Trust Issues

The Ram Mandir donations theft and Modi’s men who should answer for it

Dhirendra K Jha, Amrita Singh August 1, 2026

FIVE MONTHS AFTER Narendra Modi began his second term as prime minister, the Supreme Court delivered his government a momentous gift. On 9 November 2019, it settled a land dispute in Ayodhya, stretching back over a century, in favour of the Hindu Right. The push to build a Ram Mandir was at the political centre of a decades-long fight for the soul of India—a struggle whose most violent chapter was the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid, one of the most egregious acts of communal vandalism in independent India’s history.

Despite a token acknowledgment that the mosque’s destruction by a Hindu mob had been a criminal act, the judgment was a massive symbolic victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party. It was proof that the party could deliver on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s dream of a Hindu Rashtra. The court mandated the union government to set up a trust within three months to oversee the construction of the temple. On the face of it, this was meant to be neither a government body nor an extension of the ruling party. But what it was going to be was that the Sangh would become the custodian of one of the most politically charged religious institutions in modern India, receiving land, donations and extraordinary public trust.

Modi announced the formation of the trust in parliament, on 5 February 2020, framing the issue as a “very important and historical subject for the country” and declaring that the trust would “be fully autonomous to take any decision regarding the construction of the temple.” The Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra would be staffed with 15 members, including the magistrate or district collector of Ayodhya and representatives of the union and Uttar Pradesh governments—with the trust deed explicitly instructing that members must be “practising Hindus.” The rest of the trustees were drawn from various monastic orders. Many of those presented as independent figures had been key in sustaining the Ram Mandir campaign or were bureaucrats who had been influential in various projects of the Sangh.

K Parasaran, the nonagenarian senior Supreme Court advocate who had led the Hindu parties’ case in the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute, chaired the trust’s inaugural meeting, held at his residence. In this meeting, Champat Rai, who had spent more than three decades as a Vishva Hindu Parishad organiser in the temple movement, was appointed the trust’s general secretary, and Govind Dev Giri, who was among the Sangh’s most prominent religious interlocutors and closely associated with its affiliates, the trust’s treasurer. (Nritya Gopal Das, who had headed the VHP’s Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas, was made chairperson.) When construction accelerated, Modi turned to one of his most trusted bureaucrats, the former principal secretary Nripendra Misra, appointing him chair of the temple’s construction committee. Rai and Giri too have strong ties with Modi. Together, the religious organiser, the bureaucrat and the godman formed the triumvirate that exercised maximum control over the Ram Mandir project.

Modi inaugurated the fundraising campaign with a symbolic donation of one rupee, after which the trust began accepting contributions without imposing any formal conditions. In 2023, it also received a licence under the Foreign Contribution (Registration) Act, enabling it to accept donations from abroad. As of July 2026, the trust has raised Rs 3,264 crore in donations.

The temple was consecrated with great pomp on 22 January 2024, just months before that year’s general election. Modi shared the stage with Rai, Giri and other leaders. The RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath and many other notables were in attendance. Declaring the beginning of a new kalachakra—epoch—that would be remembered “for thousands of years,” Modi personally performed the inaugural rituals, walking into the sanctum sanctorum carrying a silver umbrella. The sitting prime minister officiating over a Hindu religious ceremony was perhaps the clearest signal yet that, for the Sangh, Modi had delivered on a key Hindutva project. Bhagwat declared that the temple “has become a symbol of a new India that will stand tall.”

Two years later, the Modi government is tying itself up in knots, trying to both claim credit for delivering on the Ram Janmabhoomi movement while also projecting distance from the controversies piling up around the temple’s management. Questions over construction management and land transactions—documented in detail by The Caravan in January 2024—have been followed by the trust’s biggest scandal yet. This July, allegations emerged that donations made by devotees to the temple had been systematically embezzled to the tune of Rs 7 crore. A special investigation team constituted by the Uttar Pradesh government found some seventy suspicious incidents on CCTV footage, of counting staff concealing wads of cash, alongside failures as basic as an absence of frisking at the entry and exit points. Eight men were arrested, including public servants and employees of the State Bank of India branch that handled the temple’s accounts. No member of the trust’s leadership came under investigation.

“I have never had any connection with the place where offerings deposited in the donation boxes by devotees are counted,” Giri, the treasurer, wrote in a letter. “The theft incidents have shattered the hearts of the devotees of Lord Ram. While counting cash offered by millions of devotees, some individuals committed the heinous crime of stealing it.” With growing public criticism, Rai and Anil Mishra, a trustee, eventually resigned, citing moral responsibility but no direct involvement. The RSS itself, meanwhile, expressed surprise at the large-scale embezzlement and positioned itself as an organisation demanding accountability from the trust, as though it had no organic connection to the institution’s leadership. This stance was simply not commensurate with the Sangh’s decades-long involvement in virtually every aspect of the temple’s creation.

