The temple, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced was the culmination of 500 years of waiting on all television screens in the nation, has now become the focus of a different kind of national discussion one of missing cash, disappointed trustees and a growing gap between the Sangh Parivar's public pronouncements of piety and its private accounting practices.

No longer can the numbers be disputed. In mid-June, the Uttar Pradesh government formed a Special Investigation Team to investigate a systematic diversion of cash even before it got to the trust's bank accounts. Eight individuals, including some who worked in the temple's counting room and a driver who worked for the cash handling for the general secretary of the trust, have been arrested and remanded to judicial custody. So far police have recovered nearly eighty lakh rupees in cash and gold, jewellery and strangely a pile of US dollars from their houses. The probe has now been extended to look at about four hundred private security guards who are stationed throughout the temple complex and officers are sifting through duty rosters and CCTV to determine if the robbery was “opportunistic” or organised. The general secretary of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, Champat Rai, and trustee Anil Mishra are already two senior figures to have stepped down citing moral responsibility although claiming they were not personally implicated.

The issue, started as a policing issue in Ayodhya, has, inevitably, turned into a political flash point. The Congress general secretary, K C Venugopal, has written to the Prime Minister asking for a Supreme Court monitored investigation as the FIR as is, names only junior functionaries and not the trustees who were in control of the funds. His colleague Jairam Ramesh took it one step further and went on to say that the government had filled the trust with RSS-affiliated members, without maintaining transparency in its selection process, and then exempted the entire trust from the provisions of the Right to Information Act, which made such opacity almost inevitable. Senior party man Rajeev Shukla has demanded that the trust be completely scrapped and the same be re-formed with seers and religious persons instead of political appointment. The demand has resonated beyond Uttar Pradesh: former Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan penned a letter saying the Prime Minister, who attended the consecration ceremony in January 2024, "owes an explanation to the nation" and called for an independent investigation "under direct supervision of the Supreme Court". Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav has even gone so far as to demand that the “true Sanatanis” abstain from the BJP as this was a violation of the “Gauri” on whose name the party had campaigned during the recent elections.

The Bharatiya Janata Party's counter is to draw attention to the process that is already in progress, and not to any misdeeds. However, Uttar Pradesh BJP president Pankaj Chaudhary shot down the opposition's allegations saying it was routine politics and the SIT would function objectively, and nobody, however big will be spared if he is found guilty. Vishwa Hindu Parishad has followed a similar approach, its international president Alok Kumar saying the state government's decision on postponing the SIT's deadline by two weeks, till July 15, was a move in the right direction and any demand for a central agency to take over the case was a "political stunt" and not a call for accountability. That defence took a bit more of a hit this week with reportage quoting government sources that the magnitude of the case, an economic offence that seemed to involve temple staff, private security contractors and perhaps even banking channels, might be best served by the CBI or other central investigation agencies, irrespective of state leaders' wishes. That's not the only pressure on them, as officials at the State Bank of India branch where some of the trust's accounts have reportedly been placed under scrutiny as investigators attempt to trace the money that was supposed to be formally deposited, but was allegedly skimmed before it went into the ledger.

In the temple's leadership, the controversy even has turned acrimonious. One of the trust members, Mr. Mahant Dinendra Das Maharaj, made the unprecedented public criticism of a temple administrator who had politicised the issue and “gone off track” along lines that were not “the traditional way of the trust.” So far, though, the Supreme Court has been unwilling to intervene on an emergency basis. A bench headed by Justice M M Sundresh and Justice Sheel Nagu didn't sanction an urgent hearing on a plea to refer the case for a court-monitored probe and will not consider the plea till after the summer vacation of the court on July 13 which hasn't helped ease political temperatures in the interim. The Faizabad Bar Association said no lawyer from its fraternity will defend the accused and threatened to fine any lawyer who breaks the discipline with 5 lakh rupees, in a further pointer to the extent of how shaken the episode has been the legal fraternity in the city.

Apart from the political theatrics, it is a story that is truly important, one of money, scale and the design of institutions. The Ram temple is not a humble temple with meager collections; it is among the richest religious temples of the country. According to trust records, it has received about thirty-five hundred crore rupees in total donations since it was established in 2020, of which it has spent about twenty-one hundred crore rupees so far on construction; about four hundred crore rupees have been paid to the government as taxes during the process. With the annual income of what is now more than seven hundred crore rupees, the temple is the third in the list of the richest religious places in India, after the Tirupati Venkateswara temple of Andhra Pradesh and Padmanabhaswamy temple of Kerala. The numbers speak for themselves: over 130 million people are believed to have visited Ayodhya since the consecration, and the crowds of devotees run between 2 lakh and 5 lakh every day, visibly impacting the local economy, with hotels, transport operators and small traders relying on the pilgrim trade. This is the type of cash inflow, from donation boxes comprising of 10-rupee notes to gold ornaments, that made it easy to skimmer for months, investigators say.

It's also where the more interesting, less partisan question lies. The major temple trusts of India are in a strange governance realm: some of them have a turnover equivalent to that of a mid-sized listed company, but many are out of reach of disclosure requirements that would apply to any similarly sized commercial entity, while some are outrightly exempt from right-to-information requirements despite a significant part of their financial history being within a parliamentary system, such as the Ram temple trust. Compare it to the operation of similar religious endowments elsewhere. In India, temples like Tirupati have statutory boards and legislated audit and reporting requirements; even the Vatican's own finances are subject to an external auditor's office, which was established following a series of scandals; and large charitable foundations around the world are being forced to publish detailed accounts of how cash is handled, precisely because it is easier to exploit and more difficult to track. In that way, Ayodhya isn't a story unique to Indian politics or to Hindu institutions it's a textbook example of what can happen when the sophistication of an organisation's internal controls is outdone by the amount of money that flows through it, be it religious or secular, Indian or international.

All this is no justification of the realities on the ground and shouldn't be. As Congress leaders have pointedly noted, the modest amounts that were tossed into donation boxes by many of them from villages and from not very affluent circumstances, deserve a full and credible accounting. But it is well to distinguish between two debates that have been confused in the past week: the criminal investigation into individuals accused of diverting cash during the count, which seems to be going on by relatively routine policing means arrests, questioning in custody and forensic tracing of notes recovered. The other is a more general question of good governance to consider: should the institution that has been entrusted with seven hundred crore rupees annually, as long as it is under this party's control, remain opaque in the manner it is at present, as allowed by the law? If the first can be resolved, the courts will be satisfied. The latter is what it would take to actually stop the repetition, and that talk significantly has received far less oxygen than the accusations thrown around between Lucknow, Delhi and Thiruvananthapuram in the past two weeks. The finances of the temple are unlikely to get back on the tracks of the relative privacy it was enjoying before this year, whether the Supreme Court decides to keep an eye on the probe when it reconvenes in mid-July or the CBI is handed the file before that, and strong arguments can be made that it is high time the temple's finances were so looked at.