Ayodhya: A Crisis of Accountability In the City of Faith – PART I

This is the first of a two-part story, covering what allegedly went wrong before the temple opened to the public. What happened around Ram’s temple in the years before its consecration a real-estate boom, a conflict of interest inside the administration, and an accounts manager removed a day after he caught donation theft.

Before the Doors Opened: The Land Deals and the Sacked Accountant

Ayodhya is the birthplace of Lord Ram, the beating heart of unshakeable faith for hundreds of millions of Hindus. Since the grand consecration ceremony (Pran Pratishtha) in January 2024, the city has sat at the centre of national and global attention. But long before the idol was consecrated, the ground beneath the temple literally and financially was already shifting.

The credit for pushing these questions onto the national stage most aggressively goes to Samajwadi Party national president Akhilesh Yadav, who said those who once spoke of “Nation First” now appear focused on donations instead. He released detailed reports on land deals, irregularities in offerings and municipal corruption, forcing the government onto the back foot. The Yogi government dismissed most of the allegations as “politically motivated.” But does calling an allegation political amount to answering it?

When the Holy City Became a Real Estate Hot Spot

After the Supreme Court verdict of November 2019, land prices in Ayodhya began to climb sharply years before a single brick of the temple’s sanctum was consecrated. Detailed reporting by the Indian Express and others has traced where the gains landed.

AAP MP Sanjay Singh and Samajwadi Party leaders allege that a plot bought for ₹2 crore was sold to the Ram Temple Trust for ₹18.5 crore within five to ten minutes. The Trust says the earlier price was outdated and ₹18.5 crore reflected current market value leaving unanswered the question of how land value could genuinely leap that far in minutes, and who set that valuation.

The Mayor on the ADA’s Own List

The ₹2 crore-to-₹18.5 crore land flip was not an anonymous transaction; reporting linked it to Ayodhya Mayor Rishikesh Upadhyay. Singh identified the men behind the sale as Ravi Mohan Tiwari and an associate, and alleged that Tiwari was related to then mayor Rishikesh Upadhyay, a BJP leader. The land had first been bought from Kusum and Harish Pathak in March 2021, then transferred to the Ram temple Trust for ₹18.5 crore soon after.

Upadhyay’s name did not appear only in that case. On August 6, 2022, the Ayodhya Development Authority reportedly released, or later said it had “leaked,” a list of 40 alleged “illegal colonisers” who had bought land and built on it without approval, mainly along the Saryu river floodplain. The list included sitting Ayodhya MLA Ved Prakash Gupta, former Milkipur MLA Gorakhnath Baba, and Mayor Rishikesh Upadhyay. It also emerged that Gupta’s nephew, Tarun Mittal, had purchased 5,174 square metres in Barhata Manjha for ₹1.15 crore just days after the Supreme Court’s November 2019 verdict that triggered the land rush.

Upadhyay’s response was blunt denial: “We have no role in any such illegal land deals,” he told reporters, and the Times of India reported the named men were considering defamation action against the ADA.

ADA vice-chairman Vishal Singh, the same official who would later be rewarded with a top state post,  first called the list credible and promised strict enforcement, then walked it back as “premature” and “wrongly leaked.”

A year later, reporting said bulldozers had demolished structures at several of the 40 flagged sites, but the plot linked to the mayor’s circle the same land later sold to the Trust for ₹18.5 crore had reportedly been reclassified from floodplain to “park and open space,” placing it outside the ADA’s demolition powers. No case was filed against the mayor, no money trail was established, and the episode ended with a denial, media scrutiny, and a rezoning dispute. Singh also alleged that the Trust had bought nazul land worth about ₹3 crore for nearly ₹24 crore, a gap of roughly ₹21 crore that the SIT was said to be examining through documents, valuation reports, and bank records.

HOABL (House of Abhinandan Lodha, the company of Abhinandan Lodha), son of Maharashtra BJP minister Mangal Prabhat Lodha bought about ₹105 crore of land in Tihura Mazha, Ayodhya, between June 2023 and March 2024, in the very window running up to consecration. The Samajwadi Party alleges backward-class Manjhi farmers’ land was acquired under pressure; HOABL denies it.

When a ruling party minister’s family firm buys land at this scale around a sacred site in another state, in the run-up to its grand opening, does that not warrant a transparent inquiry on its own?

An Indian Express investigation found Ayodhya’s circle rate had not been revised in seven years even as market prices surged, letting influential buyers acquire land from farmers cheap and resell it high. Akhilesh Yadav called it an economic conspiracy against local people. Why was the rate frozen for seven years oversight, or design?

The list of buyers in this pre-consecration land rush reads like a who’s who: Adani Group firm Homequest bought land worth about ₹3.55 crore; the sons of Arunachal Pradesh’s Deputy Chief Minister bought land worth ₹3.72 crore eight kilometres from the temple; the mother of the UP Police STF chief bought land nearby too. The question isn’t whether these purchases were illegal it’s how, and by whose grace, all of them got the opportunity years ahead of the general public.

An Indian Express investigation also flagged a direct conflict of interest inside the administration overseeing this boom: Ayodhya’s then Divisional Commissioner, IAS M.P. Agarwal, forwarded a March 2021 inquiry recommending action against a trust accused of irregular land purchases from Dalit families even as his own father-in-law and brother-in-law had bought land from that very same trust on December 10, 2020, months earlier. Agarwal said he did not recall the matter; the Yogi government ordered an inquiry, with no public outcome to date. Relatives of other senior officials, including the DIG and Chief Revenue Officer, reportedly bought land from the same trust while it was under scrutiny.

Separately, the UP Awas Vikas Parishad acquired 1,407 acres for a public housing scheme under 2020 and 2022 notifications, followed by a further 450-acre notification in 2023 all before the temple’s doors opened.

Petitioners allege the land was later earmarked for commercial use, including hotel plots sold to private developers at more than 30 times the compensation paid to farmers. The Supreme Court has left the matter to the High Court.

Mahipal Singh’s Revelations: Is This What Happens When You Tell the Truth?

While land was changing hands outside the temple, something else was allegedly going wrong inside it. Mahipal Singh, the Ram Temple’s accounts in-charge, handled the temple’s books from January 2021 to March–April 2022     two years before the consecration. According to media reports, when he allegedly caught the theft of donations from the temple’s donation boxes and complained to Trust general secretary Champat Rai and member Gopal Ji, he was removed from his post the very next day.

The man who caught the theft was thrown out. Those against whom the allegations were made stayed in office and would remain there for years afterward.

Singh claims the theft was not an isolated incident but a daily occurrence, and that eight months of CCTV footage from cameras inside the temple complex was deleted after his removal. These claims have not been independently verified, and the Trust and Champat Rai have denied any wrongdoing. But a contradiction is hard to ignore: this same Trust would, years later, itself demand an SIT investigation into its own affairs.

If everything had been done by the book back in 2022, why would that investigation become necessary at all?

Part II follows tomorrow picking up from the January 2024 consecration itself the Pran Pratishtha’s own disputed accounts, a 400-strong private guard force, a Special Investigation Team, a donation trail running through Karnataka, and a reckoning of how large Ayodhya’s true scam could be.