The Sangh, predictably, tried to turn attention outwards. Dattatreya Hosabale, the RSS general secretary, urged Hindus to “remain united” against “conspiracies (by) anti-Hindu, anti-national forces” to exploit the incident and “malign Hinduism and society.” Brajesh Pathak, a deputy chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said that “the people of this country and every follower of Sanatan Dharma know that the Samajwadi Party and the Congress have consistently opposed the Ram temple … Lord Ram will not forgive.” But the cat was out of the bag.

The unease reached past its ideological opponents and into the BJP’s own base. A leader of the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) demanded an account of a four-kilogram silver brick donated by its president, while the Mumbai-based Vishwa Sindhi Seva Sangam sought answers on offerings made in its name. Reports circulated that an internal BJP survey had prompted the party to consider organisational changes ahead of the 2027 Uttar Pradesh assembly election, reflecting concerns about the scandal’s political fallout. The Wire reported that, by early July, the temple’s daily footfall had fallen by half.

The men entrusted with building, managing and safeguarding the Ram Mandir were not outsiders. They were products of the same political movement that had spent decades demanding its construction. Above all, Rai, Mishra and Giri formed a significant trio at the heart of the Ram Mandir project. Their careers reveal how deeply the BJP and the RSS are embedded in the institution they have sought to portray as autonomous.

{TWO}

FEW WITHIN THE RSS would have predicted in 2014 that a relatively low-profile pracharak—full time worker—in the Vishva Hindu Parishad would become an all-powerful general secretary of the most important religious institution of Modi’s India within six years. For much of his career, Rai was far removed from Modi’s inner circle. Indeed, he was best known as the trusted lieutenant of Pravin Togadia, the VHP’s working president and Modi’s most formidable rival within the Sangh Parivar.

Modi and Togadia had once been close friends and prominent allies in Gujarat. They used to move together and promote their politics during their formative days in the early 1980s. Modi was a pracharak, Togadia an RSS member. In 1983, Togadia was drafted into the VHP, and the next year, Modi was inducted into the BJP. Yet they acted as a pair, firmly bound to the Sangh Parivar’s objective of helping the party rise to power in Gujarat. When the BJP leader Keshubhai Patel became the state’s chief minister, in 1995, the duo became part of his core committee, taking important decisions for his government. When Shankarsinh Vaghela, who fell out with the BJP and became a chief minister with the help of the Congress in 1996, imprisoned Togadia for his involvement in an attack against a senior politician, Modi campaigned for his release. Similarly, when Keshubhai, upon his resumption as the chief minister in 1998, banished Modi from Gujarat as a result of the internal factionalism, Togadia, who had by then become national general secretary of the VHP, supported him.

“Even when the decision to make Modi the Gujarat chief minister was taken in 2001, Togadia strongly supported his candidature,” an RSS pracharak, who had observed these developments closely, told us. This was the first election that the BJP was contesting with Modi as its face. The pracharak said that Togadia addressed more than a hundred rallies to ensure Modi’s victory. “The union home minister, LK Advani, who had played a critical role in the decision, had kept Togadia in the loop. In return, Modi made one of Togadia’s most trusted men in the VHP, Gordhan Zadaphia, the minister of state for home in his government.”

The VHP played a critical role in the anti-Muslim violence of 2002. As reported by The Caravan, an inquiry conducted by the British government into the 2002 Gujarat violence concluded that it was “planned, possibly in advance,” by the VHP. “The attack on the train at Godhra on 27 February provided the pretext,” said the enquiry report. On that fateful day, the Sabarmati Express carrying Hindu pilgrims was set on fire at Godhra, killing 59 people and triggering widespread attacks on Muslims across the state. According to the inquiry report, “The VHP and its allies acted with the support of the state Government. They could not have inflicted so much damage without the climate of impunity created by the state Government. Chief Minister Narendra Modi is directly responsible. His actions have not just been guided by a cynical assessment of political advantage. As an architect of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda which it has pursued since it came to power in 1995, he is a believer in the VHP’s ideological motivation.”

When Modi won the next assembly election, things changed. He had mastered one of the biggest communal massacres of recent times and showed his talent for converting it into a dark source of strength. He now dropped Zadaphia from his council of ministers, signaling that Togadia’s interference in governance would no longer be tolerated.

The two fell out. With Modi looking askance at Togadia’s activities, everything the latter was doing seemed to be a threat to his power and his new tactics. So long as he benefited from Togadia’s activities, he remained silent. But as soon as he found himself settled in power, he seemed to set about accomplishing his next goal—expanding his clout in the RSS and other Sangh Parivar outfits to make them totally subordinate to his leadership. He now began looking at Togadia as someone trying to set up a power centre that might threaten to come in the way of his conquest of the Sangh Parivar and his emergence as its sole leader in Gujarat.

