How activists raised concerns about Dharmasthala temple for years – but were ignored and punished

“Nobody can say they did not know,” Ranjan Rao said angrily.

Seventy-five-year-old Rao is one of the founders of the Nagarika Seva Trust, based in the village of Guruvayankere in Dakshina Kannada district. For nearly 50 years, the organisation has worked on various social and environmental causes in the region, including those concerning minorities, labourers and farmers.

The trust has faced several challenges, but Rao said one of the steepest has been getting authorities to investigate the alleged illegal activities of the organisation that runs the Shri Kshetra Dharmasthala Manjunatha Swamy Temple in the temple town of Dharmasthala. The organisation is headed by the hereditary administrator Veerendra Heggade, whom the union government nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 2022.

“There is not a single door that we didn’t knock on. We have shared our reports and findings with every minister, politician, just anybody who was capable of taking action,” Rao said. “In the state government and as well as people in the Centre.”

Rao’s assertions are particularly striking in light of the recent allegations by an anonymous whistleblower, who had worked for many decades at the temple, and who said temple authorities had forced him to secretly bury several bodies between 1995 and 2014.

He alleged that most of the bodies were of women, and showed signs of sexual assault and violence, such as strangulation. In July, the Karnataka government launched a Special Investigation Team probe into the allegations, and began visiting sites where the whistleblower said he had buried bodies.

So far, the team has exhumed one partial and one intact skull, and 100 bones from two of the 13 sites the whistleblower has shown them. Another witness has also come forward and claimed that he was a witness to an illegal burial.

Even as the developments receive breathless media coverage, Rao believes that action could have been taken earlier. “It’s ridiculous that people are trying to make it seem like the dubious nature of the temple administration was not already known,” he said.

Indeed, apart from seeking to shed light on the trust’s alleged illegal activities, the trust had also unearthed information pertaining to the pattern of unnatural deaths in the region, now in much sharper focus after the whistleblower’s allegations.

Scroll emailed the temple administration and Veerendra Heggade, seeking responses to allegations made against them. In a reply sent on August 14 – two days after this report was originally published – the temple administrator claimed that it had been “the target of a sustained campaign of sensational and unverified claims” and that the allegations against it “have been proven beyond doubt to be false”.

The administrator added that the Special Investigative Team is “the only legitimate and competent authority to examine such serious matters” and “to protect the integrity of their ongoing work, it would be inappropriate for us to comment on specific claims or rumors currently circulating in the public domain”.

The trust’s early years

The Nagarika Seva Trust was founded in 1976 by Rao and his fellow activist Somanath Nayak. When it first began, the trust worked closely with the temple, which runs several educational institutions, self-help groups and rural development projects, and also gives out small loans.

“They were also doing a lot of social welfare work, in the same areas as us, so we had a cordial relationship with them,” Rao said.

He recounted that in the initial years, they had heard that the temple administration had links to criminal activities in the region. In 1987, a young woman named Padmalatha had been kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered and many accused the temple administration of having a hand in the crime.

Rao said he and Nayak did not believe the accusations at first.

“We spoke in support of the temple administration and refused to believe that it had anything to do with the murders,” Nayak said.

Then, Nayak recounted, even the police approached them. “The police warned us that it was best that we maintain our distance from the temple administration,” Nayak said. “After listening to what the police had to say, we decided that it was best for us to not associate with the temple administration.”

As they continued with their work, the activists became more aware of the power the temple wielded, and heard locals’ accounts that the administration would harass and intimidate them, usually over matters of land ownership and use. Rao said that the temple administration’s power was indicated in a moniker that was often used for the town: the Republic of Dharmasthala.

In the years that followed, Nayak and Rao heard of mysterious disappearances of women, but did not come across any concrete evidence that the temple was involved.

Soujanya’s death and RTI applications

Suspicions against the temple administration began to grow more intense from 2012 onwards. That year, a 17-year-old woman named Soujanya, a student of an institution run by the temple authorities, was raped and murdered. The family of the victim alleged that the perpetrators had links to the temple administration.

The crime was followed by several protests against the temple by locals, who believed the family’s allegations were true.

“Only after Soujanya, more people began to hear about the suspicious activities in Dharmasthala,” Nayak said.

Rao and Nayak devised a plan to try and shed some light on the rumours that had been swirling about in the town: they filed a right-to-information application seeking to know how many unnatural deaths had occurred between 2000 and 2012 in Dharmasthala and Ujire. They chose the former because it was the location of the temple headquarters, and the latter because most of the administration’s educational institutions were situated there.

The response revealed that between January 2001 and October 2012, 11 murders and 424 suicides had occurred during this period in the two towns.

Using population data from the 2001 and 2011 censuses, Scroll calculated the suicide rates for the two towns in the years that saw the lowest and highest number of suicides, and compared these with the national suicide rates for the same years. In 2005, the two towns saw 27 suicides, a rate 16 times higher than the national suicide rate. In 2003, they saw 45 suicides, a rate 28 times higher than the national suicide rate.

The activists noted that the number of such deaths appeared to drop dramatically in the decade that followed. “After the attention around Soujanya’s murder, the deaths seemed to have reduced,” Rao said. “It could be because the perpetrators became scared.”

This assessment was borne out in 2020, when the trust filed another right-to-information application seeking similar details from between 2013 and 2020. The response noted that 17 people had been murdered and that 98 “unnatural deaths” had occurred – a significantly lower number than the previous decade despite being a broader category.

