On July 11, 2025, a man showed up at a court in Belthangady covered head to toe in black cloth. Only a thin mesh strip let him see out. He was scared that someone would come after him for what he was about to say. So scared that the court agreed to keep his name secret.
He told the magistrate. From 1995 to 2014, he worked as a sanitation worker at the Dharmasthala temple. He said that people above him made him bury more than a hundred bodies during those years. Most of them were women and girls, many showing signs of sexual assault. In 2014, a member of his family was harassed, which prompted him to flee. He said he stayed quiet about all of it for more than ten years. Because he was scared. What finally made him talk? His guilt had gotten worse than the fear.
It's the type of statement that can't be kept under control. Within days, it was national news. Within weeks, Karnataka's government had formed a Special Investigation Team.
A town that has carried grief before
Dharmasthala has seen this kind of pain before, and that's part of why the claim spread so fast. It's an 800-year-old pilgrimage town on the Nethravathi River, and close to 2,000 people visit it every day. But it also has a history of real, unresolved tragedy going back decades.
Take Padmalatha. In December 1986, this college student went missing. She was last seen near the Dharmasthala bus stop. Two months later, her body turned up near a stream. Her father, a local political leader, spent years demanding answers. The case was eventually closed as undetected. Her sister is still asking the state to reopen it.
Then there's Sowjanya. She was 17, a student at a college tied to the temple. In 2012, she went missing, and her body was found the next day, her hands tied with her own shawl. Police arrested a man, and the case went to trial. In 2023, he was acquitted, and the court didn't stop there. It said the investigation itself had been a mess, evidence tampered with, and leads that just weren't followed up. Sowjanya's father spent the rest of his life trying to get the case reopened. He died in early 2025 without seeing that happen.
So when the sanitation worker's claim surfaced, it didn't land in a vacuum. It landed on top of decades of families who already believed, with reason, that something in this town had gone unexamined for far too long.
What the digging found, and what came after
The complainant pointed investigators to roughly a dozen sites in the forested land along the riverbank. Over several weeks, SIT teams, forensic experts, and revenue officials excavated site after site. Most turned up nothing. Two yielded skeletal remains, sent off for testing.
Then, in one of the statements he gave before a magistrate, the man produced a human skull and said it belonged to a woman. Forensic analysis found otherwise. It belonged to a man in his thirties.
On August 23, 2025, the SIT arrested him for perjury. His identity became public for the first time: C. N. Chinnaiah. Under questioning, he reportedly told investigators he'd been pushed into filing the false complaint by a group of local activists, and that the skull itself had been dug up separately and handed to him to present as evidence.
Then in November, things got a lot bigger. The SIT filed a chargesheet, almost 3,900 pages long, naming six people. Chinnaiah was one of them. So were a few activists, and a woman named Sujatha Bhat. She had a separate claim on record, too, that her daughter, a medical student, went missing from Dharmasthala back in 2003. But according to the chargesheet, she later admitted that the story wasn't true either. It came from a property dispute, not a real disappearance. Chinnaiah got bail in late November, after about three months in custody, and the whole case is now sitting with the courts.
It's worth being honest about where that leaves things. The specific claims of a hundred-plus bodies, at least as laid out by this one complainant, did not hold up to forensic scrutiny, and the state's own investigators now allege they were engineered. That is a serious finding, and also not the end of the story, because a chargesheet is an accusation, not yet a verdict, and because Padmalatha's and Sowjanya's cases were never part of what's alleged to be fabricated. Those two girls are still just as dead, their cases still just as unsolved, as they were before any of this began.
What's left standing
There's a reason a claim like Chinnaiah's could travel as far and as fast as it did, even before a single bone was tested. People don't extend trust evenly. Institutions wrapped in centuries of reverence tend to get the benefit of the doubt right up until someone with nothing to gain says otherwise, and then that trust can flip almost overnight. It's a very human way of thinking, and it's also exactly the kind of thinking that can be pointed in a false direction if someone knows how to aim it.
What's harder to sit with is that both things can be true at once. A fabricated conspiracy can exploit a very real history of institutional failure. Karnataka's own courts have already acknowledged, in Sowjanya's case, that evidence was mishandled, and leads were buried. That's not an allegation. That's a court's finding. So the appetite for believing something worse was happening in Dharmasthala wasn't paranoia pulled from nowhere. It was built on documented ground.
Where this leaves the town, and the families still waiting for someone to reopen Padmalatha's file or take Sowjanya's case seriously again, is unresolved. The mass burial claim, as told by one man in a black cloak, appears to have crumbled under its own weight. The older wounds it opened back up have not.
References:
- Al Jazeera, "Why is India investigating alleged mass killings of sexual assault victims?", July 22, 2025: https://www.aljazeera.com
- DW, "Did Indian temple officials cover up a mass murder?", July 25, 2025: https://www.dw.com
- Wikipedia, "Dharmasthala mass burial case" (timeline cross-checked against The Hindu, Deccan Herald, and PTI reporting): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharmasthala_mass_burial_case
- The News Minute, "Karnataka's lingering shame: Sowjanya's murder and the cops unpunished," March 2025: https://www.thenewsminute.com
- Deccan Chronicle, report on the Padmalatha case reinvestigation request, August 2025: https://www.deccanchronicle.com
- Devdiscourse / PTI, report on the SIT chargesheet naming six accused, November 2025: https://www.devdiscourse.com
- Madhyamam, report on Chinnaiah's bail and Sujatha Bhat's retraction, November 2025: https://madhyamamonline.com