The Karnataka High Court on Wednesday (18th March) directed the Congress government in Karnataka to file a detailed statement regarding the investigation carried out by the police in the ‘mass burial’ hoax case in the Hindu pilgrimage centre of Dharmasthala.
A Division Bench of Chief Justice Vibhu Bakhru and Justice C.M. Poonacha issued the direction after the counsel appearing for the petitioners claimed before the court that 74 unnatural deaths happened in the case and the police did not follow the inquest proceedings and post-mortem as per Section 194 BNSS (Section 174(3) of CrPC).
The counsel further alleged that the records on the unnatural deaths in Dharmasthala till 2010 have been destroyed by the police in compliance with a government circular, as a form of administrative procedure. He added that the authorities have the details of post 2010 unnatural deaths registered in Dharmasthala.
“…there are no documents for the year 2002, Your Lordship. We will trace the available records. In 2023, we have destroyed old records for administrative reasons…,” the counsel for the respondent State submitted, raising concerns over the filing of the PIL in the case after a lag of 20 years.
The petition filed before the High Court sought a writ of mandamus for the Special Investigation Team (SIT) to register 74 separate FIRs, one each for the cases mentioned in the representation submitted on October 11, 2025. After hearing the petition, the High Court directed the State government to submit a detailed statement explaining important facts and details of the investigation.
What is the Dharmasthala Case
The case came to light last year after a former sanitation worker employed by the Lord Manjunatha shrine in Dharmasthala said that he was forced to bury dead bodies of women and minor girls in Dharmasthala. The ’masked man’ had alleged that he was forced to bury a large number of young women and minor girls after they were allegedly killed at Dharmasthala between 1995 and 2014. An FIR was filed by the police on June 3, 2025.
Given the seriousness of the allegations, the Karnataka government ordered the formation of an SIT to probe the case on July 19, 2025. The ‘masked man’ gave the SIT the locations of 13 ‘burial sites’, and the SIT started excavating at those places. As the SIT excavated the sites one after another, the entire case started to fall apart, as nothing was found at those places. After finding nothing despite digging 17 sites, the SIT has decided not to excavate all the sites mentioned by the man. Subsequently, the man was arrested by the SIT on August 23, 2025, by the police for misleading them.
In December 2025, the SIR submitted the complaint report before the Beltangady court in Karnataka, describing the whole case as fabricated by anti-Dharmasthala activists. The SIT named six individuals, Chinnayya (A1), Mahesh Shetty Timrodi, Girish Mattannanavar, Jayanth, Vitthal Gowda, and Sujatha Bhatt, as accused. It said that the accused persons were paid, coerced and trained to give false statements. Moreover, the SIT stated before the magistrate that the masked man confessed to having been forced, by Thimarody and the other activists, to make the “false” claims.
