Ram Mandir Loot: The Buck Stops with the Prime Minister
The current loot is bigger; it is difficult to assess as to how many thousands of crores have been stolen since the temple’s inauguration in January 2024. The video evidence presented by the SIT shows that vehicles loaded with cash, gold and silver offerings have left the Ram Temple premises at least 70 times during a 45-day window. Imagine the scale of plunder during the last two-and-a-half years!
By NR Mohanty in Delhi
Belief and faith, it appears, bear no prescriptive burden of religion. You can claim to be an ardent believer of Lord Ram, but at the same time you can happily steal the offerings made to the deity by millions of devotees. That is apparently the religious credo of the Hindutva Establishment led by the RSS and its mascot, Prime Minister Narendra Modi!
Clearly, common people are treated as chumps!
Look at the hypocrisy of this Hindutva Brigade: when it came to celebrating the limelight of destroying the 15th Century Babri mosque and building the Ram Temple on its ruins, the saffron establishment believed it was the crowning glory of its decades-long communal campaign. On its behalf, LK Advani had spearheaded the mosque demolition; Modi became the pivot for the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya.
But there was a difference between the circumstances of both these leaders equally wedded to a communal ideology; Advani waged a patently communally polarising campaign as a leader of an opposition party; Modi raised the communal rhetoric while overseeing the construction of the Ram Temple as the prime minister of the country; his high constitutional office warranted that he was obliged to protect the secular principle enshrined in the Constitution.
However, he has been blasé about this apparent dichotomy; it’s not surprising as consolidation of the Hindutva support base is the meat and drink of his majoritarian politics.
The PM hogged the limelight during the inauguration of the Ram Temple as he chose himself to be prime actor in the Pran pratishtha ceremony, sidestepping even the Shankaracharyas, the traditional high priests of Hindu religion. Since then, he has never tired of invoking the Hindu community to bask in the temple’s glory.
If he were a true leader of the Hindus, Modi would have shown the same alacrity when lightning struck the Ram Temple and devastated its core foundation based on faith. The loot of the offerings made by the millions to Lord Ram — over the months, rather years — by the bandits who masqueraded as upholders of the Hindu religion, is veritably a grave assault on the supreme deity himself.
He should have stepped in, should have owned responsibility for this dastardly robbery; after all, the Ram Temple Trust which governed the temple operations was appointed by his regime: most of the Trustees and key decision-makers of the Ram Mandir Trust were either the PM’s fellow RSS pracharaks or his trusted bureaucrats.
If he had a sense of responsibility, he would have asked for forgiveness from the Ram devotees and acted proactively. But, as is his wont, he has proved to be what he actually is, has studiously kept silent, and has tried to ride the storm by deflecting attention from it.
Remember, the PM had done the same when the land scam involving Ayodhya temple had exploded in 2021; prime associates of the Trust members had bought a plot of land for Rs 2 crore; the registration of the property showed that. But the same registration process revealed that, just 10 minutes later, the same plot of land was sold to the Ram Temple administration for Rs 18.50 crore!
A whopping profit of 900% in minutes!
So what was the lame excuse of the Trust? It said it had nothing to do with the price at which the property had been bought; it paid the seller the price as per the market rate!
Can you see the complicity of the key officials of the Trust in the loot of public money donated by millions of Ram devotees?
These officials were all appointed by the Modi establishment; they should have been sent to jail to restore public trust. But the prime minister’s lips were sealed. He refused to utter a word during those weeks when the huge scandal was a matter of public debate, thanks to social media.
The current loot is bigger; it is difficult to assess, as of now, as to how many thousands of crores of rupees have been stolen since the temple’s inauguration in January 2024. The current video evidence presented by the SIT shows that vehicles loaded with cash, gold and silver offerings have left the Ram Temple premises at least 70 times during a 45-day window.
Imagine the scale of plunder during the last two-and-a-half years!
But our Prime Minister remains conspicuously silent. At his behest, the Hindutva bandwagon has been mouthing the usual platitudes that ruling establishments invariably offer when faced with grave acts of omission and commission — that the law would take its own course and that nobody, howsoever powerful he may be (no ‘she’ as it’s a patriarchy), would be spared.
You see the farce; only a handful of lowly employees, supposedly drawing a meagre salary of Rs 12,000 a month from the Trust, have been arrested. As is the case most often, the big fish have just resigned from the Trust, but they have escaped a jail stint; indeed, they might be quietly rehabilitated once the outcry over the scandal subsides.
At the same time, in order to limit the damage caused by the anger of the Hindu support base, the minions of the establishment have been attacking those flagging the Ram Mandir loot issue as anti-Hindu and pro-Islam: these are the votaries of the Babri mosque, they don’t change.
It is quite possible that the Hindutva juggernaut would be able to tide over the current crisis by scaling up the anti-minorities campaign in the days to come, especially as Uttar Pradesh assembly elections are due in the next six months. Lok Sabha elections took place barely five months after the inauguration of the Ram Mandir (it was timed accordingly); but, to the surprise of the world, voters in Ayodhya rejected Modi’s candidate and, instead, elected a a Dalit, a representative of the Samajwadi Party, which is often castigated by BJP acolytes as ‘Mullah party’.
In March 2027, will the Ram Bhakts of UP punish the BJP for the crimes it has committed against Lord Ram Himself?
Or, will they be swayed by the communally polarising campaign of the saffron establishment?
Time will tell.
(NR) Nalini Ranjan Mohanty is a seasoned journalist, commentator and academic. He is former Resident Editor, Hindustan Times and The Times of India (Patna Edition) and former Director, Jagran Institute of Management and Mass Communication (JIMMC).
Images courtesy Instagram / Social Media
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