AYODHYA RAM TEMPLE SCAM: CRISIS FOR HINDUTVA

Mon 13 July 2026:

For the BJP-VHP-RSS holy trinity, the donations scam in the Ram temple has grown into more than just a risk of electoral loss. It has also become a loss of ideology and of face.

I am in a cab in the Awadh region of Uttar Pradesh, where our family village home is located. Ayodhya is 100 km away, the road signs say. The vehicle is clean, the driver courteous and clearly deeply religious. His telephone declares “Jai Shri Ram” a thousand times during our drive because it is set not as the ringtone (very common in this Gangetic-belt State) but as the SMS and WhatsApp alert. Every second, a sweet, childlike voice trills out “Jai Shri Ram”.

I naturally asked him how he felt about the missing donations in the Ram mandir case. “I am deeply disturbed and heartbroken,” he said, “that this should be done inside the mandir dedicated to Maryada Purshottam Bhagwan Ram.” Maryada means righteousness and adherence to duty and Purshottam means the supreme or ideal person that is Lord Ram, the king who would return to Ayodhya after 14 years of exile. For the believer, it is this ideal God-King who has been violated by the very people mandated to keep the faith.

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The scam will have consequences that will play out over time in different ways. There are psychological, cultural, political, and civilisational dimensions to what is coming to light. Such venal corruption at the very heart of the holy order will result in an inevitable loss of moral legitimacy.

There is now finally some acceptance from stakeholders that something was very wrong, and they have sought an inquiry; some arrests have been made. But suspicion lingers about whether it was the big fish who were exposed and if the investigation is real or a cover-up.

The Ram temple at Ayodhya is the most-high profile and publicly promoted temple of contemporary India, advertised by the entire political leadership, including the Prime Minister and the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. It is, therefore, shocking that those tasked with guarding people’s contributions to the temple should have brazenly stolen the donations. Everyone in Uttar Pradesh is talking about this.

Will it have political consequences? The State election is due in 2027. Remember, the BJP did lose the Lok Sabha seat (Faizabad) that houses the temple town in the 2024 national election, and when I visited soon after, among the reasons given for the defeat were that people were annoyed at being pushed around (road closures, and so on) and that the contracts for the massive construction and smaller things like eateries and diyas (lamps) were given to “outsiders”. I recall meeting Lallu Singh, the BJP’s defeated candidate from Faizabad, who said nothing beyond hinting at internal sabotage.

Members of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee protest against the alleged theft of Ram temple donations, in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, on July 7, 2026. | Photo Credit: Nand Kumar/PTI

On paper, the BJP’s social base is broader than that of the Samajwadi Party (SP) as the national party has alliances with many small parties that represent single caste groups. But again, in 2024, the SP did pull off a surprise by winning 37 of the State’s 80 seats while the BJP got just 33 against expectations that it would sweep the State. This made the party realise that power can slip away unless the electoral system is carefully managed through exercises like mass deletions in voter rolls, use of enforcement agencies, and gerrymandering.

Thus, even presuming a free and fair election, there is no clarity on what can unfold. There is a section of Uttar Pradesh that is deeply committed to the Hindutva project. This is the core vote, but there is a floating vote that is larger in number but socio-economically more vulnerable. If these people intend to spring a surprise, they are not going to let a visiting journalist know. Besides, such trends crystalise closer to the election.

The SP leadership is raising the Ram temple scam issue, but on the ground its cadre and candidates have to move cautiously. This State pioneered the use of bulldozers without due process. Given the way the election was handled in West Bengal, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav will have to ensure that even the names of booth agents are not listed in one central feed but decided at the local candidate level, with back-up options. In this age of repression, even the fight-back needs to have an element of stealth.

As in 2024, Akhilesh will need a strategy that reactivates voters and cadres but peaks at the right moment, possibly through fieldwork, popular outreach in local dialects, and the creation of a larger social base. Currently, he could get entangled with the Congress demanding half of the seats in the State as part of the INDIA bloc (even though the Congress does not have candidates for most of them).

No ordinary loot

Chief Minister Adityanath is the mahant, or head priest, of the Gorakhnath Mandir and should know how the donation process works. But, according to one version, he stands outside this circle of corruption that allegedly has Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and RSS men and bureaucratic nominees who are insiders in the Prime Minister’s Office at the centre of it.

The can of worms that has been opened has put great strain on the BJP-VHP-RSS holy trinity. Imagine if such allegations of theft had surfaced at a big shrine such as the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) of a faith such as Sikhism. Such a breach would result in a strong rebuke from the Akal Takht, which seems to have the authority to summon elected representatives and declare sacrilege. But there is no Hindu pope, no Akal Takht, no single institution empowered to speak for all or enforce accountability across temples—and rightly so, as the faith is a million rainbows and not a religion with a single book, one founder, or one deity. Ironically, it is the big backers of Project Ram Mandir who have always believed in a flattened out, hierarchical, centralised version of Hinduism. For them, Ayodhya was to be, in a manner of speaking, the Vatican of Bharat Rashtra. The organised theft inside this temple, therefore, is no ordinary loot, and it would be a mistake to equate it with stories of missing donations from the Tirupati temple or the periodic reports of cash-box pilfering at Puri’s Jagannath temple. (Indeed, corruption allegations, thefts, and siphoning of donations are reported regularly from all shrines of all religions.)

None of these shrines are aligned with a political project of this magnitude. The great danger for the self-appointed defenders of the faith in the Sangh Parivar is not whether this will result in an electoral loss: they believe they have tied up that loose end well; their greater challenge, by far, is the loss of ideology and the loss of face.

Certainly, the Parivar’s foot soldiers may continue to get satisfaction from knocking down structures and institutions that belong to minority communities. Indeed, a mosque demolition is central to the story of contemporary Ayodhya. But what is now being asked in ever louder tones is this: for all the demolitions they are undertaking, what are they building for themselves?

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