Ayodhya Ram Mandir theft: Honour the deity and the devotee

Vikramaditya tales and Arabian Nights fables feature spirits and genies guarding treasures in caves. The Buddha’s relics kept in the caverns of Mandalay temple in Myanmar are believed to be guarded by dancing pythons. The local folk on the Malabar coast would tell you tales of fierce spirits of long dead Moorish slaves guarding hidden firangi gold in forts and shrines.

Old wives’ tales, perhaps. But many people wish these tales were true when they read about the loot happening in several of India’s sacred shrines.

There still are such tales told and believed in. Temple managers had summoned snake charmers and toxicologists—just in case—when they had to open Puri Jagannath’s ratna bhandar two years ago. American writer Emily Hatch, who witnessed the opening of one of the Thiruvananthapuram Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple’s cellars in 1931, wrote about people telling her that hissing serpents had come out when another cellar was opened in 1908. (Emily, by the way, was the mother of the celebrated Afghan antiquarian Nancy Hatch Dupree who saved a lot of the Bactrian Buddhas from the Taliban vandals.) She reported those as spooky balderdash, but even today many local folk believe them to be true.

Most of these tales are fibs, but they served a purpose in their times—they kept bandits and gold-hunting brigands away from shrines and their treasures. Today, we could turn around and say—‘Good people! thy faith hath saved thee, and thy shrines.’

Shrines are more numerous these days, and they hoard more wealth than all that was guarded by all the Vikramadityan serpents and Arabian afreets in the hoary past. But the fierce spirits and fabulous serpents are all gone, leaving the sacred lucre open to loot and plunder. Nor have we replaced them with foolproof guarding mechanisms. With the result, several of those sacred shrines have become easy prey for looters to plunder the wealth offered by the faithful.

While cash and treasure loot scandals are dogging the Sabarimala shrine in Kerala, the Maa Baglamukhi temple in Agar-Malwa, Madhya Pradesh, and the Badrinath temple in Uttarakhand, corruption scandals are heard from the much richer Tirupati shrine, the Tiruchendur Murugan temple in Tamil Nadu and more.

But what shocked the faithful most is the scandal in Ayodhya. The newly built Shri Ram shrine might still be much less wealthy than the Tirupati or the Thiruvananthapuram shrine, but the loot in Ayodhya has shocked the conscience of the faithful much more deeply than the rest.

Why? One may ask. In his unending progress to spiritual solace through several of these shrines, the Indian pilgrim had been used to routine swindle by greedy pandas, corrupt managers, shady intermediaries, and smart alec conmen who promise anything from immediate darshan to instant moksha. He had come to accept these as part of the Indian pilgrimage ecosystem.

Not so with the temple in Ayodhya. To the believer, the shrine was more than a place of worship. He had been told it was an institutional expression of India’s political pride, cultural virtue, national honour, and even communal brag. Its construction was the culmination of a transmigration of the civilisational spirit from “dev to desh, Ram to rashtra” (from deity to country, and from Ram to nation), as the ruler of India had told them at the time of the pran pratishta. The onus of its upkeep was an article of faith that the current rulers of India had taken up on themselves.

That trust has been betrayed. Restore it, hon’ble rulers. For, the wrath of the devotee can be as dangerous as the wrath of the deity.

prasannan@theweek.in