Trust, distrust converge in Ayodhya amid Ram Mandir donation theft case

It’s the family’s first outing at the holy shrine, and the list of temples to take blessings from is long. Money is tight, but the darshan is free, and her faith strong. Children in tow, Devi scampers past triangular piles of ladoos peeking from half-shuttered shops. “I am blessed that I got to see Bhagwan Ram’s birthplace. How many people get this opportunity?” she asks, breathless, negotiating one round of frisking, checking of papers, shoe counters, phone counters, another round of checking, before finally reaching the grand doors.

At each step, Devi bows down, overwhelmed at her proximity to the deity. But at the first donation box — there are at least 40 steel dropboxes strewn around the two-floor temple — a shadow of doubt passes over her face. She has offerings to make in the name of every family member, notes kept in a little plastic bag. But she’s unsure. “Maybe we’ll give it in the donation counters at the entrance. I saw there that they give certificates for donation. Here, who knows what..” her voice drifts off.

It’s not just her. Allegations of widespread irregularities in temple donations and a special investigation team probe have sent shockwaves through the 100,000-strong town and led to the arrest of eight men and the resignation of two prominent trustees. Over a weeklong investigation, 20-odd interviews with officebearers of prominent temples, seers, current and former trust officials and priests — HT found a story of ad-hoc rules and flexible systems, rubber-stamp meetings, deep factionalism within the broader temple movement, multiple power centres vying for control, and a test of faith for ordinary people. In all, the controversy has become a test case in the decades-long debate over private control of temples in India and the first major challenge to what became the nerve centre for Hindutva.

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Trustees could only be removed upon death, resignation, or if declared of unsound mind or convicted for a crime of moral turpitude. All trustees had to be Hindu, and ex-officio members were meant to have no role in the succession of voting members, to maintain the trust’s “autonomous nature.” Financial reports required annual audits, placed before a trust meeting. Importantly, no trustee was responsible for any wrongdoing by another trustee or employee; they were indemnified against any losses; a trustee could only be removed by two-thirds majority.

At its first meeting in Delhi on February 19, the trust nominated Mahant Nritya Gopal Das, head of the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas, as chairman. The other nominated member was its new general secretary, Champat Rai.

Rai served in various positions in western UP through the 1980s before working more closely with Singhal, then one of the leaders of the Ram temple movement, from 1986-87. “He developed a reputation as a collector of documents…He was always with Singhal, carrying his papers,” said the leader cited above.

As VHP organisation secretary, Rai was on the ground in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, when the Babri Masjid was razed. He was one of 32 individuals charged by CBI with criminal conspiracy, rioting, unlawful assembly, and promoting enmity. On September 30, 2020, a special CBI court acquitted all 32 accused, including Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi. In 2018, he became the organisation’s international vice-president — a position he still holds.

Anil Mishra’s ties with the movement are different. Born in Ambedkar Nagar district, he completed a Bachelor of Homoeopathic Medicine and Surgery (BHMS) degree in 1981. He worked as a government homeopathy medical officer, eventually serving as district homeopathic officer in Gonda and registrar of the UP Homoeopathic Board. In the 1990s, he rose through the RSS’s regional network. “Throughout this time, he maintained a popular homeopathic clinic in Ayodhya and became the Sangh’s man in the city. He knew everyone and was seen as an educated, capable organiser who was ideologically dedicated,” said the leader cited above. After retirement, he played key roles in the trust, culminating in his appointment as yajman, the ceremonial host, for the 2024 consecration of the Ram Temple.

In their contrasting styles, these two men became the face of the trust, briefing the press, receiving dignitaries, and making decisions that shaped the body — where six of the 10 voting members were above 80 — and the temple. Three officials working with the trust confirmed Mishra, 65, was in charge of manpower and recruitment; administrator Gopal Rao Nagarkote — another RSS man invited onto the trust as administrator in 2021, and removed last week — ran the everyday working of the temple and prayer arrangements; and Rai was the signing authority. Mishra supervised procurement and purchases, with an office at the Pilgrims’ Facilitation Centre adjoining the donation-counting facility.

