The Karnataka Excessive Court docket has quashed a First Info Report (FIR) lodged in opposition to Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, who chairs the Governing Council of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), and 15 different senior officers and college members of the Bengaluru-based institute who had been accused of caste-based harassment by a former affiliate professor.
The choice, delivered on April 16 by Justice Hemant Chandangoudar, got here in response to a writ petition difficult the FIR, which the court docket deemed an abuse of the authorized course of.
The petitioners, together with IISc Director Prof Govindan Rangarajan, Registrar Captain Sridhar Warrier (Retd) and several other college members, had been named in a non-public grievance lodged by Dr D Sanna Durgappa, a former assistant professor on the IISc who belongs to a Scheduled Caste neighborhood.
Dr Durgappa alleged that the petitioners harassed him attributable to his caste, falsely accused him of sexual harassment, and terminated his employment with no honest inquiry. He additional claimed that two advocates representing IISc threatened him, asking him to resign, and tried to cancel his advocate’s licence.
The court docket discovered that the dispute originated from Dr Durgappa’s termination in 2015, following allegations of sexual harassment which he claimed had been false and motivated by caste-based discrimination.
The termination was challenged earlier than the excessive court docket in 2015, the place a settlement was reached, changing his termination right into a resignation. As a part of the settlement, Dr Durgappa acquired terminal advantages and agreed to withdraw all associated complaints filed with authorities just like the Nationwide Fee for SC/ST.
Regardless of the settlement, Dr Durgappa filed two personal complaints in 2016 and 2017 underneath the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, alleging caste-based harassment by IISc officers, each of which had been quashed by the excessive court docket in 2016 and 2017 for making an attempt to provide a prison color to a civil dispute.
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In 2025, he filed a 3rd grievance reiterating comparable allegations and including claims in opposition to two IISc advocates for threatening him and making an attempt to cancel his advocate’s license. This led to a different FIR being filed in opposition to Gopalakrishnan, Rangarajan and different IISc officers, which the excessive court docket has now quashed.
Justice Chandangoudar held that the accusations within the newest grievance didn’t represent offences underneath the SC/ST Act and had been a “vexatious try and harass the petitioners”. “The dispute between the events is basically civil in nature, albeit introduced with a prison color,” the choose famous, emphasising that the repeated complaints had been an abuse of the authorized course of.
The excessive court docket quashed the FIR and granted the petitioners liberty to hunt permission from the Advocate Basic to provoke prison contempt proceedings in opposition to Dr Durgappa for submitting frivolous complaints. Any pending interim purposes had been dismissed as the primary petition was resolved.
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