What India does so naturally is a sort of political theatre and Sunday's Sundarkand recitation at Rohini's Japanese Park was a textbook example. Before making the Hanuman chapter a centre for a nationwide signature movement for demanding accountability over alleged financial irregularities at the Ram temple, Ayodhya, Arvind Kejriwal and his wife Sunita Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia sat and read the Hanuman chapter of Tulsi Das. Kejriwal, in less than 24 hours, was declared a "chunavi Hindu" the Hindi version of an election-season Hindu by the Delhi BJP in connection with both the issue of stipends for the priests and this.

The timing speaks for itself. The Aam Aadmi Party's campaign arrives at a time when a Uttar Pradesh government Special Investigation Team (SIT) formed on June 13 is set to question officials from the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust. That probe was not initiated by AAP, but rather resulted from a series of unexplained shortages of five hundred rupee notes in the temple's donation counting room that led to the secret placement of hidden cameras by the trust officials. According to the video, the money, jewellery, gold and silver were being embezzled by the employees who were charged with counting the offerings of the devotes. So far eight people have been arrested, an FIR has been filed that carries charges of criminal breach of trust and cheating, and two senior trust officials Champat Rai, general secretary, and trustee Anil Mishra have resigned. A trust member, Krishna Mohan has been appointed interim general secretary. The SIT led by Vijay Vishwas Pant, divisional commissioner at Lucknow, had sent its preliminary report to the state government by late June and is expected to return to Ayodhya to extend its investigation into the banking dealings and the money collection mechanism at the temple.

Kejriwal has bundled this scandal into a bigger allegation by claiming that the trust has bought land for the construction side of the scam, with the price tag of eighteen crore rupees, which is more than eight times the actual worth of the land. He has said his campaign should be given a personal touch when it comes to letters that it's collecting; he says that only eight low-ranking employees have been held accountable, while bigger names are being covered up under the radar. Whether this land transaction will stand up to scrutiny is another matter from the question of whether it was stolen; the latter is now a formal criminal investigation, the former is an unverified political charge. AAP has been thoughtful enough to teach people to bandy inside the language of wounded faith, not partisan complaint, so they don't have to justify their questioning of the same kind that is applied to any other public trust, to which they gave their life savings without asking for a receipt.

The BJP's response has been to deflate the campaign and remove its religious connotations altogether, and instead present it as a stage play in anticipation of elections in Punjab and other States. It was a pointed and somewhat effective observation by Delhi BJP president Harsh Malhotra that Kejriwal's own Delhi government had promised to conduct the recitation of the Sundarkand once a week in all the seventy assembly constituencies of Delhi in 2024, which, conveniently, went missing from the headlines. He said that the reviving the same ritual now, if it is for an electoral purpose, is what makes the "chunavi Hindu" tag stick and not deflect from the Centre to the Congress. Note that this is not the first time the BJP has launched an attack using the same line; the same tag was thrown at Kejriwal in late 2024 when the BJP had issued a poster calling him “a costume priest” in a Bollywood comedy when it attacked the party's monthly allowance plan for the temple priests and gurdwar granthis. The repeat indicates that the party has hit on a message that hits, and why should it give it up.

One of the most important numbers in all of these transactions, which make the allegation of any pilferage so politically explosive, is the volume of money moving in and out of the Ram temple's accounts. The trust earned Rs 327 crore in the financial year 2024-25 with about Rs 153 crore coming from direct donations and the remaining Rs 173 crore from interest earned on the corpus of the trust. The trust has been spending nearly Rs 2,150 crore for construction since its inception in February 2020 and has paid several hundred crore in taxes in the process, with almost all of the funding coming from the public and corporate sectors rather than government funds. Today, between 70,000 and 80,000 people visit the temple each day, and, as ever, in the festivals, the numbers are three times this. The amount of money and valuables that visit the Temple makes a counting-room diversion possible and, once it is discovered, sufficiently damaging to public confidence.

From the outside, it all looks the same: large cash movements in faith-based institutions have been a recurring occurrence, at Vatican-related funds, at Buddhist temple trusts in Thailand, and at gurdwara committees in this country, to name a few and when the fraud comes to light, its impact is usually influenced by who governs the organization. In India's case, the planning to build the Ram temple is so much part of a political project of the ruling party, that any financial shortfall in it is bound to be an opposition talking point, while any opposition leader calling upon religious ritual is subject to the same accusations of opportunism as Kejriwal. Both sides of this argument are not playing fair, exactly, but they're also not playing fair; and the truth of what happened to the missing donations will emerge from the SIT in a few months, not from either side's press conferences.