Barely hours old as this is written: a hard-hitting, twelve-minute segment on ABP News’s Janhit with Chitra Tripathi, built around a statement Champat Rai issued on 18 August. In it, the Ram Mandir Trust’s former General Secretary — freshly armed with an SIT report that has reportedly cleared him in the donation-theft matter — turns his fire not on some anonymous counting-room functionary but on Nripendra Misra, Chairman of the Trust’s Construction Committee. He names Mr Misra thirteen times across nine of his thirty-three points, accusing him, in substance, of having run that Committee as a one-man show. This Chronicle will come to the specifics shortly.
But readers of this Chronicle will recognise the terrain immediately, because this publication was already standing on it. On 11 July, this Chronicle published L&T, the New Kar Sewak — and the Evergreen Sakari Sewak, a piece that asked, from outside the Trust and taking Mr Misra fully at his own stated word that his domain is construction and nothing else, a set of plain questions about the Committee he has chaired since 2020: who framed the cost estimate that moved from ₹1,800 crore to figures as high as ₹3,500 crore, who outside the Trust’s own appointees examined it, and whether the standard of prudence Sections 15 and 20 of the Indian Trusts Act codify — even if not formally binding on this Trust — was in substance observed by the twelve government-nominated trustees who sat above that Committee.
This was followed by a follow-up article on 26 June, 2026, after senior Congress leaders levelled direct allegations as regards the construction of the Ram Mandir, and not merely the embezzlement of the donations. We raised these questions over a month before Mr Rai asked his own; the link is at the end of this piece, and readers new to this thread would do well to read it once they finish this one.
What has changed since is that the questions this writer put from outside are now being put, in far sharper and far more personal terms, from inside — by the very man whose own conduct was, until a fortnight ago, the subject of the SIT’s scrutiny. This Chronicle will return to that timing below. First, the record, briefly, for readers arriving at this thread for the first time.
To recap only what is necessary. The donation-theft controversy broke on 7 June, when Akhilesh Yadav first raised the alarm; a Special Investigation Team was constituted on 13 June; an FIR followed on 25 June naming eight persons at the counting centre; and on 30 June the Trust accepted, “on moral grounds,” the resignations of General Secretary Champat Rai and trustee Dr Anil Mishra. That was the state of play when this Chronicle last wrote on the subject — a donation-side scandal, with the Construction Committee’s own cost architecture standing as a separate, unresolved question mark alongside it, not yet entangled with the counting-room affair.
It is entangled now, and the entangling has been done by Champat Rai himself, on camera, this week.
Before turning to what Mr Rai has said, a corrective is owed to the language in which this week’s coverage has been framed — because “clean chit,” repeated often enough, has a way of curdling into “acquittal” in the public mind, and the two are not remotely the same thing.
An SIT report of the kind constituted here is an executive fact-finding exercise, or a prelude to the regular post-FIR police investigation, not a judicial verdict. It can recommend that no case be made out against a given individual; what it cannot do is foreclose the matter the way a trial, or a discharge order passed by a competent court after examining the material on record, forecloses it. This is not a pedantic distinction. It was, in fact, demonstrated with some poignancy only weeks ago, when the Supreme Court, on 30 July, posthumously cleared the late Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the Talabira-II coal block matter — setting aside a 2015 special court order that had summoned him as an accused despite the CBI’s own closure reports recommending no case be made out against him. The CBI, in other words, had said there was nothing there; the Special Court had nonetheless taken cognizance and proceeded against him; and it took the apex court, eleven years and one lifetime later, to finally set that summons aside on merit. A closure report — the investigating agency’s own “clean chit,” if the phrase must be used — did not, by itself, end the matter for over a decade. Only the higher court’s considered order did.
The relevance to Ayodhya should be stated plainly rather than left to inference: an SIT’s report recommending no action against Mr Champat Rai establishes that the investigating team found insufficient evidence to proceed against him. It does not, and cannot, establish that the underlying facts recited in his own statement — his description of how decisions were taken, by whom, and on whose word — are themselves beyond further examination. A clean chit closes a criminal question. It does not close a governance question. Mr Rai would be the first person, given the seriousness of what he has now alleged against someone else, to appreciate that distinction.
On 18 August, three weeks after the SIT’s findings became known and four weeks after his own resignation, Champat Rai issued a statement titled, roughly rendered, Some Facts Worth Knowing About the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Temple — thirty-three numbered points spanning the temple’s history from the demolition of the disputed structure through to the grand temple’s construction. It is points four through fifteen, however, that carry the weight of this piece, because in that span Mr Rai names Nripendra Misra — the Construction Committee’s chairman since 2020, and PM Modi’s Principal Secretary from 2014 to 2019 before that — some thirteen times, and the charge, stripped of its surrounding detail, is unilateralism: that decisions belonging in form to a Committee were taken in substance by one man.
