The mountain-top village of Hosa Vantamuri is picturesque. There is a resettlement centre for families displaced by the submergence of Vantamuri village in the reservoir of the Raja Lakhamagouda dam over the Ghataprabha in the late 1970s. It is set in the backdrop of several windmills that line the horizon on the Belagavi-Kolhapur highway.
But this village in the border district of Belagavi, in the northwest of Karnataka, with a population of around 7,000 people (about 5,000 of them from the Scheduled Tribe of Bedar Nayaka) was witness to the horrific mob attack on a woman that shook the conscience of the nation.
Around midnight on December 10, a mob partially stripped a woman in her 40s, tied her to a pole and assaulted her. This was an act of “revenge” by the relatives of a girl who had run away with the victim’s son a day before her engagement to another boy.
