The Karnataka High Court on Thursday, October 30, ordered an interim stay on the investigation into the Dharmasthala mass burials case until November 12. The stay was granted following a petition filed by activists Girish Mattanavar, Mahesh Thimmarodi, Jayant T., and Vittal Gowda, who sought the quashing of the FIR (First Information Report) filed by the Dharmasthala police based on the complaint of Chinnaiah.
The complainant had alleged that he had illegally buried several bodies at the behest of the temple administration in Dharmasthala. The four activists were also questioned by the SIT (Special Investigation Team) after publicly supporting the complainant's claims.
Seeking the quashing of the FIR, the activists argued in their petition: "The FIR was initially registered for an offence under Section 211(a) BNS — a non-cognisable offence — without obtaining a reasoned order of the jurisdictional Magistrate under Section 175(2) BNSS, thereby rendering the registration itself without jurisdiction."
Their petition further alleged that on August 23, the respondent-SIT unilaterally amended the FIR and added numerous new sections, including Sections 229, 230, and 231 BNS (corresponding to the old Sections 193-195 IPC), which are non-cognisable and triable only on the complaint of the concerned court.
"No such complaint was made by any court, nor was any permission obtained through a reasoned order from a Magistrate under Section 174(2) BNSS to investigate these offences," the writ petition claimed.
The petition further said that, rather than initiating perjury proceedings against the complainant after the police allegedly discovered inconsistencies in his statements and the documents he submitted to investigators, "the SIT has taken the unprecedented step of presenting the same individual once again before the same Magistrate to record a second statement that contradicts the first. It now appears likely that the SIT will summon the present Applicant and others on the basis of this contradiction," the petition said.
"The above course of action constitutes a failure of justice. Once a person confesses to having lied before a Magistrate, the law mandates that he be prosecuted for perjury — not that the police build a fresh investigative narrative around his retraction," the petition further argued.
The four activists approached the court after receiving fresh summons in the case on October 24. The petition noted they had already been summoned and questioned for nine days in September 2025.
"The Applicant apprehends further coercive action and repeated summons based on the newly-recorded contradictory statement, causing serious prejudice and infringement of his fundamental rights under Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution of India," the petition concluded.
The matter has been posted for further hearing on November 12.
The complainant, a Dalit man formerly employed as a sanitation worker at the Dharmasthala Manjunatha temple, alleged that between 1995 and 2014, he was forced under death threats to dispose of hundreds of bodies, many showing signs of sexual violence and brutal murders. He identified 15 possible burial sites, and the SIT had conducted exhumation at these sites, finding partial human skeletal remains at the sixth burial site on July 31.
Meanwhile, the All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA), part of the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), has written to Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah demanding a comprehensive, independent probe into decades of rapes, murders, and suspicious deaths of women in Dharmasthala, Dakshina Kannada district.
In a strongly worded letter dated October 25, 2025, 43 prominent feminists, activists, and academics from all over India endorsed the statewide campaign ‘Kondavaru Yaaru? Who Killed Women in Dharmasthala?’ And urged the state to take immediate action to address systemic failures, negligence by the police, and institutional cover-ups. They pointed out that despite complaints from the families of the victims, most of the cases, including those of Soujanya, Padmalatha, and Yamuna/Narayana, have been closed without justice and the mysterious deaths of key witnesses remain uninvestigated.
While the Karnataka government, in July 2025, constituted an SIT to investigate "mass burial" cases, ALIFA insists that the scope must be expanded to cover "all unresolved crimes" of the past decades.
Also read: SIT to submit Dharmasthala probe report by Oct end: Parameshwara
Follow us
