Questions Inside the Indian Mind

I invite readers’ attention to what’s happening at three different sites in India. One of them contains the immense temple in honor of the infant Ram in the holy town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, the large northern state, Ram of course being the much-loved deity who, in the Hindu belief, was born aeons ago in that city. Prime Minister Modi had inaugurated this temple in January 2024 amidst unprecedented pomp and ceremony. 

The second place is an entire sacred town, Ujjain, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Via its temples, Ujjain is linked to two other revered deities, Shiva and Krishna. The third venue is a small piece of ground in New Delhi called “Jantar Mantar,” named after an abutting observatory. It’s the only space today in India’s capital where protestors may demonstrate, though only after permission has been obtained from the police. 

Ayodhya’s Ram temple has been enveloped by a massive scandal. Eight employees of the trust managing it have been arrested for embezzling donations of cash and offerings of jewelry, and two of the trustees, Champat Rai Bansal (who was also the temple’s chief administrator) and Anil Mishra (whose relatives were allegedly part of the team tasked with counting and storing the donations) have resigned. 

A call in the 1990s for building a Ram temple in Ayodhya, and an earlier 1980s’ call for demolishing the 16th-century mosque (which the temple would replace), have been seen in retrospect as the foundation for the BJP’s road to power. The temple scandal therefore carries major political implications. 

The spiriting away of portions of the large amounts of cash and jewelry left as offerings at the Ram temple by millions of the devout was termed “dacoity” by Nripendra Misra, a member of the temple trust and chair of the body that constructed the temple. 

OTHER ALLEGATIONS 

News of the robbery has been followed by two other serious allegations. One is that individuals associated with the temple made absurd sums of money in land deals. An opposition MP in the Rajya Sabha, Sanjay Singh of the Aam Aadmi Party, says he has presented documents to UP officials showing, among other things, that one parcel of Ayodhya land, bought for twenty million rupees, was sold only a few minutes after purchase to the temple trust for 185 million rupees. 

The other big charge is that large off-the-record commissions to unknown entities were paid by those who won contracts for different aspects of temple construction. According to The Hindu of January 31, 2026, constructing the temple will have cost Rs 1,900 crore or around $225 million. 

Unsurprisingly, these awkward revelations have been seen as a jolting betrayal of the faith reposed in the BJP and in the Modi government by winning numbers (in India’s first-past-the post system) of India’s voters, who as everyone knows are predominantly Hindu. It is worth noting that all members of the trust managing the temple, including the two who have resigned (Champat Rai Bansal and Anil Mishra) are men strongly affiliated to the RSS, the ideological network described by Modi (in 2025, on India’s independence day, August 15) as “the world’s largest NGO.” 

Modi himself started his career as a pracharak (propagandist) for the RSS. A prominent inscription at the temple assigns chief credit for erecting it to two men: Narendra Modi and the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat. 

Although the temple robbery was first reported on June 14 in the widely circulated Hindi daily, Dainik Bhaskar, Modi is yet to comment on it. While UP’s BJP chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, famed for the “bulldozer justice” he has enforced in his state, is not from the RSS, he has a lifelong association with the movement to replace what until 1992 was the Ayodhya mosque with a grand Ram temple. He has claimed that his administration will identify the ones who’ve brought disrepute to the temple project. 

Some in the opposition have wondered whether Adityanath will attempt to use the scandal to establish himself as Modi’s successor, but as of writing the possibility of anyone in the BJP projecting himself even indirectly as a Modi successor, let alone as a Modi challenger, seems remote. 

On June 30, according to The Telegraph of Kolkata, which credited the news agency Press Trust of India, the Congress Party has “intensified its attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the alleged embezzlement of donations at the Ram temple in Ayodhya, accusing him of maintaining a ‘silence’ that amounts to a ‘direct assault’ on the faith of crores of devotees.” The party has also alleged that its regional chief in Uttar Pradesh, Ajai Rai, was detained by police ahead of a planned visit by a Congress delegation to offer prayers at the temple. 