For their followers, the two men — Rai, who lived in a stark one-room residence in Karsevakpuram, and Mishra, who lived in his ancestral three-storey bungalow in Faizabad — helped accomplish an ideological milestone for Hindutva. For detractors, they took advantage of a trust clearly under-equipped for administrative work, pushed people close to them onto the payroll, and, against the backdrop of an ailing trust chairman, assumed massive powers.

“They ran everything and were drunk on their power. They should have registered all property in the name of the deity but they didn’t. They never established processes because that would have curbed their power,” said Mahant Dharam Das of Hanumangarhi temple.

“On the income side we have the cash offerings only. The income from offerings commencing from 23rd Dec. 1949 up to the 5th Jan. 1950 i.e. during the period before the charge was ₹225. But the average monthly income will be ₹200/- or thereabout only. The maintenance, therefore, becomes much too costly,” Ram wrote.

“Locked boxes for cash offerings will be provided. The income receipts will be entered in the account book daily. The cost of Bhog will be paid daily,” he added.

This was broadly the pattern of collection until 2019, according to two former priests. Collection was through dropboxes at the makeshift shrine, opened once a week — daily during holy fairs — under police security, in the presence of the local commissioner (the site’s receiver) and the magistrate. “The records would be kept with both the commissioner and the bank and receipts would be given at the spot,” said Achut Shukla, secretary of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Seva Samiti.

This protocol — described by a trust official to HT — listed pre-prepared lists of donation boxes, prohibited moving boxes without written permission, and mandated shift-wise counting, a fixed number of counting personnel, biometric attendance, no mixing of amounts from different hundis, a prescribed dress code, frisking at entry and exit, restrictions on personal items in the counting room, updated records, machine counting, no food or tobacco in the counting room, and submission of daily reports.

Then, a new agreement was signed on February 6, 2025, between Anil Mishra and Govind Mishra, manager of SBI’s Naya Ghat branch. Rai has since claimed he had no knowledge of the protocol. The SIT said that after this agreement, some norms were relaxed — regular checks outside the counting room became random spot checks — and others observed only in breach.

“Frisking was not conducted at entry and exit points. The restriction to wear the prescribed pocket-less dress code was not enforced. The restriction on keeping personal items alongside was not enforced. Hundi-wise counting was not conducted. Amounts from different hundis were mixed. Denomination-wise records, vouchers, and certificates were not prepared. Biometric attendance was not effectively enforced. The restriction on food items and beverages in the counting room was not followed. CCTV monitoring was not utilised as a preventive measure,” the SIT interim report, seen by HT, said.

Across 45 days of footage reviewed by the SIT, it flagged 70 instances of alleged pilfering.

The interim report stopped short of naming anyone except Anil Mishra, whom it held responsible for diluting frisking norms. “The issue of frisking not being conducted was also brought to his notice through internal channels. Despite this, no effective written instructions were issued to enforce the frisking arrangement. Similarly, no effective corrective orders were issued to enforce biometric attendance, the prescribed dress code, restrictions on personal items, hundi-wise counting, denomination-wise documentation, and the daily reporting system. Shri Mishra is also responsible for relaxing the pre-determined arrangement for frisking,” the report found.

It recommended no action against any trustee. But against the backdrop of treasurer Govind Dev Giri and Rai blaming SBI and seeking to absolve themselves, the agreement clearly showed that the onus of security was on the trust — confirmed independently to HT by a former trust official.

“SRJBT shall ensure there are proper security measures in its premises wherein the cash notes are sorted and collected by the bank. Further, the strong box/vault will be kept in strict security which will be the responsibility of the SRJBT only,” the 2024 MoU said, referring to the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust.

This is the house of Lavkush Mishra, 26, from whose two houses ₹14.25 lakh was recovered by police two weeks ago. In this village of around 100 households, four generations of the Mishra family have farmed some 10 bighas of land.

“Lavkush worked in a Maruti garage in Faizabad and came home every 15-20 days before he got the job in the Ram Temple last year. His brothers work in Surat and Ghaziabad, and his sister got married five years ago,” said neighbour Raghavendra Singh. When HT visited the village, his grandfather Jagdamba Mishra sat cross-legged on a string cot, reading a religious text. “My grandson has never had a dispute with anyone. I don’t know how this happened and if it is true…we’ve told everything to the police,” he said.