Togadia, noted for his inflammatory speeches, must have been stunned by Modi’s unpredictability, but his sense of being used was balanced out by a major addition to the ranks at the national level in the VHP. In October 2003, the VHP working president, Ashok Singhal, announced his retirement, and Togadia was informally appointed as the leader of the organisation. “The decision to informally hand over the reins of VHP to Togadia has been taken in view of my advancing age and poor health,” Singhal told reporters. “From now onwards, all decisions with regard to VHP’s programmes, including the Ram temple agitation, would be taken in consultation with Togadia.”

The new responsibility resulted in Togadia being forever on the move, staying mostly outside Gujarat, thus diminishing the chances of any serious confrontation between him and Modi. For eight years, Togadia combined the work of general secretary and informal president of the VHP. His formal appointment as international working president was made in the organisation’s national executive meeting, held in December 2011.

“All these years, differences between Modi and Togadia kept growing,” recounted the RSS pracharak. “When the RSS supported Modi’s candidature for the prime ministership ahead of the 2014 general elections, Togadia never endorsed the decision. He always remained opposed to it.”

CHAMPAT RAI HAD RISEN entirely within Togadia’s shadow. Born on 18 November 1946 in Nagina, a town in Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor district, he was the second of ten children. He appears to have associated with the RSS from an early age. According to a senior RSS member in Bijnor, Rai completed his education at Nagina, where his father had a small business, and started teaching in a local college on a temporary basis. “When Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency and banned the RSS in 1975, Champat Rai was arrested along with a large number of swayamsevaks and pracharaks from across the country,” the RSS member told us. After his release, he completed the Sangh’s highest level of ideological training and became a full-time pracharak. He spent the early 1980s as an RSS organiser in Dehradun, Saharanpur and Meerut before being deputed to the VHP, in 1986.

For much of the next decade, Rai remained an organisational functionary rather than a public face of the movement. Initially attached to Singhal’s office, he later became the VHP’s organising secretary for western Uttar Pradesh. After being shifted to Ayodhya in 1991, his principal responsibility was to maintain the legal records of the Ram Janmabhoomi litigation and to assist lawyers appearing before the Allahabad High Court and the Supreme Court. Even after becoming one of the VHP’s national secretaries, in 1996, he occupied a position of little consequence within the organisation’s hierarchy.

His fortunes changed only after Togadia assumed effective control of the VHP. In 2003, when Singhal informally handed over the organisation’s reins to Togadia, Rai emerged as one of his closest associates. Thanks largely to Togadia, Rai had finally emerged from decades of obscurity. By 2013, he had become one of the VHP’s principal organisers of the revived Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. When the RSS convened a meeting of senior Sangh Parivar leaders in Delhi to revive the temple movement, Rai attended, alongside Singhal and Togadia, in January that year. The VHP subsequently launched a nationwide campaign demanding legislation to build the Ram Mandir. It was during these mobilisations that Rai first emerged as one of the movement’s principal public speakers in Ayodhya.

By the time Modi became prime minister in 2014, Rai had risen as far as he could within the Sangh ecosystem, but as Togadia’s man. And, as the Modi government acquired solidity and authority, a section of the RSS set out to oust Togadia from the VHP. The matter came to the fore during a meeting of the VHP’s board of trustees, in Bhubaneshwar on 29 December 2017, when attempts were made to replace the reigning international president, Raghava Reddy, with VS Kokje—a former judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court and former Himachal Pradesh governor, who was part of the anti-Togadia camp. Togadia outmanoeuvred his opponents by pressing for an election and by refusing to withdraw Reddy’s candidature.

In the VHP’s scheme of things, its members choose, through voting or unanimity, an international president, who then nominates an international working president. It is the international working president who selects other office-bearers and effectively leads the organisation. In December 2011, Reddy was unanimously elected international president. He nominated Togadia as the international working president, who then chose Rai and other office-bearers.

With Kokje’s candidature, the VHP was forced to announce that an election—the first in its history—would be held, on 14 April 2018. Soon after the announcement, Reddy alleged that the list of voters had been manipulated. In a letter to Kokje, he alleged that the voters’ list included members who were ineligible under the VHP’s own rules and urged the returning officer to halt the election until it had been corrected. At the time, a VHP leader close to his faction had told us that a “total of 37 fake voters have been added to the original list of 212 members who are eligible to cast their votes in the election of new president.” The election went ahead.

For Rai, the contest presented the defining political choice of his career. Everything he had become within the VHP he owed to Togadia. Yet, as the balance of power shifted, he recognised that loyalty to his mentor now carried political costs. “Champat Rai was not alone,” the VHP leader told us. “Many other team members of Togadia decided to switch over to the pro-Modi lobby. That’s why no pressure could be mounted on returning officers to act on the allegation of voters’ list manipulation raised by Reddy.”

Kokje won the election, forcing Togadia to resign as international working president. The new leadership appointed Alok Kumar to replace him. Rai, meanwhile, emerged politically stronger than ever, becoming one of the VHP’s vice presidents. His ascent could not have been lost on Modi. Rai emerged from the Modi–Togadia confrontation a good deal more powerful in the VHP than he had ever been. Now, he seemed to grasp the meaning and opportunities of the political game, the tactical dodges and manoeuvres by which one played for one’s personal promotion. The image of a simpleton pracharak carried away by events and by his impulsive reactions was replaced by that of the cool and methodical Hindutva leader aspiring for power.

