A Karnataka temple town in the grip of hysteria over rumours, skeletons | Bangalore News

These are places recognized by the sanitation employee – who was as soon as employed at Dharmasthala — as spots the place, between 1995 and 2014, he allegedly secretly buried our bodies of victims of assaults and murders within the area. The burials, he alleged, have been carried out on the behest of an influential household within the temple city.

Whereas the primary two days of the SIT investigation yielded little, on July 31, Day 3 of the train, components of a human skeleton have been collected from one of many spots.

“He has not talked about the precise variety of our bodies he has buried. Even when his allegations are true, the police need to confirm every part earlier than going ahead,” stated Dakshina Kannada Superintendent of Police Dr Ok Arun who supervised the investigation earlier than the SIT took over.

The invention of those stays has given a contemporary momentum to the allegations levelled by the sanitation employee. Amid rumours that his allegations may set off extra revelations got here a grievance filed on July 15 by a 60-year-old girl, Sujatha Bhat, who earlier labored as a stenographer within the CBI. Bhat alleged that her daughter, a first-year medical pupil at a university in Manipal went lacking at Dharmasthala in 2003, and that she wasn’t allowed to file an FIR then. She has now sought the discovering of her daughter’s stays.

Dharmasthala, nestled within the foothills of the Western Ghats in Dakshina Kannada district, is house to the Sree Manjunatheshwara Temple. (Particular Association)

A police grievance has not but been registered within the case, with police nonetheless verifying Bhat’s allegations and claims, which additionally revolve round alleged lack of property within the area to the temple administration.

“Her request depends on the belief that one of many our bodies (claimed to have been buried by the sanitation employee), if exhumed, will become her daughter’s, which needs to be verified by DNA testing,” stated SP Arun.

Regardless of repeated requests made via her lawyer, Sujatha Bhat was unavailable for feedback. Her legal professionals cited well being causes for her withdrawal from public appearances — after an preliminary look to submit a grievance to the Dharmasthala police on July 15.

Dharmasthala Grama Panchayat vp Srinivas Rao dismissed the sanitation employee’s allegations — that lots of of our bodies have been buried within the forests surrounding the city — as “purely imaginary”.

“We’re assured that the reality will come out,” he stated, expressing confidence within the SIT fashioned by the state authorities.

He stated the administration has had an association with the gram panchayat since 1986-87 to get rid of unknown our bodies. “That is completed solely with police clearances after a autopsy is performed. The physique is buried by the Well being Division or the Grama Panchayat,” Rao stated.

On a mean, 10-12 unclaimed our bodies are buried yearly within the area after following all procedures and conducting a panchnama. The administration is within the means of compiling the checklist of all our bodies buried in order that unverified claims could be put to relaxation, he stated.

Between reverence and rumours

Dharmasthala, nestled within the foothills of the Western Ghats in Dakshina Kannada district, is house to the Sree Manjunatheshwara Temple. The temple has a particular place within the lives of the folks of Karnataka and has, through the years, emerged as one among Karnataka’s foremost non secular locations.

Dharmasthala’s identification as a spiritual city is intently linked to the authority of the temple directors, who’ve during the last century assumed larger-than-life roles within the lives of the folks, with their affect extending over every part from schooling to healthcare, rural improvement to ladies’s empowerment.

Dharmasthala’s identification as a spiritual city is intently linked to the authority of the Sree Manjunatheshwara Temple directors, who’ve during the last century assumed larger-than-life roles within the lives of the folks. (Particular Association)

The Sree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Schooling Belief, a non-profit academic unit of the temple belief, for example, runs 40 establishments — from faculties and schools to skilled establishments.

Till the top of the seventeenth century, the area and the privately managed temple have been beneath the management of feudal lords of the Sthanik Brahmin neighborhood earlier than it shifted to the Jain Bunts in the course of the Anglo-Mysore wars, making it a novel non secular establishment — a Shiva temple administered by a Jain household with rituals performed by Brahmin monks.

Male heirs of the Pergade household, a Jain-Bunt neighborhood, have been chief directors or the ‘Dharmadhikaris’ of the temple and city for 21 generations — beginning with Varmanna Heggade to Veerendra Heggade, 76, a BJP-linked Rajya MP and a Padma Vibhushan awardee for social work, who has been dharmadhikari since 1968.

Folks have through the years deferred to the non secular and feudal authority that ruled their lives. But, rumours and murmurs of highhandedness by ‘highly effective forces’ have floated within the temple city for many years.

The primary public outrage occurred within the aftermath of the 2012 rape and homicide of faculty pupil Sowjanya, 17. Whereas Santosh Rao, a 34-year-old homeless man, was arrested within the case, a CBI investigation didn’t discover proof to nail anybody for the rape and homicide of the 17-year-old pupil.

The CBI probe additionally revealed that key proof within the case — equivalent to vaginal swabs of the sufferer — was tampered. In its order of June 16, 2023, a particular CBI courtroom, whereas acquitting Santosh, the one accused within the case, beneficial motion towards officers who allegedly botched up the investigation within the early phases.

