Content warning: Mentions sexual violence and murder. Please proceed with caution.
Imagine you're someone who knows something others don’t. It plagues your mind day by day, every night when you fall asleep, keeping your mind wide awake even when your body needs rest. The hours pass by, and you feel with every second that something could just happen that tips you off the edge completely.
It never arrives, however. The feeling of something happening never happens. Days pass by normally, and your life goes on well enough. But why does everyone else seem so fine while you don’t?
As you lose more and more sleep by keeping silent for so long, you’ve finally had enough and finally blurted out the truth. A wave of relief crashes over you, for the first time in many years.
But that can never truly resolve the things you have done. Or ever resolve what you saw them do.
So who is truly in power here? The perpetrators, or yourself?
What exactly did the 48-year-old Dalit man, who has seemingly been in hiding for over 12 years, have to confess?
The confession
On July 11th of 2025, a 48-year-old Dalit man had come to the local court in Belthagandy to make a statement. The man belonged to the Dalit community, known to be the least privileged caste within the Indian hierarchy.
Upon his arrival, dressed in black clothing, he made a terrifying confession that shook the small town of Dharmashtla.
He alleged that he had been coerced into burying the dead bodies of over a hundred women who were raped before being murdered. He was also beaten up and was threatened with harm towards him and his family if he didn’t comply with what the perpetrators asked of him, which was to dispose of the bodies.
Noting that if he hadn’t complied with their demands, he would be buried alongside them.
After years of being hidden away, the guilt and paranoia were too much for his mind to bear. His purpose of being there was to unearth the dead bodies, as well as to reveal the perpetrators who carried out the murders, under the condition that his identity remain anonymous.
This soon created a huge commotion within the state, as the official Karnataka government had started a thorough investigation to find the bodies according to the man’s claims.
The man was soon arrested the next morning for the crime of perjury (an act of dishonesty or false claims), before they investigated further.
Outcry across the state
The bodies were said to have been buried between the years 1995 and 2014.
Even then, there had been many protests regarding the many deaths and disappearances, including brutal rapes within the area of Dharmasthala, all the way back to the 1980s. An example is the “Justice for Sowjanya” movement that started after a teenager’s rape and murder in 2012.
Many of the bodies had been identified with the help of the man, from a young teenage girl to a woman whose face had been burned, according to the man. Unfortunately, some have still yet to be identified due to the amount of decay and rot of the skeletal remains, which made tracing the identities of the victims difficult.
The bodies that have been identified, however, have also given some hints of connections to the many cases that have happened across the area, with a notable one being that of a medical student by the name of Ananya Bhat who had disappeared back in 2003.
“India had never seen this gravity of offence in its republic after Independence," was stated by S Balan, a senior lawyer and human rights activist, a part of the Karnataka High Court.
Some family members had come forward after the truth had been revealed, requesting the reporters, after filing complaints,s to find the skeletal remains of those they'd lost.
12 Years of Silence
The most jarring thing we can note here is the amount of time it took for the man to come forth with such a truth.
It was December 2014 when the man decided to go into hiding in a neighbouring state after one of his female relatives was harassed by someone connected to the temple supervisors, bringing his family along with him.
There they stayed, for over 12 years. Until his own conscience and guilt took hold of him to the point where he could no longer stay in the dark about the truth.
The man was but a sanitation worker under Dharmasthala temple, someone with the least power over everyone else. Someone whose role was not too notable.
Yet it is he who held the most powerful knowledge over everyone else.
He had found the bodies of the women and girls near the riverside. The authorities never knew about it, as he was threatened to bury them by his supervisors, and he was called to specific locations where the bodies were to be disposed of.
Some of them were older women with marks across their bodies; others were minor girls in their school uniforms.
The man was responsible for the burial of the many souls that never got a chance to rest peacefully, who never got the justice they deserved.
No one else knew, except for the man. He continued the same task for 19 years out of fear of anything happening to himself or his family. It was a pain kept away from the eyes of many.
The contrast between the one with the lowest rank, but who holds the most over everyone else, is a key part of the entire investigation. If the man hadn’t said anything and stayed in silence until he passed away, none of this would have ever been brought to light.
Yet, just the words of a single man alone can shake up an entire state just like that. That is the true mark of power: someone you will never ever assume to possess it.
As more cases come up within the country, something as jarring as this tells us how much can still be hiding out there. Individuals who have yet to come clean about truths, ones who can never say what they truly know, and many others who would rather stay in silence.
If someone as simple as a common person working for a temple can hold such a shattering truth that explains an entire period of violent cases, who knows what else is left to be brought to the public?
We shall only see to the future for answers.
References:
- https://www.aljazeera.com
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgm2z9zjgx7o
- https://frontline.thehindu.com