The activists published the data they had obtained in reports, along with other investigations into matters pertaining to the temple, such as land tussles. They presented their information to various officials – but, they recounted, the officials did not probe them further.

In fact, the activists noted, after they stepped up their scrutiny of the allegations surrounding the temple, the administration began to act against them. “It was after 2012 that the temple administration started to go after Somanath,” said Rao. “They started filing cases against us and we also filed cases against them.”

The activists managed to avoid major difficulties until 2022, when a Belthangady court sentenced Nayak to three months in prison for supposedly disobeying a temporary injunction that barred him from publishing material that portrayed the family running the temple negatively. “The temple administration claimed that I was focusing all my attention needlessly on them and spreading propaganda,” Nayak said. “It was funny for me to hear because I focus on so many issues, not just them.”

Journalists’ efforts

Over the years, some local journalists also wrote regularly about the murders and disappearances in Dharmasthala.

Among the publications that maintained a focus on the matter was Lankesh Patrike, a local newspaper founded by P Lankesh, the father of murdered journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh. The paper, which referred to the temple administration as “Dharmasthala mafia” in one of its articles, consistently ran pieces alleging the involvement of the temple authorities in the murders of a woman named Padmalatha and another named Vedavalli.

“Mainstream media houses did not show much interest in covering the issue. But Lankesh’s newspaper diligently published pieces,” Rao said.

One article published in Lankesh Patrike on March 14, 2001, to mark 14 years since Padmalatha’s death, noted that Padmalatha’s father Devanand, a communist leader, had taken on a candidate propped up by the temple administration in gram panchayat elections in 1986. It alleged that the administration targeted his daughter because he chose to contest the elections.

Padmalatha had set out for her college on the morning of December 22, 1986, but never returned home. Two months later, her decomposed body was found near the Neriya Hole stream near Dharmasthala, her hands bound and her body bearing signs of brutal assault and rape.

“Murders are not rare in Dharmasthala, bodies suddenly appearing in the Netravati stream is not unusual,” the article read.

The article also recalled the 1979 murder of Vedavalli, noting that she was the wife of Dr Buddappa Revanappa Harale, and a teacher at one of the temple organisation’s schools. She was allegedly denied a promotion on the basis of her caste and had protested against the administration. Following this, it noted that Vedavalli “ended up mysteriously murdered one day”.

Another journalist who followed the Dharmasthala temple’s activities closely was Seetharam BV, the founder and editor-in-chief of Karavalli Ale, a newspaper based in Mangalore.

“I’ve always raised my voice on the suspicious activities by the temple management,” Seetharam told Scroll. “To this day, I continue to write on the matter.”

Seetharam claimed that the Dharmasthala temple administration heavily advertised in popular media spaces and that this discouraged investigation into the administration’s activities. “Since newspapers were getting a lot of ads from the administration, reporters were discouraged from covering any negative news about the Dharmasthala temple,” he said.

He added, “The administration also threatened journalists to prevent them from writing.”

He recounted that his own publication’s own office was attacked multiple times, even after it was granted police protection – though he added that he did not have proof of who carried out the attacks.

Seetharam also recounted that many of his readers would write to the paper with comments on the incidents that they would publish. “People knew about these incidents and trusted us to report on it,” he said. “But nobody had the courage to directly accuse the temple administration.”

Seetharam has faced other serious consequences for writing and publishing material against the temple administration: in 2014 , a judicial magistrate court sentenced him to 30 months in jail in connection with cases filed against him by the family that ran the temple administration. The accusations against him included criminal defamation and violating court injunctions.

“The Karnataka High Court eventually stayed the verdict in 2015,” Seetharam said.

The temple administration’s efforts to shut journalistic voices down has been apparent even in recent weeks, as it has sought to block media reporting on the investigations into the whistleblower’s claims. It obtained a favourable order from a trial court in Bengaluru, which was subsequently quashed by higher courts.

Other allegations

The Nagarika Seva Trust has also made claims to the media and on its own platforms that the temple administration was involved in activities such as land grabbing and encroachment.

The trust recently had some success in a petition they filed against the brother of Veerendra Heggade, the temple administrator.

The brother, Harshendra Heggade, had obtained 7.59 acres of land in Dharmasthala from the government in 1972, after claiming he was “landless”, had an annual income of Rs 1,200 and did not inherit any land from his family. In its petition, the trust argued that Harshendra’s claims of being landless and having a low income were false.

In February, a Puttur revenue official ruled in favour of the trust and cancelled the grant of land to Harshendra.

Nayak explained there were other cases against the temple that were currently in courts.

One of these, the trust noted in one of its reports, from 2017, pertained to alleged illegal sale deeds linked to temple officials. “The Assistant Commissioner’s Court of Puttur has ordered cancelling of 25 sale deeds of the agricultural lands purchased illegally by the SDM Educational Society headed by Veerendra Heggade in Ujire, Belthangadi, Kuvettu and Odilnala villages and has ordered the confiscation of 132 acres of land,” the trust stated in the report.

Despite the unprecedented scrutiny of the temple’s activities, however, Rao is not hopeful that justice will be done anytime soon. “It may take another 20 years for justice to be served,” he said. “I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime or in the lifetime of the people accused.”

This story was updated on August 14 to include the response of the temple administration.