens, the trial will begin through a summary process, and if convicted, Prakash will be taken into custody.”
When TNM reached out to Inspector Prakash BG on May 1, we found that he was still serving as the Inspector of Kushalnagara Town Police Station. Regarding this, advocate Rahul said, “The IGP has been instructed to initiate departmental action, and he should have been suspended by now.”
Nowhere close to closure
Five years on, with Mallige alive and Suresh vindicated, one question continues to haunt this case: A woman died, and her remains lay unclaimed and unidentified all these years. Who was she? To whom did the skeletal remains belong?
The court flagged this as well and directed the police to reopen the investigation and submit a fresh report.
Mallige now lives with Ganesh, while Suresh lives with his two children and Mallige’s mother, Gowri. For him, the nightmare is far from over.
As a member of the Jenu Kuruba community, he was seen as a vulnerable and easy target.
“The systemic bias against tribal people means they are seen as easy scapegoats. With little to no representation, they are easily framed and pressured into confessions or charges far from the truth,” said BG Raghavendra, a Mysuru-based lawyer.
An ‘honourable’ acquittal means very little to people like Suresh. Sitting outside the courtroom, with folded hands and tear-filled eyes, Suresh's parents called the past five years a “living hell.”
“We knew our son was innocent. But nobody listened to us,” his mother said. “The whole village started looking at him like he was a murderer. He missed seeing his child grow up. He missed life.”
His father, who had borrowed money from relatives to fund the legal battle, has now found himself in debt. “Everything we had, we gave up to fight this case. And for what? For the police to declare our daughter-in-law dead when she was not? The court has given us justice. But what about the officers who ruined our son’s life? They must face consequences,” he asked.
Both Suresh and his family now hope the officers involved would finally be held to account. In a case like this, even a verdict that declares justice offers very little in the way of meaning, celebration, or closure.
“What should I celebrate? What’s done is done. There’s nothing to be happy about. I just hope this becomes a lesson for society, and for the system. It’s been proven that I didn’t do anything wrong.”
There’s no time to dwell on what he’s lost. Suresh says he needs to get back to work.
“I am too poor to sit and think about all this,” he says flatly. "I have to earn. That is all I can do now."
On April 17, 2025, TNM met Mallige at the 5th Mysuru District and Sessions Court. She declined to speak.
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