“BREAK YOUR SILENCE” 

The Telegraphquotes the Congress Party’s national general secretary, Jairam Ramesh, as saying, “PM Modi’s silence regarding the looting at the Shri Ram Temple is a direct assault on the religious faith of crores of people across the country. The Modi government constituted the temple trust without any transparent criteria or public consultation and appointed RSS members to it. Subsequently, the entire trust was exempted from the ambit of the Right to Information Act. Modi-ji, break your silence!” 

The Congress Party has demanded the dissolution of the trust managing the temple and called for an investigation monitored by India’s Supreme Court into the alleged donations scam. The Telegraph story also reports an apparent decision by the association of local lawyers that “none of its members would represent the eight accused arrested in the case.” 

Ujjain.The BJP’s Mohan Yadav, who has been the Madhya Pradesh chief minister from December 2023, represents south Ujjain in his state’s legislature. After three months of research, Jay Mazoomdaar, investigative reporter for the Indian Express, claims to have found that Yadav and members of his family doubled their land holdings in the Ujjain area within two years of his becoming a minister in 2020, and then doubled their land assets once more within two years of his becoming chief minister. 

Published on June 23, Mazoomdaar’s detailed story on the land holdings of the Mohan Yadav family is likely to go down as a remarkable piece of painstaking and brave journalism. Among other things, it showed that the expansion in the family’s lands coincided with the government’s projects to develop the area for tourism, especially religious tourism, and to widen its roads. 

NOT LOSING MOMENTUM 

Jantar Mantar, New Delhi. Led by thirty-year-old Abhijeet Dipke, the “Cockroach protest” continuing at Jantar Mantar and elsewhere is not losing momentum, even though protestors must take risks. Anyone going to that site encounters not only a sobering police regiment that answers to India’s home ministry but also cameras that record your joining the protest. 

That the millions of Gen Z Indians who on their phones endorsed the Cockroach Janata Party would not rush physically to join the protests was always known. At Jantar Mantar, where protesters continue to assemble, the chief demand, linked to student suicides, continues to be the resignation of India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. A number of students whose activism predates the CJP are showing up at Jantar Mantar, including several belonging to long-established student organizations, as well as quite a few first-time protesters. In this article, and also here, objective and positive assessments of Dipke and his CJP team are offered. 

The clarity of the CJP’s core spokespersons, Dipke included, should be acknowledged. Their voices underline the shocking absence of accountability, despite paper leaks and student suicides, in those in charge of India’s system of examinations for professional courses or for government jobs. These voices also reiterate the CJP’s commitment to an India of equality, inclusiveness, and free speech. Also heartening is evidence that the male and female students joining the protests, often interviewed by YouTubers, come from a variety of religious and caste backgrounds. 

Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger-strike at Jantar Mantar in support of the CJP’s demand for Pradhan’s resignation is not a minor development. Here is what a reporter of The Hindu picked up after interviewing a few protesters on Sunday June 28.

Fifty-nine-year-old Wangchuk is an educator and environmentalist of global renown. His success in creating a coalition of Buddhists and Muslims in high-altitude Ladakh has been more than impressive. Like the CJP, which he backs wholeheartedly, Wangchuk is committed to peaceful protest. He has made it plain, moreover, that his hunger-strike at Jantar Mantar is for Ladakh’s future as well as for Minister Pradhan’s accountability. 

“WHAT ARE YOU WRITING?” 

When elections are known to be doctored, occupants of seats of office may be feared but they are not esteemed. “Voting results” lose credibility. Judgments that people make in their minds, not always openly revealed, matter more. 

Tailpiece: Kolkata’s Telegraph of June 27 notes in an editorial that one of the rules laid down by the Indian government for thousands of NGOs receiving any aid from outside India is that they “must disclose all social media accounts [and] websites and declare whether they or their key functionaries have published a book, magazine or a newspaper article.”