In the temple town of Dharmasthala, India, where pilgrims come seeking blessings and “peace of mind,” a darker search has been unfolding in parallel: a search for women who never came home. For years, families in Dakshina Kannada have spoken—often in whispers—about daughters who went missing, about “unnatural deaths,” about rape-and-murder cases that seemed to stall at the police station gate. Then, in July 2025, the silence cracked open with a testimony so grim it sounded like folklore—until it landed in a courtroom file and forced the Karnataka government to respond.
The whistleblower was described across reports as a former sanitation worker attached to the Dharmasthala temple administration, employed roughly from 1995 to 2014. He approached authorities as a masked man, and his story was not a vague rumour: it was procedural, place-specific, and steeped in the kind of detail that only a person who had physically handled evidence could narrate. He alleged that over those years he was coerced into disposing of bodies—many of them women and minors—at multiple spots he could identify. He claimed many bodies bore signs consistent with sexual violence and assault, and he described being ordered to bury bodies in secluded areas, including sites along the Netravathi river belt and forested patches around the town. In some versions of the account, he also alleged witnessing extreme violence against vulnerable people, including poor beggars, and said the burials were intended to erase crimes that powerful actors wanted forgotten.
The testimony detonated because it resonated with an older local memory: Dharmasthala has long been linked to contested, unresolved cases, including the 2012 rape-and-murder of a teenager (often referred to in Karnataka public debate as the Soujanya case). Multiple investigations over the years left families and supporters convinced that the truth was being diluted by delay, influence, and the exhaustion that comes when justice—इंसाफ (insaf, justice)—feels like a moving target.
Under pressure, police registered a case and, by July 19, 2025, the Karnataka government constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT). Excavations followed at locations the complainant pointed out—dig after dig, camera crews and forensic teams watching the earth open. Yet the early results quickly became ammunition for doubt: several sites yielded no remains, while a handful produced partial skeletal material and a skull and bones that required forensic validation.
Then came the moment that many women’s groups say illustrated the system’s reflex: focus on discrediting a messenger rather than protecting the vulnerable. In late August 2025, the SIT arrested the complainant on perjury-related allegations after inconsistencies emerged—most famously, officials said a skull presented as evidence in court did not match the claim that it belonged to a woman, based on forensic assessment. Bail conditions later reported in the press included restrictions such as reporting requirements and a ban on speaking to the media—details that fed the public sense that the story was being contained, not clarified.
For women’s rights advocates, the crisis was never only about whether one whistleblower was perfectly reliable. It was about the pattern: decades of women marked as गुमशुदा (gumshuda, missing), reduced to case numbers; “unnatural deaths” treated as paperwork; allegations circulating through a climate of डर (dar, fear) and ख़ामोशी (khamoshi, silence). In August 2025, women’s organisations and long-time women’s rights workers launched a statewide movement with a blunt question in Kannada and English: “Kondavaru Yaaru – Who Killed the Women of Dharmasthala?” Their demand was expansive by design: investigate disappearances, sexual assaults, unresolved crimes, and suspicious deaths connected to the Dharmasthala region—not just the sensational “mass burial” allegation, and not only the cases the media happens to remember.
From November 1, the campaign widened into colleges, labour unions, self-help groups, and villages, gathering signatures and postcards—an old-fashioned tactic for a modern scandal, insisting that a woman’s life is not a disposable headline. On December 10, 2025 (Human Rights Day), the Karnataka State Commission for Women publicly echoed the need for statewide mobilisation, as the movement presented a large tranche of signatures in Bengaluru. Six days later, on December 16, thousands converged in Belthangady for a silent march and “Mahila Nyaya Samavesha,” submitting memoranda and pressing the SIT to treat women’s safety as a systemic issue rather than an inconvenience to be managed.
In Dharmasthala, faith and fear now share the same geography. The question that remains is not only “Was every claim true?” but “Why did it take a masked man—and a movement led by women—to make the state look properly at what families have been saying for years?”
Spicy Auntie has walked through temple towns before. She knows the smell of incense, the rhythm of bells, the way faith can soften people’s faces. And she also knows how easily that softness turns into silence when women disappear. Dharmasthala is not unique in that sense—it is just more exposed right now. A sacred place where the bodies of women were allegedly treated like trash to be removed, buried, forgotten. If that doesn’t make you angry, check your pulse.
Let’s talk about the whistleblower. Everyone is suddenly obsessed with whether he is “credible,” whether one skull matched one story, whether he contradicted himself. Auntie finds this very convenient. When women report rape, they are grilled for years about timelines, clothing, memory gaps. When a man speaks about bodies he claims he buried under coercion, the entire state rushes to discredit him the moment his story becomes uncomfortable. Maybe he lied. Maybe he told the truth badly. But here is the real question: why did his words sound so familiar to so many families?
Because women have been disappearing from this region for decades. Because “unnatural death” has become a polite bureaucratic euphemism. Because justice for women is always conditional, always delayed, always waiting for a perfect victim and a perfect witness. Spoiler: they don’t exist.
The investigation that followed felt less like a search for truth and more like damage control. Dig here, dig there, announce inconclusive results, arrest the man who dared to speak, restrict him, quiet him down. Case closed? Not quite. What authorities underestimated—again—was women’s memory. Women remember patterns. Women connect dots. Women are very good at asking the one question men in power hate most: “Who benefited from our silence?”
That is why “Kondavaru Yaaru – Who Killed the Women of Dharmasthala?” matters. Not as a slogan, but as a refusal. A refusal to let this story shrink into a technical debate about forensic margins. A refusal to let dead women become collateral damage in a reputational war. A refusal to bow before power simply because it wears a sacred mask.
When women marched in Belthangady, silently, they were not asking for miracles. They were asking for something radically simple: take women’s lives seriously. Investigate all the cases, not just the embarrassing ones. Stop pretending that faith cancels crime. Stop acting as if silence is harmony.
Spicy Auntie will say this plainly. If you are more offended by questions than by dead women, you are on the wrong side of history. Truth does not stay buried forever. It leaks. It smells. And eventually, it demands witnesses.