Dharmasthala burial case: No more media gag after new judge rejects injunction plea by temple admin

A Civil and Sessions Court in Bengaluru on Wednesday dismissed the Dharmasthala temple administration's plea to continue the ban on media's reporting of mass burial allegations.

Additional City Civil and Sessions Judge Anitha M rejected the application filed by the temple administration thereby, effectively lifting the earlier ban in force.

A detailed order is awaited.

The background to the case lies in a wave of media coverage that followed serious allegations made by a former sanitation worker employed at the Dharmasthala Manjunathaswamy Temple.

The worker claimed in a police complaint that he had been forced by his supervisors to bury numerous bodies, including those of women, for nearly two decades.

While the complaint did not name any specific individuals as accused in a crime, the revelations triggered significant public debate and media reportage.

Following this, Harshendra Kumar, Secretary of the Dharmasthala temple institutions, filed a civil defamation suit before a sessions court in Bengaluru, listing 8,842 allegedly defamatory links.

These included 4,140 YouTube videos, 932 Facebook posts, 3,584 Instagram posts, 108 news articles, 37 Reddit posts, and 41 tweets.

The sessions court then passed a blanket gag order till August 5 against reporting the issue.

Additional City Civil and Sessions Judge at Bengaluru Vijay Kumar Rai passed that order on July 21.

The stay order was lifted with respect to YouTube channel Kudla Rampage by the Karnataka High Court but it remained in force with respect to other media outlets.

However, judge Rai later requested that the matter be placed before another judge.

This was after journalist Naveen Soorinje pointed out that Judge Rai had been a student of the 1995-1998 batch of the SDM Law College, Mangalore, which is run by the Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Trust.

The matter then came up before judge Anitha M today.

Harshendra Kumar sought to extend the injunction against all defendants except Kudla Rampage, arguing that the High Court's August 1 order only quashed the injunction against Rampage.

Advocate Sakshi Satish for Kudla Rampage refuted this argument and said that the High Court had found that the injunction order was violative of Code of Civil Procedure and hence, entirely invalid.

The trial court today refused to extend the injunction.