When a devotee folds a note and drops it into the hundi at the Ram Mandir, she is not completing a transaction. She is performing something older than any temple's ledger - the surrender of a thing that is hers to a presence that is not. Dana, in the Indian grammar of giving, is not charity. It is closer to yajna: an offering whose entire merit lies in the release, in the giver's hands coming away empty and clean. The gift is consecrated at the very moment it stops belonging to anyone.
When it lands in a counting room, the sacred becomes countable, and the countable becomes vulnerable. That narrow seam, between the offering that is given to God and the institution that must physically hold it, is where every great devotional civilisation has, sooner or later, been tested. Ayodhya has just been tested there, and failed.
The facts are still settling, but the shape is clear enough. A Special Investigation Team has reported serious shortcomings in how donations at the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi temple were counted and monitored - weak oversight, poor accountability, gaps wide enough for cash to slip through. Eight people have been arrested, several of them entrusted with the counting itself; CCTV footage is said to show notes being diverted during the tally.
The story is both peculiarly Indian - corruption in uniquely opaque systems - and entirely universal. What happened in that counting room is one of the most eternal stories in the history of organised devotion. The error is not in believing this could only happen here. The error is in not recognising how very old, and how very global, the problem is.
Consider the institution most often held up as the gold standard of sacred administration. The Vatican has spent four decades cycling through financial scandal: the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano in 1982, with the Vatican Bank as its largest shareholder and its chairman, 'God's Banker' found hanged under a London bridge; the catastrophic London property venture of the last decade, into which the Secretariat of State poured some 350 million euros before selling the building at a 140-million-euro loss; the corruption trial that followed and convicted a cardinal once spoken of as a future pope; a parallel billion-dollar fraud traced through a suppressed Catholic society in Peru. All of this inside a sovereign whose own theology could not be clearer that the wealth it holds is held in trust - that, as the tradition insists, the Church's money is not hers but the Lord's. The conviction did not prevent the theft. Only institutions did: the Vatican's belated financial watchdog, its submission to external money-laundering review, the slow, humbling acceptance that even a holy treasury must be audited by people who assume it might be robbed.
That is the lesson Ayodhya should take, and it is being taken - quietly, and from an unexpected quarter. In direct response to the Ram Mandir affair, the trust that runs Tirupati, the richest temple in the country, has gone to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and asked it to tear out a decades-old accounting system and replace it with a modern, audited, enterprise platform inside a hundred days. The accountants describe the project, rightly, as a potential template for religious institutions across India. Tirupati's response is the mature one: not to insist that a sacred space is above suspicion, but to build the controls that make suspicion unnecessary.
Here is where the comparison with the Vatican should give Indians not anxiety but a strange confidence. Because the discipline now being imported in the language of ERP systems and internal controls is usually framed as a modern Western correction applied to the, sometimes, symbolic world of temple administration. It is no such thing. It is a recovery of something India theorised earlier and more ruthlessly than almost any civilisation on earth.
The Arthashastra, at least two thousand years ago, sets down a catalogue of 40 distinct ways in which officials embezzle from the treasury - recording what was paid as unpaid and the unpaid as paid, entering a large gift as small and a small as large, naming one recipient in the books while another pockets the money. Read today, the list is almost completely current. And Kautilya offers it without illusion about human nature: just as it is impossible, he writes, not to taste the honey or the poison that finds itself at the tip of the tongue, so it is impossible for one handling the king's revenue not to consume at least a little of it. From that bleak realism he builds a system - rewards for whistle-blowers, a larger share for the outsider and a smaller one for the colleague who informs; punishment running up the whole chain of custody, not merely the lowest clerk; the rotation of officials before they learn the loopholes of an office. This is fiduciary accountability worked out in granular detail, in a civilisation that also wrote the Bhagavad Gita.
That is the deeper point a returning civilisation should be willing to make about itself. The figure of the trustee - the one who holds what is not his, the nimitta-mātra, the mere instrument through whom the offering passes - sits closer to the heart of Indian thought than the figure of the owner ever has. To demand that such a trustee be watched, counted, and held to account is not a foreign imposition on devotion. It is shraddha in its most practical form. Auditing the hundi is not an act of suspicion against the divine; it is an act of fidelity to the devotee who gave with her hands clean.
A civilisation does not prove its maturity by placing its holiest institutions beyond scrutiny. It proves it by remembering that it once knew, better than anyone, that scrutiny is the
price of trust. Ayodhya's scandal is not evidence that India lacks a standard of sacred stewardship. It is evidence of a lapse from one India already possessed - and, if Tirupati's instinct prevails over Ayodhya's politics, evidence that the standard can still be recovered. That, in the end, is what returning means.
(Hindol Sengupta is a multiple award-winning historian and author of 13 books. His new book India as a Civilizational State is out in autumn 2026.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