Over 20 years later, the reminiscence of the crime and its injustice continues to linger within the city. With the current allegations, Sowjanya’s household has known as for the SIT probing the key burials to revisit the rape and homicide case. There are related calls for for revisiting different unresolved circumstances within the city – some going way back to 1979 — regardless of authorized resolutions to lots of the issues.

Key members of the Nagarika Seva Belief, a resistance group which has emerged to problem the authority of the temple administration, claims to have been followers of the Heggade household till they determined to chop ties following a homicide in 1986.

The founders of the belief, Ok Somanath Nayak and Ranjan Rao Yerdoor, have been waging authorized battles towards alleged injustices within the city. Nayak spent three months in jail in 2021 after a Belthangady courtroom held him responsible of violating an injunction and “indulging in malicious propaganda” towards temple-run establishments and members of Heggade household.

Speak of the city

Even these vital of the administration of the temple and the city, nevertheless, take into account the allegations as far-fetched and extreme.

“Earlier, nobody dared discuss towards the city or the household of the Heggades,” says the editor of a newspaper within the area, referring to social media campaigns searching for the reopening of outdated circumstances which have adopted the sanitation employee’s claims. Nevertheless, he says, half-truths have been being unfold in every single place concerning the case and that fact was now indistinguishable from the lies. “Judgment on the case, it seems, is already handed (by the general public) when the investigation is but to start,” he says.

Many residents of Dharmasthala are vehement of their defence of the temple authorities. There are additionally those that see the present controversy as a ploy by right-wing organisations to take management of the temple from the Jain household.

“Our bodies being discovered across the forests of the city isn’t new,” says a resident of the temple city. “I’ve seen our bodies of people that hanged themselves to dying owing to the assumption that they are going to obtain everlasting bliss by dying at a spiritual place like Dharmasthala.”

Dismissing rumours towards the temple directors, he says, “You can not discover one household that has not benefited from the Dhani (benevolent landlord).”

The Sree Manjunatheshwara Temple is a Shiva temple administered by a Jain household with rituals performed by Brahmin monks. (Wikimedia Commons)

Justifying an ex parte injunction granted by a Bengaluru courtroom to “delete/de-index” 8,812 hyperlinks throughout media platforms associated to information protection of the Dharmasthala secret burials, he says the marketing campaign towards the temple administration was “orchestrated” to defame the city and, by extension, the Heggade household.

In search of a decree for everlasting prohibitory injunction, Veerendra Heggade’s brother Harshendra Kumar D had in a petition contended that “unknown individuals or events are cropping up and began to make allegations towards the plaintiff, his elder brother and his members of the family, the temple and the establishments run by them” and “vested individuals are persevering with to make false, frivolous, baseless and vexatious video contents.”

In Kanyadi, a village that borders Dharmasthala, a resident says, “Ask us how many individuals have obtained subsidised schooling? What number of {couples} have been married, with the temple incurring all bills? What number of poor persons are supplied free or subsidised drugs in hospitals run beneath Shri Kshetra Dharmasthala?”

Those that swear by the household insist that the rumours haven’t diminished the aura of the temple or its dharmadhikari. “The relentless bombardment of faux information has affected the psychological peace of many within the city. Nevertheless, the variety of devotees has not dwindled as devotees of Lord Manjunatha have belief of their deity and custodians of the temple,” says the gram panchayat president.

“This can be a basic case the place those that can’t tolerate the celebrity achieved by an individual finally tries to besmirch him. You possibly can both do higher work than him or drag him down by incessant private assaults. Lord Manjunatha doesn’t spare such folks,” says a resident of Dharmasthala.

SIT has an uphill activity

The SIT constituted on July 19 faces an uphill activity as they examine the claims of secret burials of “lots of” of people that have been assaulted, rape or murdered over 20 years in the past.

To start with, the SIT must hint the households of those that went lacking within the area — just like the daughter of Sujata Bhat — after which match DNAs with our bodies which are claimed to have been buried by the previous sanitation employee.

The invention of those human stays have given a contemporary momentum to the allegations levelled by the sanitation employee, who was as soon as employed at Dharmasthala. (Particular Association)

The SIT must receive oral accounts in circumstances the place there have been no lacking complaints lodged within the city and procure DNA samples for matches with retrieved stays.

The SIT would even have to take a look at claims of land grabbing within the area the place folks have been pressured off their lands by dominant gamers.

“We must always know whether or not it (the alleged sexual assaults and murders) passed off or not. If we drag this alongside, then it gained’t be proper in response to the legislation both. Subsequently, we have now sought an investigation. I don’t know what’s going to come out of it,” Karnataka’s house minister G Parameshwara stated after the structure of the Particular Investigation Group.
“If the investigation fails to uncover one thing then we will say that there was no wrongdoing to most of the people,” he stated.