“They had bought two parcels of land in Faizabad two years ago,” said another neighbour, Gajraj Rawat. Mishra lived in Faizabad with his wife Supriya, where he was building a bigger two-storey house now facing demolition.

Another 100km away is the residence of Karunesh Pandey in Vashisht Pandey Purwa village. Comprising only 20 households, the cream-coloured, one-storey Pandey residence was shuttered in the afternoon. Next door was a thatched cattle shed with a calf resting in the squalid dark. It’s from here that banknotes inside dung cakes were allegedly recovered.

Ramdas Pandey, Karunesh’s father, works at a shop in Faizabad and has five children — three boys and two daughters. “Anyone can come and see our house, made by my father. Apart from that land and ancestral property, we have nothing,” he told reporters.

In the village, resentment ran deep. “Ramdas ji is a good man. Why are the only people arrested poor? Why hasn’t any big guy been arrested?” asked neighbour Shyam Lal Govind.

HT visited the premises of seven of the eight accused across two districts. Anukalp Mishra and Avinash Shukla both lived in Faizabad’s Kaushalpuri Colony — the former in a house rented a year ago, the latter in a yoga centre called Shyam Sadhanalay. Srivastava lived with his wife in the middle-class colony of Anjanipuram, on bankers’ lane. The main accused — Ram Shankar Yadav ‘Tinnu’ — and his nephew Manish both lived in the centuries-old Swargdwar neighbourhood of Ayodhya, amid ancient temples and canopies of electrical cables.

Yadav’s wife Poonam defended him. “He has been a part of the movement since 1992 and never thought of his own benefit,” she told the media.

Accounts from current and former trust employees and seers indicate that Tinnu wielded wide powers. “If you needed anything done in the temple, you went to him. He was Rai’s right-hand man. He would decide who gets frisked, which car would gain entry, whose ID card wouldn’t get checked, who would get special darshan,” said Achut Shukla.

A former trust official said Yadav’s word was enough for Rai to recommend someone for hire among the trust’s 1,500-odd staff. “Not only did he have the keys to the counting room in an unauthorised manner, but also no complaints would be entertained,” said the official, requesting anonymity.

Rai has said his faith in his associates was betrayed, and has publicly written an open letter saying he will speak after the SIT’s final report. Mishra has made no public comment.

Another former employee, Mahipal Singh, alleged he first flagged irregularities in the counting process — extra cash packed into bundles beyond what receipts showed, among them — to the trustees in 2021, only to be replaced. And in 2020, Rai himself alleged that cheques with his forged signature were used to withdraw ₹6 lakh from the trust’s account.

The second issue is recruitment. Inside the temple, personnel from three agencies — SIS, Sainik Security Services, and PS and PS agency — are deployed, with an SIS guard also posted outside the counting room. The SIT confirmed all eight accused were recruited by SBI through Sainik Security Services on the recommendation of trust officials. Rai and Mishra allegedly conveyed their preferences to two designated bank employees, Ratnesh Chaturvedi and Gagan Deep. The names of counting staff and receipt-givers were decided at internal meetings, including one on April 8, 2024, said people aware of the matter.

“The last time the trust did any meritocratic hiring was when it held its very publicised exam for priests in 2023, out of which around 35 young men were picked. Since then, recruitments were only on recommendation,” said a senior priest in the temple.

“In our Hanumangarhi, there is a system and everything happens with police presence. Why did they pick their own men? Even if they didn’t take money, those who picked the wrong people are guilty and must be punished,” Dharam Das said.

Sushila Devi doesn’t know all this. The summer humidity has sapped her energy and made her boys restless. She is dismayed at the words of Dharam Das, whose teachings she regularly follows (and forwards on WhatsApp to family). Her relatives are asking if the number of his followers has dipped (it probably has, but it is peak summer). But she is satisfied that her donation was received, and she has a receipt to prove it. “A poor woman like me won’t understand all this. But if someone stole from the home of god, they should be punished,” she said. “And not just the little guy; everyone.”