Shikha Mukerjee | Pilferage at Ayodhya Big Blow to BJP, RSS, Modi

Pilferage and abodes of the gods have a long and sordid history. It’s not limited to the sundry servants of the Lord of Ayodhya, Ram Lalla, in whose name a massive temple was built by the Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra, who were nabbed after they were discovered skimming money and valuables gifted by devotees.

The Ram Mandir scandal is bigger and worse than other similar cases. It involves trustees appointed after their names were cleared by the Prime Minister’s Office, acting under Supreme Court orders. There was a gazette notification by the Centre in 2020 and that makes it the business of the PMO; therefore, not just the dodgy trustees, but the government is accountable.

Having campaigned in 2024 on fulfilling the promise to open the Ayodhya temple to the devout and tourists, the PMO should have been more watchful and less naively trusting. It should have remembered that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had in 2014 famously declaimed, “Na khaunga, na khane doonga”, while he was campaigning against parties that preceded the BJP in power, accusing them of siphoning money from state funds to line their own pockets.

The theft and the resignations from office, though not the trust, was an obvious shielding of the accountable, such as Champat Rai and Anil Misra. The resignations don’t cover the lifelong membership of these two individuals as trustees, making the resignations meaningless, more like token gestures to placate the gullible, instead of a genuine act accepting responsibility.

The Ram Janmabhoomi scandal points to an ugly phenomenon; the political appropriation by the BJP of a political-social-cultural movement, namely the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi movement. There were other stakeholders in the movement and the agenda to demolish the Babri Masjid and erect a Ram Mandir. It wasn’t just Lal Krishna Advani who worked to create and then mobilise the BJP’s core vote base; his endeavours were supported by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad on one hand the RSS on the other, with the Shiv Sena adding people and energy to the mobilisation. There were some other stakeholders like Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas’s Nritya Gopal Das, the Nirmohi Akhara, other hereditary trusts and older temples, which were bulldozed or erased or their land appropriated to create space for the BJP’s 21st-century Ram Mandir.

The list of such criminal activities related to wealthy temples is neither new nor novel. The issue is not sacrilege or unrighteous goings-on. It boils down to just one thing; the corruption is widespread, and there are always scapegoats who will take the fall because the powerful and the privileged are beyond the arm of the law. The signal is that corruption is not really a crime, if those responsible are on the protected list. The question is: who is protecting whom?

The corruption is a sign and a signal; of how widespread and open it has grown, even if it’s a cancerous growth that will kill the body where it is located. It is also a subtle and sly signal, that corruption by the right people enjoys immunity from legal action. How else could the eight arrested people in the theft of assets in Ayodhya have done so with CCTV cameras recording their activities?

The temple’s administrators must have seen what was taking place. Did they turn a blind eye?

The Samajwadi Party and Aam Aadmi Party were the whistleblowers. The Opposition is perfectly clear: the BJP is protecting the wrong-doers. In Guruvayur and Sabarimala, allegations surfaced in 2025; the Jagannath Temple suspected thefts became a campaign issue ahead of the 2024 Assembly election. The BJP went into verbal lynch mode, accusing the Opposition-run state governments of mismanaging temple treasures.

The allegations prompted a barrage of accusations from the BJP, including a vitriolic post on X by one Pradip Bhandari: “ The Left government’s INTENTIONAL negligence and mismanagement of Kerala’s revered temples is SHOCKING. From Sabarimala’s traditions being trampled to Guruvayur’s gold going missing -- this is systematic disrespect towards the Hindu faith and institutions by the Kerala Left regime.” This happened ahead of the Assembly elections in Kerala in 2026. Kerala was then under the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front, and the Guruvayur temple is run by the Guruvayur Devaswom, a statutory and independent board appointed by the state government that manages and governs 12 temples in the southern state.

In Odisha, the Ratna Bhandar issue became a national scandal of mismanagement because the allegation of stolen treasures through negligence or connivance was dumped on former Biju Janata Dal chief minister Naveen Patnaik. The timing was similar to Kerala, ahead of the crucial Assembly election which the BJP won by mobilising Hindu voters, aided by Mr Patnaik’s error of judgment.

The caught-on-CCTV theft of cash being stuffed into pockets and socks in Ayodhya has not provoked the Ram bhakts to go into shock and accuse the Narendra Modi government of intentional negligence and mismanagement. Instead, the RSS’ sarkaryavah, or general secretary, Dattatreya Hosabale, is in damage-control mode. All that has emerged is a belated and rather pathetic injunction to treat the “extraordinary matter” of pilferage recorded by CCTV cameras as a matter of “utmost urgency”.

If this is damage control ahead of the 2027 election in Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP as the ruling party is keen to win a third term, then the RSS’ intervention is inadequate at one level and is simultaneously a pointed reminder of what is at stake. The matter of nailing the culprits and cleaning up the muck is, according to Mr Hosabale, “crucial to ensure that the faith and reverence of crores of Ram devotees in the Ayodhya temple remain unbroken and steadfast. The current state of confusion and uncertainty must end.” His concern is clearly the likely disenchantment within the massive Hindu base that was built in the name of the Lord of Ayodhya. Faith, like ideology, is sensitive to moral turpitude and ethical transgressions.

The uncertainty and confusion would certainly decline had the Narendra Modi government made a statement, instead of leaving it up to the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh to sort out who stole and who provided access to the money, silver, gold and jewellery gifted by devotees. Before 2020, it would have been unthinkable to ask the Prime Minister to explain what happened in Ayodhya, at the temple he opened to the devout in January 2024, ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.

It is now a legitimate demand that the Prime Minister address the nation, especially the Hindu majority, to explain why his mission – “Na khaunga, na khane doonga” - has failed.