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
  3. AnonymousJuly 22, 2025 at 6:29 PM

    Very scandalising and bone chilling! How would we leave our girl children work in cities, staying alone? And we are not given any security by the government! Where are we?
    Dawnanddew

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 22, 2025 at 9:10 PM

      Cities? And I'm speaking about temples.

      Delete
    2. AnonymousJuly 22, 2025 at 10:40 PM

      More terrifying. Sorry for being preoccupied with personal issues!

      Delete
  4. magiceyeJuly 22, 2025 at 6:41 PM

    Horror of horrors unveiled.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AmbicaJuly 22, 2025 at 8:39 PM

    We aren't safe anywhere. Remember the small nomadic girl who was taped for 8 days in Kashmir. The world is full of beasts. It's Kalyug.

    ReplyDelete
  6. rupam sarmaJuly 22, 2025 at 8:48 PM

    Horrifying incident... So sad to read

    ReplyDelete
  7. Liz A.July 23, 2025 at 3:38 AM

    Chilling. And very, very sad. Powerful people get away with such things because no one holds them accountable. And while we remain in thrall to those with "power", nothing will change.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Linda's Relaxing LairJuly 23, 2025 at 4:07 AM

    Very sad.

    ReplyDelete
  9. peppylady (Dora)July 24, 2025 at 6:55 AM

    There plenty of sexual assaults in religion.

    ReplyDelete
  10. HaddockJuly 24, 2025 at 7:36 AM

    I wonder if heads would roll (in this case). I am sure there were many casualties than what is reported. Like Dora said above, there are plenty of sexual assaults in religion (any religion)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 24, 2025 at 9:34 AM

      Very powerful people are involved. So can't say what will happen. Most probably nothing much.

      Delete
  11. rifle range boyJuly 24, 2025 at 2:21 PM

    Religion gives a get-out-of-jail free card. Just promise the unattainable.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 24, 2025 at 3:08 PM

      Religion probably is the most misused human instrument.

      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

Modi’s Art of Censorship

One of the infinite ironies about Narendra Modi’s India is its flagrant censorship while claiming to be the most tolerant civilisation. A Guardian report today informs us that Arundhati Roy’s 2020 book, Azadi , is banned in Kashmir for promoting a “false narrative and secessionism.” Being a fan of Ms Roy’s rebellious spirit, I buy her books as they are published. I had reviewed this book ( Azadi ) back in 2020 when it was published. The Congress government that ruled India for a very long period, before Modi’s rhetoric mesmerised the Indian electorate, was highly flawed. Corruption ran in its every single vein. Yet it was far better than what Modi brought in its place. The glaring hypocrisy of the Congress was a glue that held India together, Ms Roy says in this censored book of hers. What she means to say is that though secularism was not practised sincerely or consistently the pretence of it acted as a binding force that maintained a kind of social and political equilibrium. T...
9 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Solzhenitsyn’s Many Disillusionments

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died a sad and disillusioned man. Solzhenitsyn was a genuine socialist in the beginning. He fought for the Red Army in WWII. He was a committed Soviet patriot. Equality, justice, and dignity of the workers were his ideals, his dreams. However, Stalin became a brutal dictator and Solzhenitsyn became his vocal critic. As a result, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to the Gulag: a network of inhuman labour camps. Hundreds of Russians were tortured and killed in those camps and Solzhenitsyn was disillusioned with socialism. The Russian Revolution was supposed to have liberated the common citizens from imperial oppressions. However, the new government under Stalin was far more ruthless, unjust, and oppressive than the empire. The socialist ideology became a kind of deity for which everything else was sacrificed, including truth. Writing the story of his life in the camp in The Gulag Archipelago , Solzhenitsyn warned that such systems coul...
9 comments
Read more