“The successful operation against Togadia marked an important turning point for Champat Rai,” the VHP leader told us. “It concluded Champat Rai’s political apprenticeship and marked his first real entry into politics. The consequence of this shift was to ensure that Modi seemed fairly sure that Champat Rai could be relied upon.” Soon after the VHP’s break with Togadia, Rai set about transforming his timid, static image and making himself the face of the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. His own energy seemed inexhaustible. None of the other VHP leaders, including Alok Kumar, was remotely a match for him: they were not so dominant as figures such as Togadia or Singhal, and were not even known outside the organisation. In the process, he also acquired an arrogant tenacity that would become part of his persona. Rai did not respond to the questions we sent him.

When the Sangh Parivar attacked the Supreme Court for postponing hearings in the Babri Masjid title dispute in October 2018, Rai was at the forefront of the campaign. At the VHP’s Dharma Sabha in Ayodhya the following month—its largest mobilisation since the demolition of the Babri Masjid—he emerged as the gathering’s principal speaker. “This is the biggest congregation of Ram bhakts after a gap of twenty-six years,” Rai declared. “We have been fighting this battle for the last four hundred years, and our patience should not be put to test anymore.” Rejecting any compromise over the disputed site, he insisted that Hindus would accept nothing less than the entire 1.12 hectares. Nor, he argued, was there any reason to await the Supreme Court’s verdict. The union government, he said, should simply legislate to enable the construction of the temple.

When the Supreme Court later appointed a three-member mediation panel to seek a negotiated settlement between the Hindu and Muslim parties, Rai publicly denounced the process before it had even concluded. At a meeting of the VHP’s central governing council, in Haridwar, in June 2019, he reportedly described the panel as part of a conspiracy to deprive Hindus of their rights in Ayodhya. “Rai also said that Hindus have won whenever they have fought for their rights but lost in every negotiated settlement,” a member of the council, who attended the meeting, told us.

By the time the Supreme Court delivered its judgment in November 2019, Rai had become indispensable to the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. When Modi constituted the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra the following year, Rai’s appointment as its general secretary was presented as the natural choice of an experienced VHP organiser. In reality, it also rewarded a carefully timed political realignment.

{THREE}

NRIPENDRA MISRA may be considered the outlier among the Ram Mandir’s Trust’s leadership. Rai and Giri had spent decades inside the Sangh Parivar. Misra came from the Indian Administrative Service. He was Modi’s representative inside an institution the government insisted was autonomous, and the clearest indication that the prime minister had no intention of leaving the temple entirely to the RSS.

In the first month of his government, in 2014, Modi amended the law governing the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India to bring Misra back into government as his principal secretary, weathering a political storm over the move. For the next five years, Misra became one of the principal instruments through which Modi centralised power in the prime minister’s office. He chaired key committees, coordinated ministries, reportedly influenced appointments across government and became, as officials frequently described him, Modi’s “eyes and ears.”

In January 2020, months after Misra’s retirement from the prime minister’s office, Modi appointed him chairman of the executive council of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, which was soon renamed the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library, as part of the government’s broader effort to reshape public institutions around its own historical narrative. Misra later recalled that PK Mishra, the additional principal secretary, had approached him with the appointment. “I was shocked for a few moments,” he told ANI. “Then I balanced myself and said that I accept the responsibility that I will be given by [the] prime minister.” The assignment he truly wanted came a month later.

In an interview with the Indian Express, Misra recalled another phone call from PK Mishra. “Maybe, if you asked me, I could have liked something more,” Misra told him. “I am being greedy but transparent.” He had two positions in mind: a governorship or chairing the Ram Mandir construction committee that was about to be constituted following the Supreme Court’s Ayodhya judgment. Soon afterwards, Misra said, the union home minister, Amit Shah, telephoned and offered him the chairmanship of the construction committee. “Would you like to take this work?” Misra recalled being asked. He accepted immediately. “I think within two days, the draft of the trust, the manner in which it is to be formed, was brought to my residence by an additional secretary, it had a clause related to someone who will become the chairman. Would you be happy with this? [he asked.] And then this is the story.” Modi had personally ensured that an aide he trusted occupied one of the most powerful positions within the Ram Mandir project.

THE CHOICE WAS STRIKING, because Misra had not always been viewed as a natural ally of the Sangh. A reputed IAS officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre, he became principal secretary to the Mulayam Singh Yadav government on 2 January 1990 during one of the most turbulent periods of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. “He was considered a very no-nonsense type. Not very friendly. Like a typical bureaucrat,” a senior journalist in Uttar Pradesh told us. The Sangh began a rath yatra of tens of thousands of volunteers later that year, which was to reach Ayodhya by the end of October. Yadav was staunchly against the movement and ordered security forces of the state to open fire. Fifteen volunteers died. The Sangh used the controversy to label Yadav as anti-Hindu. “The chief minister gives the directive, but the secretary has to sign the order,” the senior journalist said. Another journalist, Sanjay Sharma, who runs the web portal 4PM, also agreed that Misra was “100-percent” involved in the decision to open fire. (Misra has never himself denied this but, since he joined Modi, a few reports have claimed, without adequate sourcing, that he was against the decision.) Misra did not respond to questions sent to him.

