A woman and her daughter were allegedly attacked and harassed by the residents of their neighbourhood in Banashankari Stage 3 on July 1 for regularly feeding stray dogs.
The incident was sparked off by another where an eight-year-old girl was bitten by a dog which was known to have had a long history of abuse.
The victims, Sudha Venkatesh and her daughter, Megha Barani, 24, run a cat shelter at their house in Banashankari 3rd stage in South Bengaluru and regularly feed streeties, one of which is a lactating mother.
It all started with a stray dog in the street biting a girl aged around eight.
The incident happened on the afternoon of June 28 when the kids were playing in the street.
The dog was known to have suffered abuse and was scared of kids.
“Ever since it was a puppy, it was pelted with stones, kicked and abused, and the dog had developed an aversion to people.
We had also observed it and were not going near it,” said Barani.
“We were unaware about the incident and my mother was feeding another lactating dog mother which regularly visits us,” Barani added.
It was then that a few neighbours including the father of the little girl came and asked Sudha not to feed dogs in the area.
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A non-stop kitty partyThe mother-daughter duo plan to shift out to a larger space to make more room for their furry friends
Sudha and Megha saw the little girl’s wound and told them that the dogs were injected with anti-rabies vaccine and the girl need not take an anti-rabies injection and they could treat it like a common bite wound.
Sudha continued feeding the dog as it was a lactating mother.
This irked the father, who allegedly kicked the bowl and threw a huge stone at the dog which immediately ran away.
“After the incident, the dog never came back at all.
She would have gone back to the drain to be with her puppies,” Megha rued.
Soon, another man in his early thirties, who appeared to be drunk, came and allegedly started creating a scene.
“When my mother told him that he was drunk and asked him to go back, he roughed her up and my mother ran back into our house compound.
He barged into our compound when my mom threw an empty carton box on him,” Megha told Bangalore Mirror.
She then managed to push the man outside and locked the gates.
The man started kicking the gate furiously when the iron lock broke off.
Scared, Megha dialled her brother and Sudha dialled 100, but the Hoysala patrol police came only after 40 minutes.
By then Megha’s brother had come, only to be beaten up by the drunk man later identified by the police as Uday Kamath.
“Kamath was being encouraged by the neighbours to attack us as we used to feed animals and had a cat shelter at our house,” Sudha said.
Kamath, being drunk, roughed up my mother and barged into our compound; he also spat water in our faces– Megha Barani
“As Kamath was drunk, someone had given him water so that he would become sober, but he was spitting into the cup and throwing it at our faces during these times.
He also vandalised my scooter,” Megha said.
According to Megha, when the Hoysala police arrived, they said it was a ‘tit-for-tat’ incident and it was already solved.
“The dog had bitten the girl and the upset parents and neighbours who were angry for feeding stray dogs reacted to them that way,” Megha quoted the police as saying.
Megha then wrote an email to animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi, explaining their plight.
Gandhi’s office called up the duo and instructed them to legally pursue the matter.
The next day, around 25 people from Sudha’s neighbourhood approached the Girinagar police with a petition stating that Sudha and Megha should not be allowed to stay in the neighbourhood.
The Girinagar police pacified the residents and sent them back.
With the help of an animal activist lawyer Allwyn Sebastian, a complaint was drafted by Sudha and Megha who later filed it with the Girinagar police.
Cops then registered an FIR and arrested Kamath for assault on women, destroying property, harassment, and criminal intimidation.