When Does Protecting Faith Require Regulating the People Who Manage It?

The Donation Box Nobody Can Audit

Every rupee, every gram of gold, every plot of land that changes hands around the Ram Janmabhoomi temple moves through a structure that answers to no statutory body - only to its own trustees. That is not automatically corruption.

But it is a structure that makes corruption very hard to ever prove, disprove or prevent, which is exactly the problem this editorial is pointing at. The specific tension, stated plainly India's Constitution protects two things that pull in different directions here.

Article 26 guarantees a religious denomination's right to manage its own affairs and administer its own property, free from state interference. Article 25(2)(a), sitting right next to it, allows the state to regulate the secular, economic and financial activity that surrounds religious practice - even when it's wrapped in religious meaning.

Temple boards at Tirupati, Nathdwara and Guruvayur exist precisely because the Supreme Court, as far back as the 1963 Tilkayat case on the Nathdwara temple, drew this exact line: matters of faith stay untouched, but the money, land and contracts around faith are a public, regulable concern. Why Ayodhya sits outside that pattern The Ram Janmabhoomi temple was directed into a private trust structure rather than a statutory board - a choice made without a stated public reason.

That decision might have felt uncontroversial when the temple was a construction project defined mostly by its emotional and political weight. It looks very different now that the story has shifted to alleged loot from land deals and chadava collections running into large amounts of gold, silver and cash.

A structure built for a moment of national sentiment is now being asked to survive scrutiny it was never designed to withstand. What makes this genuinely hard, not obvious It would be easy to say "just impose a statutory board"

• but the same state oversight that catches embezzlement can also become a tool for political interference in how a denomination runs its own religious life, which is exactly what Article 26 exists to prevent. Devotees who want transparency about their donations are not automatically the same people who'd welcome a government-appointed CEO second-guessing the trust's religious decisions. Where the actual line should sit The workable distinction isn't "state oversight versus none"
• it's the same secular/religious split that already governs Tirupati and Nathdwara: statutory audit and public disclosure requirements over land deals, contracts and cash donations, with zero state authority over ritual, doctrine or who leads worship. Ayodhya doesn't need a government-run temple. It needs the same financial guardrail every other major temple in India already has.