Misra continued as the secretary even when the state’s power shifted hands from Yadav to the BJP’s Kalyan Singh, in June 1991. “This never happened earlier, that one day you are principal secretary to one person, then the next,” a retired IAS officer from the UP cadre, a few years junior to Misra, told us, on the condition of anonymity. The senior journalist described Misra as someone close to both Mulayam and Kalyan. On 14 September 1992, the Times of India reported on a front-page story carried by the RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya, which alleged that Misra could be an agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

Misra survived the controversy but, by October, had been posted away from the state capital, as the chairperson of the Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority. A couple of years later, when Mulayam Singh was back in power in the state, he was shunted to the board of revenue in Allahabad for a year.

“If you could participate in a plan involving firing alongside Mulayam Singh, then how could you also stand with Kalyan Singh during the temple movement?” the retired officer said. They felt that Misra must have been in touch with Kalyan while serving as Mulayam’s secretary. While there is no proof of this, a Times of India report, in December 1992, mentioned that, according to the state BJP president, Kalraj Mishra, Misra “had leaked classified government information to the party in 1990.” The retired officer referred to Misra’s Allahabad posting as a blip in his otherwise smooth career.

By the time that Atal Behari Vajpayee became the prime minister, Misra was constantly shortlisted and tipped to be in top positions in the union government, but he was repeatedly passed over. According to a 5 November 2001 news report, Advani and Yashwant Sinha, the finance minister at the time, wanted Misra to be appointed as the revenue secretary but were overruled by the prime minister’s office. In January 2002, Misra was considered the natural successor to Prabir Sen Gupta as the commerce secretary but was made the fertiliser secretary instead. Towards the end of 2003 and in 2004, he was the top officer in the running for the post of home secretary, often being touted as the “front runner,” but lost out to Anil Baijal, who was two years his junior. In February, a news report stated that Misra, “once considered for the Commerce and Planning Commission, could not make it despite seniority. An insider has it that it’s all to do with Brahmin politics, especially with Kamal Pande and Brajesh Mishra around.” He was made telecom secretary instead.

After retiring from the civil service, in 2005, Misra gradually began moving into Modi’s orbit. One of the most crucial tenures of his life was as the TRAI chairman, from March 2006. Misra ended up becoming a crucial witness against the telecom minister at the time, A Raja, in the 2G scam that shook the Manmohan Singh government. He came out unscathed in the scandal. After his tenure ended in March 2009, the TRAI rules dictated, he could not hold a government job again.

In the next five years, Misra became a director at Usha Martin and joined the Vivekananda International Foundation, affiliated to the Sangh. The VIF was a prime catchment area for Modi when picking officers for his newly formed government in May 2014—he picked Ajit Doval as the national security advisor and Surya Prakash as the chairperson of Prasar Bharti, among others, from the foundation. Despite having had no documented interaction with Misra before, Modi handpicked him as his principal secretary. A political backlash ensued, given that this would contravene the TRAI rules, but the Modi government passed a bill amending the rules, in order to employ Misra.

Misra’s job profile was varied. He was Modi’s voice in various ministries and headed important committees. He even issued elaborate rules for using Modi’s pictures in all government advertisements, which earlier used to be just a formality. When Modi was re-elected, Misra and PK Mishra were again brought on board with cabinet-level ranks. When Misra chose to retire in September 2019, at the age of 74, there was no bad blood with his boss. Both spoke in glowing praise of each other, with Modi tweeting that Misra “taught me a lot and his guidance remains extremely valuable.” In January 2020, Misra was appointed to the NMML and then the Ram temple construction committee. (In January 2025, he was re-appointed as the chairperson for another five-year tenure at the NMML.)

“The PMO and the RSS were supposed to share control, but, ultimately, the RSS held the reins,” a journalist who has covered the Ram temple for several years told us. “Initially, during the meetings, Nripendra was calling the shots. He had been sent by the PM, so, these people—Champat Rai and others—even complained to the higher-ups, to Bhaiyyaji Joshi, the official in charge of the Ram Temple project.” The journalist claimed that Joshi intervened “to keep Nripendra under control. There was a sort of watch being kept on him.” The Times of India reported how the Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna labelled Misra’s appointment as a sign of Modi’s keen interest in expediting the construction. At several points, Misra has spoken about Modi’s advice to him for developing the temple, such as the need to make it inclusive for people from south India. He reportedly announced, in October 2025, that Modi’s “vision is for the Ram Mandir to be an international temple that inspires pride among people of all classes and ideologies.”

