Suhas Shetty Murder Reignites Tensions in Mangaluru

They came for Suhas Shetty after dusk on May 1st, in that slack hour when every shadow starts to feel like a warning. It was a junction near Bajpe, called Kinnipadavu Cross—an unremarkable place, a place you pass on your way to somewhere else. But Shetty, seated in his car, didn’t pass through. He was intercepted, surrounded, and hacked with cinematic precision. Later, the police would say the killers came armed with machetes and a surveillance plan, and that by the time it was over, it became clear that Shetty—a Bajrang Dal strongman accused in a communal lynching case—could not survive his injuries.

The police acted fast, or fast enough to pre-empt the usual accusations of selective paralysis. Within 72 hours, eight men were arrested. The names were Muslim, the coordinates familiar: Adil Mehroof, Abdul Safwan, Faizan, among others. They had split up, scattered, some holed up in nearby towns. The case was cracked, the authorities said, with the help of “technical evidence”—a catchall phrase for the forensic flotsam of twenty-first-century crime: tower dumps, pin drops, the unblinking gaze of CCTV.

Shetty’s police file reads like the footnotes of a local crime drama. But what turned his death into a communal flashpoint was his alleged role in the 2022 murder of Mohammed Fazil, a 23-year-old Muslim youth lynched in front of a textile shop in Surathkal in July of that year. That killing, captured on CCTV and later disseminated in viral loops, had stunned even those who thought themselves unshockable. To understand Fazil’s death, you have to rewind two days earlier, to July 26, 2022, when Praveen Nettaru—a BJP Yuva Morcha member—was murdered in Bellare, in the same Dakshina Kannada district. Nettaru was hacked down as he returned home on a motorbike, a method that has now become grimly recognisable. The police suspected Popular Front of India operatives, citing patterns and previous affiliations. What followed was a collective rupture: Hindu groups stormed the streets, shops were forced shut, and grief took on a militant hue.

Two days later, Fazil was cornered and killed by a group of masked men. His murder, the police said at the time, appeared to be retaliatory. Shetty’s name surfaced during the investigation. He was arrested, then released on bail. At the time of his own death, the trial in the Fazil case had yet to begin.

So when Shetty was murdered this May, the script practically wrote itself. A Hindu man out on bail in the murder of a Muslim youth is killed by a group of Muslim men, one of whom is the slain youth’s brother. The cycle completes its revolution. Hindu groups announce a bandh. VHP leaders rouse street corners. Local transport shutters in self-preservation. Mangaluru, once again, is no longer a city but a screen.

Police later claimed that the murder was premeditated and driven by a personal grudge. One of the arrested, Abdul Safwan, had allegedly been assaulted by Shetty’s associates in 2023, and harbored resentment. There were also unverified reports that some of the accused had been paid for the act—₹3 lakh to one, ₹2 lakh to another. The National Investigation Agency and state police are probing whether the funds could be traced to compensation received by Fazil’s family from the Karnataka government. But as of now, any direct link between those funds and the murder remains unproven.

It is worth pausing here, on the mechanics of how a coastal city of 700,000 becomes an ideological Rube Goldberg machine, where one act of violence triggers another, and another, until the distinction between memory and vendetta collapses like a poorly tied dhoti. The Shetty murder did not occur in a vacuum. It occurred in a geography already primed for provocation, where every shop and every billboard becomes a potential pressure point in the pinched nerve of communal identity.

In the last half-decade alone, Mangaluru and its coastal cousins—Surathkal, Ullal, Bantwal, Puttur—have seen a rising trend of reciprocal murders, “revenge” killings, and flare-ups catalysed by WhatsApp disinformation. The victims are most often young men, either affiliated with youth wings of religious organisations or simply proximate to the accused. Law enforcement, already stretched thin, is frequently reactive. Investigations become expositions of cause-and-effect, structured like B-grade vigilante thrillers: X was killed because of Y, who killed Z for insulting A. No ideology, no motive sheet, no trial docket is ever free of that intimate algebra of grievance.

Local WhatsApp groups now function as both surveillance and rumour engines. Terms like “adjusted,” and “fixed” have become euphemisms for a cycle of violent equivalence. Politicians, of course, orbit the carnage like moths near a flickering spotlight. Meanwhile, in homes from Kankanady to Katipalla, families switch off the news early and tell their children not to linger near shuttered shops. Women edit their names before ordering autos. College students rehearse what not to say in public. Barbers know to trim differently for different districts. These are the more ambient violences, the ones that don’t leave blood but still stain everything: the friend request not sent, the seat not taken, the hello that becomes a risk.

What Suhas Shetty’s death ultimately reveals is that no one in this machine is exempt. Not the provocateurs, not the pawns, not the apologists in khadi. Justice is no longer a process; it is a plot twist. And everyone is in the cast.

The final irony is that this cycle plays out in a city that calls itself “educational hub of Karnataka”, with more coaching centres than clinics, more hostels than homes. The beaches are still postcard-blue. The dosa still costs ₹35. But beneath the civility is a quiet recalibration of fear. The violence is no longer episodic. It is recursive. And the city, wary, waits to be told who died next.

 

 

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