The Ayodhya Ram Temple funds case is getting curiouser, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence on the massive loot at one of the epicentres of Hindu faith is surprising. He zealously promoted the cause of the temple throughout the past 12 years of his governance. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has distanced itself from the misappropriations of epic proportions over the past few years by saying it had nothing to do with this. This in itself offers no relief. That the temple trust chief, Champat Rai, functioned as the vice president of the VHP is no small matter. While there is no evidence to suspect his direct role in the disappearance of crores, his resignation from the trust post is significant. It was the VHP’s spirited pursuit of the Ayodhya cause that led to the erection of the temple through huge collections of donations from near and far. Millions of Hindu devotees had donated funds and also bricks etc., for the temple’s grand construction. The Prime Minister’s personal presence to lead the consecration rites, though this raised the eyebrows of secularists, makes it imperative that the PM personally intervene and set things right at the epochal centre of Hindu faith.
The Sangh Parivar’s temptation to blame an outsourced agency, citing the reason that sent its personnel for counting donations, does not absolve the top temple functionaries of the blame. That a top VHP leader oversaw the functioning of the temple where such a loot took place is a sad commentary on how entities linked to religion conducted themselves. The rise of the BJP as the governing political establishment in recent decades might have contributed to the creeping in of wrong tendencies in such entities, which had previously raised no accusations in financial matters. However, the reports of large-scale embezzlement in Ayodhya now would work to the BJP’s disadvantage in the Hindi belt. Assembly elections are due in Uttar Pradesh in six months’ time. The Yogi Adityanath government, with its intelligence apparatus, should have known what was going wrong in the hallowed environments of the high-profile temple. Rather, the government let down the faithful. The Opposition is bound to raise this as a major issue in the election campaign not just in UP but also in other Hindi-belt states where elections take place in the near future.
The proposed investigations by the CBI, in addition to the probe initiated by the UP police, are unlikely to produce any result and might end up as an eyewash. Central investigating agencies today suffer from a credibility crisis and are known for dragging investigations instead of giving the seriousness that such probes deserve. While such agencies had always been under political pressure, their image as “caged parrots,” doing the bidding of their political bosses has increasingly been reinforced in recent years. There is less reason for the faithful to feel confident that the misappropriated funds from their donations to the Lord would be retrieved and restored to the temple’s coffers.