The media reported about Misra’s many visits to Ayodhya over the course of his new role. He finalised the temple’s designs—which deviated from the VHP’s thirty-year-old blueprint—the stones and sand used, and where the idol would be placed. He met Modi, Adityanath and Bhagwat multiple times to discuss the construction.

Misra’s role, clearly, was not limited merely to construction. He helped finalise Modi’s itinerary for the inauguration. In January 2021, President Ram Nath Kovind kicked off a nationwide donation drive for the Ram temple. Misra, Giri and the RSS leader Kulbhushan Ahuja went to meet the president. In October 2021, IANS reported that the temple funds had crossed Rs 3,000 crore, following which Tata Consultancy Services had been hired to manage the funds. “IT experts from the Tata Group recently gave a powerpoint presentation of the software to temple construction committee chairman, Nripendra Mishra,” the report said. The committee also weighed in on how the Ram Navami celebrations would be held in 2023.

Misra has also undertaken an expansionist approach to the job. The complex is slated to have an auditorium and a guest house. Misra also secured the Ram Katha Museum, to be taken over by the trust and refurbished to be more high-tech. The tender for this was given to Tagbin, the same company that worked on the Pradhanmantri Sangharalya. In January this year, the trust announced plans for a hospital, the Namo Cancer Care Foundation, and a memorial to people who died in the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign. Even in September 2020, Misra was discussing Ayodhya development projects with district officials. He was invested in developing the town on the whole. “Outside the premises of Ram temple, the social-cultural site has to be found,” he later told the Indian Express. “So, people spend a day or two more in Ayodhya. We must build 5-stars, community halls, and there have to be a lot more cultural presentations.”

The events of January 2024 can be taken as proof of how Misra’s achievements have served Modi. On 15 January, the Narendra Modi gallery at the Prime Ministers’ Museum was inaugurated. It holds all-encompassing documentation of every event that Modi brandishes time and again to bolster his image, from the stripping down of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in 2019, to the many temple corridors that have come up during his reign, to his numerous foreign visits. The museum is aligned with what appears to be a fundamental requirement for the prime minister—self-promotion. The next week saw perhaps the biggest victory celebration for Modi: the consecration of the unfinished Ram temple upon the ruins of the Babri Masjid.

But Misra’s handling of his post throws up clear issues. In 2021, his construction committee roped in Anoop Mittal, a former chairperson of the National Buildings Construction Corporation who had previously faced corruption charges, as a consultant. (He was later cleared of the charges.) By then, several media outlets had reported on improper land deals in the development of the Ram temple complex. Abhishek Upadhyay, who runs the YouTube channel Top Secret, spoke to Dinanth Verma, an engineer who worked in the construction, and another individual who told him that, in one deal the stones were offered to the trust for free, but that deal fell through because the procurement team insisted on a fixed rate. Instead, the stones were purchased elsewhere at five times the rate of commission. “So, who was in charge of that construction?” Upadhyay said. The deadline for completing the construction kept shifting—from June 2025 to September 2025, then to November. Shortly after the inauguration, the roof of the temple began to leak.

Yet, even about a week after the controversy about the embezzlement of donations broke out, Misra distanced himself, saying that his job was only “to supervise the construction of the temple.” A week later, he gave a series of televised interviews in which he expressed anguish, calling the incident a dacoity. He did not take any responsibility. Instead, he claimed to have found that there was no monitoring of the donations, while adding that he could vouch for the integrity of Rai. “Misra was Modi’s man,” the journalist said, “that’s why you don’t see any coverage against Nripendra Misra on national channels. You see it against Champat Rai and others, but I haven’t seen a single story targeting Nripendra Misra.”

Misra pushed for a CEO to be appointed for the trust, allegedly at Modi’s behest. Another report noted that he wanted the job for himself. Notably, on 7 July, Nritya Gopal Das rejected the push to appoint a CEO, but later the proposal was accepted. An anonymous trust member told The Telegraph that it was “difficult to fight with the government.” It appears to be a far-fetched idea that the CEO would be independent—he will report to the general secretary of the trust. “They opted for a CEO because they realised that, without one, the RSS’s direct control would be too obvious,” the journalist who has covered the Ram temple said.

Misra’s statement of this being a dacoity has caught on. “That implies the RSS are dacoits, because the temple is synonymous with the RSS,” the journalist said. “So, this is essentially RSS versus Delhi—or rather, RSS versus Modi and Shah.”

{FOUR}

GOVIND DEV GIRI’S APPOINTMENT as the treasurer of the Ram Mandir trust surprised no one within the Sangh Parivar. He belongs to a class of sadhus who are, in a strict sense, different from the rest of their fraternity. They have strong ties with the RSS, having worked as cadres or even pracharaks. Since these sadhus owe their success largely to the Sangh Parivar’s clout in the spiritual market, they maintain their umbilical cord with the network.

