On July 11, a man veiled entirely in black, with only a narrow strip of mesh revealing his eyes, entered a court in India’s Karnataka state to record his statement.

The complainant, a former sanitation worker at a Hindu temple in Dharmasthala, has come forward with claims of decades of rapes, mass graves, and killings, violence he claims was orchestrated and concealed by powerful figures tied to the revered institution.

For centuries, Dharmasthala, an 800-year-old pilgrimage village on the banks of the Nethravathi River, has drawn the faithful in search of divine justice.

Nearly 2,000 people arrive each day to offer prayers to Lord Manjunatha, a deity believed to reward virtue and punish wrongdoing. It is a place of ritual and reverence. But, according to the veiled man, it is also something else.

On July 3, after twelve years in hiding, the former sanitation worker resurfaced. In a sworn statement to the police, he said he was coming forward “with an extremely heavy heart and to recover from an insurmountable sense of guilt.”

“I can no longer bear the burden of memories of the murders I witnessed,” he wrote in the complaint, which has since prompted a state-led investigation by a Special Investigation Team.

In his testimony, obtained by TRT World, the man, or the whistleblower, described burying hundreds of bodies, many of them women and girls bore visible signs of sexual assault, beating, and mutilation. Refusal to cooperate, he claimed, brought death threats.

“This has been going on for the last 40 years. I know that people are dying, people are being raped, killed, and buried in Dharmasthala,” S. Balan, a senior human rights advocate, tells TRT World.

The whistleblower belongs to the Dalit community, the most marginalised and historically persecuted group in India’s caste hierarchy. His name is protected by law.

His account has reopened long-festering wounds in a town where the sacred and the unspeakable have lived side by side.

‘Obey or be cut into pieces’

The man claims he worked under the temple administration from 1995 to 2014. His initial assignment was simple enough: clean the riverbanks near the Nethravathi. It was there that he first began to encounter the dead.

At first, he assumed the bodies had belonged to drowning victims or suicides. But over time, that explanation wore thin.

“But soon, I noticed that many female corpses were found without clothes or undergarments. Some corpses showed clear signs of sexual assault and violence,” he said.

One day, he refused to bury a body. He claims that is when the threats began.

“There was no doubt in their threat, it was ‘obey or be cut into pieces along with your family,’” he later told police.

According to his testimony, he was summoned to burial sites by men he identified as supervisors linked to the temple. The corpses he was ordered to bury, he said, were often those of minor girls.

“The absence of undergarments, torn clothes, and injuries to their private parts indicated brutal sexual assault,” he said.

In one harrowing account, he recalled being dispatched in 2010 to a site near a petrol station where he found the body of a girl aged 12 to 15. She wore a school shirt, her skirt and underwear were missing, and her school bag lay beside her.

“There were strangulation marks on her neck,” the complaint stated. “They instructed me to dig a pit and bury her along with her school bag. That scene remains disturbing to this day.”

Other cases, he alleged, involve homeless men, tied to chairs, suffocated with towels, and disposed of in remote forests. Some bodies were burned using diesel. He claimed he had buried corpses “in several locations throughout Dharmasthala… they numbered in the hundreds.”

In December 2014, after a female relative was harassed, he fled the town. He has been in hiding ever since.

The dead have spoken

Families of the missing, along with activists and rights lawyers, have for years voiced suspicion that Dharmasthala, marketed as a spiritual sanctuary, has also served as a backdrop for organised violence.

In 1987, a 17-year-old named Padmalatha was raped and murdered. Protests followed, but the case was buried. In 2012, the brutal killing of a teenager named Sowjanya inspired a grassroots movement, Justice for Sowjanya. That case, too, remains unsolved. In 2003, a medical student named Ananya Bhat vanished after being last seen in Dharmasthala.

The whistleblower’s testimony has reignited these cases.

Sujatha Bhat, Ananya’s mother, has filed a new complaint. Her lawyer, N. Manjunath, said she now suspects her daughter may be among the victims.

Manjunath also said that the worker identified at least fourteen suspected burial sites, most of them located deep within India’s protected reserve forests, land where burial is legally prohibited without state clearance.

Manjunath further claimed that, according to the complainant-witness, the site with the most bodies is not among the currently marked 13 locations. It is believed to be situated further away and will be taken up once the present round of exhumations is complete.

The temple’s administration, for its part, has responded publicly.

K. Parshwanath Jain, a spokesperson for the Dharmasthala trust, said the institution supports a full investigation.

“Truth and belief are the strongest foundation for a society’s ethics and faith. Therefore, it is our sincere hope and earnest demand that the SIT conducts the highest level of investigation and brings out true facts to light,” he added.

To many observers, the allegations are not shocking so much as familiar.

Balan calls it a “system failure.” He cited multiple examples of obstruction. He cited examples where investigations were deliberately thwarted.

“In the Padmalatha case, the officer initially investigating was abruptly transferred. His successor filed a closure report, he tells TRT World.

“In the Saujanya case, the court acquitted the accused and asked that action be taken against the police officials,” Balan adds. “If the lawmaker becomes a lawbreaker, what can the law enforcer do?

He stated that repeated chargesheets went missing, investigations were stalled, and the State Crime Records Bureau remained silent despite recurring complaints.

The temple trust, he adds, is not just a religious body. It controls schools, hospitals, and social institutions across Karnataka, an empire of influence that may explain the decades of silence.

Skeletons tumbling everywhere

The whistleblower, for his part, has reportedly exhumed at least one skeleton. He has offered to lead police to other burial sites.

In his statement, he avoided naming individuals directly, citing fear. “Some of the persons I will name are very influential and have a tendency to eliminate those who oppose them.”

Despite the lack of names in the police complaint, Balan said the account is credible.

“He refers to the burial of many young girls in the age group of 16 to 20… most of the victims have been raped and murdered. Some of the girls’ faces were disfigured using acid.”

Under Indian law, unnatural deaths require a post-mortem, a public notice, and proper documentation. None of these procedures appear to have been followed in the cases the whistleblower describes.

The complainant-witness has told police he is prepared to undergo polygraph tests and guide investigators to the sites. What comes next, say legal experts, depends on whether the SIT can operate without political pressure.

“The entire ecosystem may support the culprits,” says Balan. “But if the SIT breaks one inch, they can make a huge hole.”