Karnataka’s state government has constituted a five-member special investigation team to carry out a fresh, ground-up inquiry into the 2012 rape and murder of Sowjanya, a 17-year-old pre-university student, after the Supreme Court ordered a de novo investigation earlier this month. The new team is headed by IPS officer N. Shashikumar and includes four other officers, C. K.
Sudheer Kumar Reddy, Nikhila James and Lokesh Jagalasar among the IPS ranks, along with Venkatesh Prasanna; the Supreme Court had specifically directed that no officer who worked on any of the earlier investigations be allowed to join the new team, in an apparent effort to insulate the fresh inquiry from the failures of the original one. Sowjanya disappeared in October 2012 while returning home in Belthangady taluk near Mangaluru, and her body was found the following day near Mannasanka bearing signs of sexual assault and murder. The case passed through Belthangady police, then Karnataka’s state CID, and eventually the CBI, but in June 2023 a CBI special court acquitted the sole accused, Santhosh Rao, citing insufficient evidence, a verdict that left the victim’s family and activists demanding the case be reopened for well over a decade. The Supreme Court’s September 21 order for a de novo probe followed years of campaigning, including public demands from local politicians such as Nalin Kumar Kateel for the case to be reinvestigated, even after the state’s home department had at one point said it had no plans to reopen it.
The newly formed SIT has been given three months to complete its investigation and submit its findings to the relevant court, a tight timeline given that the case is now well over a decade old and much of the original physical evidence and witness testimony will need to be re-examined or reconstructed. The case has long been linked in public discussion to broader concerns about the handling of sexual violence cases in the Dharmasthala area of coastal Karnataka, and the fresh investigation is expected to face intense scrutiny both from the victim’s family and from political parties that have used the case to criticise successive state governments. Officials have not yet indicated whether new suspects or evidence have emerged since the CBI court’s 2023 acquittal, and the SIT’s composition of officers untouched by the case’s troubled history is likely to be its most closely watched feature as the reinvestigation gets under way. For a case that has already outlived one full investigative cycle without a conviction, the government’s decision to staff the team entirely with officers new to the file signals an attempt to rebuild public confidence in the process itself, not just in whatever outcome the SIT eventually reaches.