Bharatiya Janata Party's Karnataka President BY Vijayendra on Tuesday, 18 August, publicly questioned whether Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay was intervening in the Chamarajanagar encounter as the Chief Minister of all Tamil Nadu citizens or solely as a 'Christian Chief Minister.' The remarks came as political and inter-state pressure mounted over the 15 August killing of three Tamil men by Karnataka forest personnel inside the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary.

What Vijayendra Said

Speaking to reporters in Bengaluru, Vijayendra said that Tamil Nadu CM Vijay had written to the Karnataka Chief Minister regarding the incident at Hanur in Chamarajanagar district. He added that an Archbishop had separately written to the Karnataka Chief Minister seeking government jobs and compensation for the families of the three deceased.

'Is it right to give a caste or religious colour to the deceased?' Vijayendra asked, criticising what he described as an attempt to frame the encounter along communal lines.

The BJP and the Janata Dal (Secular) had already raised the matter in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly, demanding ₹1 crore compensation and a government job for a family member of each of the three deceased on humanitarian grounds.

The Encounter: What the Karnataka Government Said

The Karnataka government told the Legislative Assembly that forest department personnel opened fire in self-defence after the three men — identified as Anthony Samy, John Rose Peter, and Kumar — shot at them during an anti-poaching operation in the Chamarajanagar reserve forest. The government characterised the three as poachers.

Tamil Nadu CM Vijay strongly condemned the killings, calling the incident a 'massacre' and rejecting the state's account of an exchange of fire as 'completely unacceptable.'

Vijayendra's Demand for Judicial Inquiry

Vijayendra questioned the operational logic of the encounter, asking why personnel needed to open fire if they had entered the forest carrying torches. 'You said they had gone carrying torches. Then why was there an encounter? Were they lions or tigers?' he said, alleging lapses in the operation.

He demanded that the Karnataka government acknowledge any lapses and called for a judicial inquiry into the incident. He also urged state ministers to take seriously the long-standing conflicts between forest-dwelling communities and forest officials across the state.

Broader Context: Forest-Fringe Tensions in Karnataka

Vijayendra pointed to a pattern of friction between forest communities and officials across Karnataka, citing recent protests in Madikeri and similar tensions in Shivamogga, Uttara Kannada, and coastal districts. He also flagged rising human-animal conflict in forest-fringe areas as an unaddressed governance challenge.

This is not the first time encounters in Karnataka's reserve forests have triggered inter-state political flashpoints. The Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary, which straddles the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border region, has long been a site of contested jurisdiction over forest use and anti-poaching enforcement. With a judicial inquiry now demanded and inter-state correspondence on record, the political fallout from the Hanur encounter is unlikely to be resolved quickly.