Skip to main content

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple

Dharmasthala: The Shadows Behind the Sanctum

Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru).

Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This man left his job in 2014 when his own relatives were sexually assaulted by the temple people. He was intimidated into silence. He could not bear the guilt and grief anymore and thus he approached the magistrate with his confession.

The temple is situated on over 400 acres of land. Beneath the aura of sanctity lie chilling stories of sexually exploited women. It is estimated that at least 400 women went missing or found dead over the past two decades. The police didn’t take any interest in investigating the cases. Because the family that runs the temple, the Heggades, are extremely powerful.

The media didn’t report these cases for the same reason: fear. The News Minute, which had reported on the case extensively for years, was compelled to take it all down.

I came to know about this only when a Malayalam weekly wrote its latest editorial on the issue expressing surprise over the silence of political parties as well as the media. Well, surprise is out of place, we know. There’s so much oppression and exploitation of all types of citizens – not only women – going on in this country every single day. But I don’t wish to digress.

Dharmasthala has transfixed me.

Dharmasthala raises a more focused question: are we safe even in our sacred spaces?

PM Modi in the temple


  

Labels:

Comments

  1. Jose D. MaliekalJuly 22, 2025 at 10:22 AM

    " Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. " And the corruption of the best is the worst." Thanks for having excavated the Dharmasthala story for me. This report had faded from my memory... Like many new normals.. of our Kaliyuga. What is disgusting is the repetitveness of the action and the wanton Amnesia.. And Collective.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 22, 2025 at 4:03 PM

      The corruption of the best is the deadliest.

      I was not aware of this particular "corruption" until this morning. It stunned me. How would any society permit such things to go on for years?

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanJuly 22, 2025 at 1:43 PM

    Hari Om
    Where men gather en masse, mischief will always arise... where mischief is not corrected, evil creeps in. For some reason this sad tale puts me in mind of the Epstein 'club'... power displaying how immoral it is. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 22, 2025 at 4:05 PM

      I wouldn't dare to use the word 'mischief' here. This is beyond comprehension. Such things happening for years!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

Akbar the Brutal

When I was in school, I was taught that Akbar was a great emperor. ‘Akbar the Great’ was the title of the lesson on him. That was how the emperor was described in history in those days. Now the grade 8 history textbook calls that same man Akbar the Brutal . A lot of efforts are being made to rewrite India’s history. All Muslims are evil in that new history. In fact, everyone except Hindus stands the chance of being accused of much evil. It is sheer coincidence that I started reading Manu S Pillai’s new book, Gods, Guns and Missionaries , soon after reading newspaper reports about the alleged brutality of the Mughals. In the very first chapter, Pillai presents Akbar as a serious spiritual seeker as well as advocate of religious tolerance. Pillai’s knowledge of history is vast if the 218 pages of Notes in the book are any indication. Chapter 1, titled ‘Monsters and Missionaries’, starts with three Jesuit missionaries led by Rodolfo Acquaviva visiting Akbar on a personal invitatio...
16 comments
Read more

The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...
8 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
16 comments
Read more