India arrests staff accused of theft at temple, built on Babri Masjid site
Top members of an Indian temple trust resigned on Friday after police arrested eight people accused of stealing donations at a Hindu shrine central to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu-first politics, officials said.
The Ram Mandir temple in Ayodhya in northern Uttar Pradesh state, built on grounds where a mosque stood for centuries before being torn down by Hindu zealots, was inaugurated in 2024 with great fanfare by Modi himself.
The case has sparked anger amongst the devotees who have donated to the $240 million temple, which was funded entirely by public donations, according to the trust managing the site.
More than 50 million people visited the temple in the year after its consecration alone, according to the temple trust.
Police registered a criminal case on Thursday over alleged irregularities in the handling of donations and arrested eight people, including temple employees, according to a government statement issued late that day.
Most were involved in counting or handling cash and valuables donated by devotees including gold and silver, media reports said.
They face charges of criminal breach of trust, theft, criminal conspiracy and corruption, the government statement said.
- 'So shameful' -
The government has not disclosed the scale of the alleged embezzlement.
Opposition parties and media reports say it could amount to more than $20 million.
"It is so shameful that a shrine of such supreme importance is being discussed for all the wrong reasons," said Viti Saxena, a 44-year-old homemaker who had donated to the temple.
"I now wonder if that actually went into the temple coffers or not. It is a matter of global shame now," Saxena told AFP. "The faith of countless Hindu believers is shaken."
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a firebrand Hindu monk whose state government ordered the investigation into the case, has vowed that "no guilty person will be spared".
On Friday, the top official of the Ram Mandir Trust, Champat Rai, and another prominent member stepped down from their positions on "moral grounds", a temple management official told AFP.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, also said a larger management body, the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Trust, is likely to be dissolved and reconstituted soon by the government.
Devout Hindus believe that the god Ram was born in the town of Ayodhya -- home to the temple -- more than 7,000 years ago, but that the Babri mosque was built over his birthplace by a 16th-century Muslim emperor.
India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) -- then in the opposition -- played an instrumental role in public campaigning that eventually led to the mosque's demolition in 1992.
It helped propel Modi's BJP as an unstoppable electoral juggernaut. In 2014, it displaced the secularist Congress party that had dominated India since independence from Britain.