A temple town, a mystery whistleblower and a chilling confession: allegations of rape, murder and the secret burial of hundreds of women and girls over two decades have shocked the quiet holy town of Dharmasthala in southern India’s Karnataka state.
His face hidden behind a black hood, the whistleblower appeared before a local court earlier this month carrying skeletal remains that he claimed were taken from a mass burial site of sexual assault victims.
The man claimed to be a former sanitation worker at the Dharmasthala temple and alleged he was forced into secretly disposing of hundreds of bodies, many of which showed signs of brutal violence and sexual assault.
In a written complaint to the police chief of Dakshina Kannada district, the man, whose identity is being withheld for his safety, said he worked under duress for nearly 20 years before fleeing into hiding with his family in 2014.
Driven by guilt, remorse and haunting nightmares, he had returned after more than a decade to expose the “horrific crimes” he allegedly witnessed during his time working at the temple.
The whistleblower demanded exhumation of the hundreds of corpses he claimed to have buried and an investigation so that justice could be ensured for the victims “who were denied dignity even in death”.
His lawyer, KV Dhananjay, told The Independent this was an “unprecedented” case where the witness had come forward not only with his testimony but also evidence, demanding accountability.
“Here is the individual who says that it is not the fear of law but the fear of conscience and fear for morality that has brought him back,” Dhananjay said. “In the last 100 years of court judgments, you don’t find a parallel.”
The emergence of a whistleblower has put the spotlight on hundreds of cases of women and girls who were found dead or reported missing in and around Dharmasthala over the years, many of which were ignored or not formally investigated by police.
Nearly two weeks after the man filed his complaint, Karnataka’s state government constituted a special investigation team (SIT) to look into the allegations.
Nestled in the lush Western Ghats on the banks of the Netravati river, Dharmasthala is a major Hindu pilgrimage site. The medieval Shri Manjunatha Temple, dedicated to the deity Shiva and managed by a family, attracts millions of devotees to the small town every year.
The whistleblower said he was from the Dalit community, the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system, and worked at the temple from 1995 to 2014. “What began as regular employment later turned into work of covering up evidence of extremely horrific crimes,” he alleged.
He fled in 2014 when “the mental torture I was experiencing became unbearable”. The tipping point came after a young girl was sexually harassed, he alleged, prompting him to run away.
He and his family went into hiding in a neighbouring state, he claimed, constantly changing residences in fear for their lives.
In a chilling first-person account, the man said he found corpses washed up on the riverbank and assumed they were suicides or accidental drownings. But he soon noticed that most of them were women, and many were naked or semi-naked and showed signs of violence.
It was in 1998 when he was first asked to “secretly dispose of the bodies”, he alleged. When he refused, he was allegedly beaten and threatened.
“We will cut you into pieces. Your body will also be buried like the other corpses. We will sacrifice all your family members,” he alleged he was told.
He claimed that many of the victims he ended up burying in secret were minor girls and women subjected to brutal sexual violence. They bore torn clothes, acid burns, and other injuries.
In a particularly distressing case in 2010, the man said he was ordered to bury a girl he estimated was 12 to 15 years old. “She was still wearing her school uniform shirt but other garments were missing. She had a school bag. Her body showed clear signs of sexual assault. There were strangulation marks on her neck,” the whistleblower said in his testimony. “They instructed me to dig a pit and bury her along with her school bag. That scene remains disturbing to this day.”
He also claimed that destitute men were murdered at Dharmasthala and similarly buried. The man alleges that he was a witness to these murders.
According to the lawyer, the corpses were not buried in designated cemeteries but on open land. “These were not organised interments sanctioned by any authority but random burials, hidden and illegal,” he said.
The whistleblower said he kept silent for years out of fear but the “insurmountable sense of guilt” and recurring nightmares became too much to bear.
“I can no longer bear the burden of memories of the murders I witnessed, the continuous death threats to bury the corpses that I received and the pain of beatings – that if I did not bury those corpses, I would be buried alongside them,” he said.
Dhananjay said the whistleblower’s claims described a place where “ordinary laws just don’t work at all”. “Now if it is true, one must assume that if somebody goes missing in such a place, the police are simply not going to record it,” he said.
“But just because we are unable to explain the past, the rocks should not blind us to the present.”
The lawyer said the whistleblower took matters into his own hands because he expected little from police. “Before coming to us, he went to one such burial site, exhumed the remains, and handed them over to the court,” he said.
“So now, the court has half the picture. The other half is for police to take him to the site where the recovery was made. They have not done that either. This man was not wanted. There were no pending investigations against him. No one was even looking for these bodies. By not acting, police are sending a message to the world – that this man may be telling the truth.”
In a statement issued on Sunday 20 July, the temple authorities said they support a “fair and transparent” investigation.
“Truth and belief form the foundation of a society’s ethics and values. We sincerely hope and strongly urge the SIT to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation and bring the true facts to light,” said K Parshwanath Jain, the official spokesperson for Sri Kshetra Dharmasthala.
The whistleblower hasn’t named any of the people he claims are responsible. He has sought protection from the court first, saying he will disclose more details once he and his family receive proper protection.
Should anything happen to him before he is able to reveal the names, he has said, Dhananjay will open a sealed version of his full testimony.
“The truth about these tragedies must not die with me,” he said in his testimony.
Karnataka State Commission for Women chair, Nagalakshmi Chowdhary, told The Independent that the appointment of a special investigation team was a “significant step”.
She referenced the anguish of families still waiting for answers. “An old woman is still hoping to recover the remains of her daughter just so she can perform her last rites,” she said. “That’s why I wrote to the Karnataka government, and within four or five days they constituted the SIT.”
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