The specifics, as set out in the statement and reported since, run as follows: that L&T’s selection as the temple’s design-and-build contractor rested on Mr Misra’s own recommendation; that Design Associates, the Noida-based architectural firm engaged on the temple’s buildings, was similarly his choice; that Mr Misra brought in aides of his own choosing — chief among them Anoop Mittal, former Chairman of the National Buildings Construction Corporation, said to have attended Construction Committee meetings regularly at Mr Misra’s side and to have handled his correspondence, despite having been summoned to Ayodhya, by Mr Rai’s own account, only once or twice across six years; that responsibility for the Ram Temple Museum — the twenty-gallery project this Chronicle’s July report noted was still finalising its storyline — was assigned to one Sanjeev Singh, again described as a Misra confidant; and that the Committee met monthly, latterly once a fortnight, with every material decision, on Mr Rai’s telling, running through this circle.
None of this, it must be said plainly, has been independently established; it is Mr Rai’s own account, offered by a man with an evident and immediate interest in redirecting scrutiny away from the counting room he oversaw and toward the construction site he did not. That is a fair caveat, and this piece offers it without hesitation. But a caveat about motive is not a refutation of substance, and the substance here — a Committee Chairman said to have picked his own contractor, his own architect, his own aide, and his own museum custodian, largely outside the collective process the Committee’s own name implies — restates, almost point for point, the very question this Chronicle asked in July: who, outside the circle that benefited from these decisions, examined them?
The timing invites a second observation this writer will not dress up as anything other than what it plainly is: retaliation, or something closely resembling it. On 19 June, weeks before his own clean chit, Mr Misra had gone on camera to call the donation theft “an open robbery,” and — without naming anyone — had cast pointed suspicion on those close to Mr Rai for the counting-room’s lapses of oversight. Two months later, with the SIT’s findings behind him, Mr Rai has returned the compliment in kind, training an identical charge — a failure of oversight, dressed in the language of one man’s unchecked discretion — on the Committee Mr Misra chairs.
There is an older layer beneath even this. Dinanath Verma, a retired engineer once associated with the construction effort, had earlier alleged — unverified, uninvestigated, and unconfirmed to this day, and this writer states that qualification as firmly as the allegation itself — commission-taking running to some 40 percent on construction contracts, double payment for identical work, and aluminium-work overcharging of up to half its billed value, claims he says he had conveyed to Mr Rai directly at the time. Whether Mr Rai’s own silence on those claims, while he held office, sits comfortably beside his present eagerness to interrogate the Committee’s conduct is a question this writer leaves, for now, to the reader — noting only that a General Secretary who received such warnings and did not act on them cannot straightforwardly reposition himself, once out of office, as the construction ledger’s chief interrogator.
There is, inevitably, a wider reading of this quarrel, and it would be an omission not to name it, however carefully. Mr Misra’s authority in this matter has never rested on the Construction Committee’s chairmanship alone; it rests, in the public mind and arguably in institutional fact, on his six years as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, a proximity this Chronicle noted in June functions as its own kind of institutional shorthand — that a man so closely identified with the PMO, speaking calmly on the Prime Minister’s most cherished project, carries an authority that requires no further explanation from anyone. To question Mr Misra’s conduct as forcefully as Mr Rai now has is, whether intended this way or not, a challenge that touches that proximity — and Mr Rai’s own long institutional association with the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the wider Sangh Parivar gives the reading a further, more specific edge: this writer sees, in what is unfolding, something closer to a contest between the Parivar’s own institutional voice and a trusted hand of the Prime Minister’s office than a simple dispute over who controlled which contract — fought out, for now, in the more deniable language of a construction audit. This writer says no more on that score than the facts themselves warrant, and certainly nothing about the Prime Minister’s own position in this — Mr Misra’s proximity is a matter of record; what anyone chooses to infer from a subordinate’s conduct is not.
It is worth returning, in closing, to the devotee this Chronicle addressed in July — the one who sent ₹100 by money order and the one who sent ₹10 crore by cheque, both invoked there, both still waiting here. For a generation and more, the Ram Mandir stood for millions as a millennial dream deferred and finally redeemed — a matter of faith settled after five centuries, not a matter of institutional plumbing. That its two most senior custodians should now be trading charge and counter-charge in the public press, each pointing at the other’s circle of trusted men, is not merely an administrative embarrassment; it is, for the ordinary devotee, a wound of a different order altogether, and this writer does not use that word loosely. Allegation answered by counter-allegation does not, of itself, produce clarity — it produces noise, and noise is not what a project funded by the small and devout offerings of crores of citizens has earned the right to be governed by. Mr Rai may be entirely right, and Mr Misra may be entirely blameless — but neither can be settled by a twelve-minute interview, thirty-three points of assertion, and one SIT report that examined, by its own remit, only the counting room. What this moment calls for — as this Chronicle argued in July and repeats now with no less urgency — is not another round of statements traded through friendly television anchors, but the one instrument capable of examining both men’s conduct on the same evidentiary footing: a Commission of Inquiry headed by a sitting or recently retired judge of the Supreme Court, empowered to go wherever the ledger, and not merely the loudest voice in the room, leads it.
The writer is a retired IAS officer of the 1984 batch, Punjab cadre, and superannuated as Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab, in July 2021. He is the Founder-Editor of The KBS Chronicle.
Related reading from The KBS Chronicle: L&T, the New Kar Sewak — and the Evergreen Sakari Sewak — the 11 July piece this article builds on, setting out the fiscal and governance questions the Construction Committee has yet to answer.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.