Govind had all but campaigned for Modi ahead of the 2014 election. At a public meeting organised in the garb of a yoga camp by Ramdev, at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan that March, he shared the dais with Modi, alongside Avadheshanand Giri, who was the Juna Akhara’s spiritual head, and several other high-profile sadhus. As the Economic Times reported, an unmistakable message was sent to their devotees: “Though they did not make any speech endorsing Modi, their blessings sent a message across to their thousands of devotees that Modi is the man.” The Congress later complained to the Election Commission that Govind had invoked “the holy cow and Hindutva” from the stage while seeking votes for Modi.

In 2015, the VHP passed a resolution asking his government to enact a law to pave the way for building the Ram temple, given that it was a “core issue.” “While some sants at the meeting said they must pressure the government into enacting a law to build the temple,” the Indian Express reported, others said they should not “‘mistrust’ their ‘own’ government.” Govind had said, “If we become impatient, this could be derailed. We have to struggle for it, but we have to be careful.”

Subsequently, Govind featured in several events held by BJP-led state governments and the RSS. He has been part of key international delegations—including to Yangon, for Samvad-II: Dialogue for Peace, Harmony and Security, an initiative of the VIF born out of dialogue with Modi and the former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. He was one of the people representing the Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha. Govind was also a part of the Indian delegation at the R20, the G20’s religious forum, in Bali in November 2022. In May 2024, he took a contingent from Ayodhya to Sri Lanka on the invitation of President Ranil Wickremesinghe, to promote religious tourism between the two countries.

Govind was not merely a spiritual figure lending ceremonial credibility but repeatedly proved useful to Hindutva politics more broadly. He opposed Maharashtra’s anti-superstition bill in 2010 and 2013. Seven years later, he urged Hindus to have four children until a Uniform Civil Code was implemented, warning that “India lost those territories wherever Hindu population reduced, resulting in demographic imbalance.” In February 2024, he called on Muslims to surrender the Gyanvapi and Mathura mosques in exchange for being left alone on “all other things.” As recently as January 2026, he attacked the actor Shah Rukh Khan for signing a Bangladeshi Muslim cricketer to his IPL team, urging his followers to voice anger over “violence against Hindus” in Bangladesh.

Akhileshwaranand Giri—a Jabalpur sadhu who assumed the chairmanship of the Cow Protection Board of Madhya Pradesh, in 2016—had previously told us that both he and Govind, as well as Avadheshanand Giri, had been initiated by the same guru, Satyamitranand Giri. “While Avadheshanand was a swayamsevak, Govind Dev Giri was a pracharak before taking to sanyas,” he said. The lineage places Govind within the same RSS-descended network as the men who would go on to occupy other key positions around the temple project.

A 2016 news report identifies Govind as the Bharatiya Sant Sabha’s national convenor. The BSS is affiliated to the RSS. The report mentions that RSS-affiliated monks were pushing for Adityanath to be made chief minister. “The sadhus even raised their hands in emphatic consent when Govind Dev Giri, the Sant Sabha’s national convener, conducted an on-the-spot assessment to see how many would campaign for Adityanath.”

The networks Govind has maintained paid off during the temple’s construction. He presided over the three-day Vedic rituals preceding the inauguration, chaired the trust’s religious committee and sat on the subcommittee that oversees the temple campus. He announced several of the project’s largest donations as they came in—a R21-crore contribution from a Pune college, R11 crore mobilised by the spiritual leader Morari Bapu. He was also involved in selecting the priests appointed to serve at the temple, a process reported to include a six-month training period. His own affiliated ventures—the Bhishma Indic School and the Maharshi Vedvyas Pratishthan—received thousands of dollars from a US-based foundation between 2018 and 2020.

When allegations first surfaced over the trust’s land dealings, Nripendra Misra distanced himself from the matter but said his fellow trustees, including Govind, were handling the issue and that he retained full faith in the trust’s decision-making. Govind was more combative in public. Confronted over complaints filed by the monk Dharam Das, he refused to submit to what he called a “media trial” and dismissed the trust’s critics by comparing them to the washerman from the Ramayana who cast doubt on Sita’s character.

GOVIND GIRI’S DEVOTION TO MODI is well recorded. At the temple’s consecration on 22 January 2024, he called Modi a “rajarshi”—royal saint—and a “tapasvi rashtriya neta,” an ascetic national leader, and gave him charnamrit—sacred water from the feet of a god—to mark the end of an eleven-day fast. He later told reporters that he felt as though he had given the sacrament to his own son, comparing Modi’s asceticism to that of Chhatrapati Shivaji. A year on, he lent his voice to a video that circulated online, which claimed that Modi had spent his weeks in the Emergency “meditating” at the Garudeshwar temple.

Despite being the trust’s treasury, Giri has maintained that daily donation-counting was never his responsibility. He issued the trust’s official statement, calling itself “deeply saddened, distressed and concerned,” announced that gold, silver and other valuables remained secure, and confirmed that he had given a statement to the SIT—while offering no account of his own oversight role.

