Political storm erupts over arrest of complainant in Dharmasthala case

Soon after a special investigation team (SIT) probing the issue arrested CN Chinnaiah, the whistle blower in question, in Mangaluru, the opposition BJP demanded an NIA probe to expose what it described as a conspiracy to “malign Sanatana Dharma”.

The police have said the principal complainant has been arrested for perjury -- a development that triggered a massive political row on the motives behind the charges.

“The Congress and Deputy CM DK Shivakumar must ensure the conspirators are exposed. They should form an SIT or hand over the case to the NIA. Money is said to have come from abroad to perpetrate this false accusation. The NIA probe will reveal the truth,” said R Ashoka, LoP in Karnataka Assembly.

Veerendra Heggade, the Dharmadhikari of Dharmasthala Manjunatha Swamy Temple said the “truth was beginning to come out”.

In early July, Chinnaiah lodged a police complaint, following it up with a statement before a magistrate where he claimed to have buried bodies of hundreds of young girls and women raped and murdered around Dharmasthala.

He said he worked as a sanitation staff at the temple between 1995 and 2014 and had been forced to bury bodies. Following his claims, the SIT even visited 13 spots and retrieved skeletal remains from some of the sites. The remains have been sent for forensic examination. It is not yet known to who these belong.

Till today, the complainant had appeared before the police in black clothes and a face mask to hide his identity.

K Annamalai, a senior BJP leader from Tamil Nadu, said it was extremely disturbing to note that one masked man took the entire government machinery of Karnataka for granted for over a month, with the sole aim of denigrating one of the pillars of Sanatana Dharma, the Dharmasthala Temple.

“It was idiotic on the part of the Congress government in Karnataka to have given legitimacy to his baseless allegations without a shred of prima facie evidence. In its desperation, it constituted an SIT, ordered random excavations at 13 sites, and shamelessly projected them as “burial grounds” linked to the temple. Finally, they found one skeleton at one of the sites, but it turned out to be a man, contrary to the claims of this masked man,” Annamalai said.

He said at one more site, the bones that were found were of a male person, who likely died by suicide.

“During the course of this random digging up, a woman named Sujatha Bhat was coerced into filing a false complaint that her daughter had gone missing in 2003. Later, she admitted that the daughter’s existence was fake and that certain individuals had forced her to file this complaint,” Annamalai added, noting that today’s arrest cannot be seen as the end of the matter.

“Who guided him? Who funded him? Who stood to gain from maligning Dharmasthala? These are questions the Karnataka Government conveniently wants to bury. The real masterminds of this conspiracy must be exposed and held accountable,” he said.

Confirming the arrest, Karnataka Home Minister G Parameshwara said no conclusion could be drawn in the case till the SIT concluded its probe.