Did Araga let ‘Santro Ravi’ go to Gujarat, asks HDK

NT Correspondent

Kalaburagi / Ahmedabad: Former Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy on Friday wondered aloud if State Home Minister Araga Jnanendra may have helped ferry human trafficking accused Manjunath KS alias ‘Santro Ravi’ out of Karnataka to protect the latter.

The statement comes on a day when Ravi was caught by Mysuru police in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Jnanendra was one of the ministers whose pictures with Ravi have been doing the rounds. The others are State Health Minister K Sudhakar and Education Minister BC Nagesh.

Kumaraswamy made the comments while campaigning for his party under the Pancharatna Rath Yatra programme in Kalaburagi South Assembly constituency. He also claimed that he had gone to Gujarat to be able to fly out of the country, avoiding Karnataka police in the process.

“We shall see. They have arrested him (Ravi). Let’s see whose names come out and who is associated with him,” he said, smirking. “In my opinion, if he was found in a state like Gujarat or Rajasthan, they were most probably planning to transport him out of the country. That is important.

If he escaped to Gujarat or Rajasthan, who let him slip out of the state? Who let him do that? Was it even possible for him to do that under these circumstances? He was let go to be safeguarded with the blessing of the home minister, it appears,” he added.

The JD(S) legislature party president even floated the conspiracy theory that even the arrest was a pre-planned farce. “It was most probably pre-planned and then he was arrested. That’s just my opinion,” Kumaraswamy said. Earlier, he had claimed Ravi had used prostitutes to lure rebel MLAs to the BJP at the behest of the saffron party during the infamous ‘Operation Kamala’ in 2019.

Ravi was arrested in a case registered by his second wife, a Dalit woman, in Mysuru’s Vijayanagar police station. He has been booked under rape charges, the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) Atrocities Act and Dowry Prevention Act.