Bengaluru: In a scathing indictment of shoddy police work, Karnataka high court has quashed a cow theft case registered nearly two years after the alleged incident, holding that police acted without conducting even basic verification before invoking criminal law.Justice M Nagaprasanna came down heavily on MK Doddi police in Channapatna taluk, describing the case as a “classic illustration of the criminal justice system being pressed into service for purposes wholly alien to its object.” The court set aside proceedings against Mangalamma and three members of her family from Thavatanahalli village.The case arose from a complaint filed by Dasaiah, a resident of MK Doddi village, who said his two cows had gone missing on Aug 18, 2024. Nearly two years later, on March 26, 2026, he lodged a complaint after allegedly being told by one Shekar that Mangalamma and her family had sold the missing cattle through him. Based solely on this information, police registered an FIR.Challenging the case, the accused argued that the extraordinary delay in the filing of complaint itself raised serious doubts about its credibility. The cops defended their action, contending that cattle theft was a cognisable offence and that they were duty-bound to register the complaint.Rejecting this stand, Justice Nagaprasanna said the complainant himself could not say with certainty that the cows allegedly found after two years were actually his. “The accusation rests not upon tangible material, identifiable marks of ownership or any legally acceptable foundation, but upon little more than conjecture,” the judge observed. Merely because the complainant’s cows had gone missing two years earlier did not mean that the animals later spotted were the same ones, nor could such assumptions justify accusing the petitioners of theft, he said.Shoddy investigationThe court was particularly critical of the police handling of the complaint. “What shocks the judicial conscience is not merely the unexplained delay in lodging the complaint, but the utter absence of even the most rudimentary inquiry by the investigating agency,” Justice Nagaprasanna observed.The judge noted that police had failed to verify when the cows actually went missing, how the complainant identified them after two years, whether they had any distinguishing marks establishing ownership, or whether there was any material linking the accused to the alleged theft. Instead, police “mechanically registered the crime” and summoned the accused “as though the mere lodging of a complaint, irrespective of its inherent improbabilities, was sufficient to justify the invocation of criminal law,” the court said.Warning against allowing criminal investigations to proceed on such weak foundations, Justice Nagaprasanna said doing so would amount to giving judicial approval to “suspicion masquerading as accusation and conjecture masquerading as evidence”.He added that permitting such prosecutions would reward “indolence, speculation and misuse of the criminal process” and show how the criminal justice system could itself become “an instrument of harassment” when investigating agencies fail to conduct basic objective verification before registering cases.Continuing such proceedings would amount to an abuse of the process of law, the judge observed while quashing the proceedings against Mangalamma and her family.