Like Misra, Giri defended Rai. “I know Champat Rai thoroughly, and, even today, I have no doubts about him,” he stated to the media, on 7 July. “We had repeatedly cautioned him, but those shortcomings were part of his nature and working methodology, not a character flaw. If anyone accuses him of financial involvement, I believe that is wrong even today.” He argued that bureaucratic failures, not personal malice, were responsible for what had happened. A day later, echoing Misra, he endorsed the idea of installing a CEO. “All of this happened due to the absence of a CEO,” he said. “Oversight requires the discipline that professional bureaucrats bring. We did not have that kind of professional supervision in place and this was the result.” He described Rai as “healthy, solution-oriented” and someone who “has no misgivings about his resignation.”

This did little to placate the monks of Ayodhya, several of whom turned their scrutiny on Giri himself. The Ayodhya Sant Mandal urged the trust not to accept Rai’s resignation and separately pressed Govind for an explanation for why concerns over the theft had not been flagged earlier. “The role of trust treasurer Govind Dev Giri should be probed instead of making Rai a scapegoat,” one sadhu told The Telegraph. “He is a Sanatani but attempting to show his dominance over Shri Ram Janmabhoomi,” Sitaram Das, the mahant of Saket Bhavan Temple, told IANS. Deveshacharya Maharaj, who heads the Siddh Peeth Hanumangarhi Temple, went further, pointing to the contradiction at the heart of Govind’s own defence: “He himself had said that he did not have any authority or responsibility, then how was he holding the position of the treasurer?” He dismissed Giri’s framing as calculated. “It is a propaganda and people are being misled so that the issue is slowly erased out of public memory.”

Giri, for his part, led a nine-day prayaschit pujan—an expiation ritual—at the temple. On 30 July, his Geeta Parivar celebrated Guru Purnima in Delhi’s Ashok Vihar. There, he recast the entire controversy as manufactured. “Regarding the Ram Mandir—as I mentioned—look at social media and our compromised mainstream media,” he told the gathering. “Keep one thing in mind: whether the discussion is about the Ram Mandir or the protests at Jantar Mantar, the sole objective of all these sinners is the same—to destabilise our government and create instability in the country. That is their fundamental aim.” The Jantar Mantar reference was to the tens of thousands of young people who had descended on central Delhi, in the previous week, to protest the government’s education policy, at the call of the Cockroach Janata Party.

Giri went on to minimise the theft itself. “A theft did occur there, a minor one,” he said. “However, there are those who wish to blow this small incident out of proportion and inflame Hindu sentiments. Their goal is to weaken the community so that the temples of Lord Krishna and Lord Shiva are never built.” He invoked an unnamed “ecosystem” working against the temple, noted that the matter was now before the Supreme Court, and predicted vindication. The temple, he said, would “emerge even more radiant, like gold purified in fire.” Giri did not respond to the questions we sent him.

OVERALL, Giri’s defence has been similar to those of Rai and Anil Mishra: oversight was someone else’s job. Misra, too, had claimed that his job was only to “supervise the construction of the temple.” That a treasurer, a construction chairperson and a general secretary could each shrug off responsibility for the donations, while the RSS itself postured as an aggrieved outsider demanding accountability, is not an accident of institutional design. It is what the institution was designed to do, as The Caravan has consistently shown in its reportage. With Uttar Pradesh headed to the polls next year, the question of who answers for the theft has become more pressing.

Sanjay Sharma and the anonymous journalist both argued that all parties in the controversy knew of the embezzlement. Top Secret has also reported on another case involving Mahipal Singh, a former accounts in-charge who claims to have informed Rai of the same before the controversy broke out.

“In my opinion, this revelation is the result of an internal feud,” Sanjay Sharma said. “It involved the misappropriation of donations. Secondly, everyone knew about this theft.” The journalist from Uttar Pradesh agreed that everyone knew—all parties tried to stifle the matter but the news spread very fast. “Then, the attitude became ‘Save whatever you can,’” he said. “Ram Lala has become a bargaining chip for power. There are three stakeholders involved—the centre, Lucknow and the RSS—and each is asserting its own position.”

For Modi, this is an opportunity to have an upper hand in his relationship with the RSS, which threatens to overpower him. Adityanath has to do a careful balancing act of retaining the support of both the Modi government and the RSS to remain in power, while brandishing himself as less corrupt than the other two. His statements and the formation of the SIT, align with this endeavour. After Misra’s televised interviews, Adityanath gave a statement asking people to refrain from making irresponsible statements—a remark that appeared to be directed at Misra. The journalist also said that Adityanath has enmity with Rai, given that the latter did not allow him to have a say in the temple. This was Adityanath’s opportunity to cut him to size. “The chessboard is laid out. The battle is ongoing.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly attributed the estimated ₹7 crore theft figure to the SIT report. The estimate was reported by media outlets. The Caravan regrets the error.

Dhirendra K Jha is a contributing writer at The Caravan / Amrita Singh is a staff writer at The Caravan.

Source: CARAVAN

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