Ram Mandir scandal has snapped RSS's moral authority: Political theorist Pradip K Datta

Commenting on the Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust's decision to hand its temple donation-theft probe to a Special Investigation Team rather than settle it internally, political theorist Pradip K Datta has this blunt statement to make — "The RSS no longer believes it has the moral authority to conduct this operation."

For a movement that built its entire political identity on sanctity and moral purity, the twin financial scandals — over inflated land purchases and the alleged siphoning of donations — have opened up a question mark the Sangh Parivar has never had to face before.

The Federal spoke to Pradip K Datta, political theorist, former professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and co-author of the seminal book on the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags, on what the scandal means for Hindutva's politics of symbolism.

Here are excerpts from the interview:

Do you see the eruption of these two financial scams — the land purchase and the donation siphoning — as a momentary challenge for the Sangh Parivar and the Centre, or something that will leave a lasting smear on the Ram Temple movement, the Sangh Parivar and this entire combination of forces?

It's of course difficult to predict from today's vantage point. But let me say this has been a very important development in the unfolding of a movement that started in 1983 and acquired a new momentum in 2024. It's important because it poses a major question mark to the transformative agenda of Hindutva itself, and especially of the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Whether they overcome this storm over time is debatable, but the question mark itself is a very major development.

Hindutva's premise is a politics of symbolism. It isn't primarily built on usual political issues such as reservations, livelihoods, regionalism or federalism — it rests on symbols, and the Ram Janmabhoomi is the movement's most central symbol. It is central precisely because it sanctifies the movement; it gives the movement a sense of sacredness.

This works in two ways. First, it restores the sanctity of Ram's birthplace, and Ram is a figure who combines sacredness and devotion with the moral virtue that runs a state. So on one hand, the sanctity of Ram Janmabhoomi is a promise of a moral, virtuous, divine state — a new nation. Second, it is sanctified by the fact that the movement erased the claims of Muslims on this country, because Ram Janmabhoomi was seen as a symbol of India itself and of the future India that could come into being. That is essential to the transformative agenda.

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This is the important point — the fact that this birthplace is being made sacred by erasing the Muslim presence gives the agents themselves — the VHP, the RSS, the BJP — a sense of sacredness, because they are the agents bringing about that restoration of the promise of a pure, dharmic nation.

This relationship between the symbol of purity — Ram Janmabhoomi — and the agents fighting for it and restoring it is now at risk of snapping completely. That is a very major challenge, because if the agent is taken out of the main symbol, it becomes just another agent fighting for sanctification. It becomes normal, everyday, like any other political or secular organisation.

I would add here that the major impact of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, looking back in retrospect, was precisely that it arrived in a context of ever-increasing scandals and stories of corruption after liberalisation, and the stigmatisation of politicians as corrupt. From the 1980s onward, we had leaders emerging from outside the political realm — VP Singh, then Anna Hazare, then Arvind Kejriwal — all promising to clean up a corrupt system. And on the other hand there was Modi and, before him, Advani.

Yes. Together with that, this culture of corruption that the whole country seemed immersed in came to a climax with the Commonwealth Games scandal, the 2G spectrum scandal — whatever the merits of that isn't what I'm concerned with.

What was happening was this overwhelming culture of corruption in politics and in the body of the nation. So the sanctity that Ram Janmabhoomi promised has to be located in that context — a pure state of the nation, away from corruption, a virtuous nation.

While you were speaking I was reminded of two specific phrases Modi has used through this period. One is from his three most important speeches after the Supreme Court judgment on Ayodhya — on August 5, 2020 after the Bhoomi Pujan, on January 22, 2024 after the Pran Pratishtha of the idol, and again in November 2025 after hoisting the saffron flag over the temple. On all three occasions he described the completion of the temple as the beginning of a new "kaal chakra" — a new epoch.

The other is his slogan from 2014, "na khaunga na khane dunga". Now nobody has said Modi himself is involved in what has happened. But it has definitely been said that the system was created by the government of India, by the Prime Minister's Office, because his former principal secretary, Nripendra Misra, played a key role in the temple construction and in the Ram Temple Trust. Do you think there's a problem within the Sangh Parivar in transiting from opposition politics — remember, they were in opposition on this issue from 1983 to 2014, more than 40 years — to actually running a system and creating a structure with standard operating procedures? Because everything here appears to have run in a very ad hoc manner. The treasurer has said he wasn't stationed in Ayodhya regularly, that he would go once a month and look at the audited statement. Is the treasurer's job only to look at audited statements?

Two people have resigned and a third has been sidelined, which suggests the institution that was created wasn't running as it should have. The failure lies at the door of the people who established the trust — which, as far as this is concerned, was the Prime Minister's Office, acting on the directions of the Supreme Court. Do you see this as an inability to shift from an ideological, agitational phase to a governance phase?

Yes and no. I think the real problem is that we don't know how the RSS functions — it is not a registered body, it doesn't have a constitution. What we do know from the outside is that it emphasises personal contacts and personalised relationships, because it works through a hierarchy that doesn't generate documents. It is verbal, it is oral in its mode of operation.

It seems to me that what was happening in the Ram Janmabhoomi trust was an extension of that culture — a culture of oral and verbal commands and personalised relationships, based on who you know, who you don't know. Most of them are, in any case, part of the Sangh Parivar. So what Champat Rai was overseeing as general secretary was an extension of something he knew — the RSS culture — within that trust.

The second major problem is that the RSS, by its almost reflexive nature, is averse to creating organisations that are accountable to the public, because the RSS itself is not accountable — it doesn't see itself as needing to be. Now, you could say the BJP is accountable to the public — it is, after all, a registered political party. But the trust comes from the VHP, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

The BJP is always seen, until Modi comes and consecrates it, as an outside agency — Advani comes after the movement has been generated and leads it. He is, in that sense, the political wing. But the moral centre is the RSS — the moral centre of this movement, which will not desist from correcting the BJP.

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The RSS and the VHP don't want any accountable public official around. If you look at other major temples — Tirupati, Kashi Vishwanath, Siddhivinayak — they are controlled by state legislations and public officials. But the VHP's basic demand is that there should be no state regulation of temples at all — a complete removal of any state control and, hence, of any public control. It will be internal control, because the RSS sees itself as the moral voice of Hindutva.

It does not require anybody else to dictate morality to it — it dictates morality to the government in power itself. So for these two reasons — the culture of the RSS, and the importance of keeping temples outside public accountability — we have arrived at the situation we have today.

There's another point I want to raise. There has been a general belief in Hindu society, going back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s, that temples are run by corrupt pandits and pandas. Innumerable mainstream Hindi films — not just parallel cinema — presented temple trusts and temple bodies as villains.

The Ram temple was supposed to be a different kind of temple. Do you think that distinction has now collapsed, that it is no longer different from any other temple? Just the other day there was news of corruption at the Badrinath-Kedarnath trust too — it isn't new.

Hindu devotees have always seen temples as seats of corruption. But here was a temple that promised a completely new beginning.

That's a very important point. At the popular level, Hindi movies capture this, but if you go back to the 19th century, the reform movement itself starts from criticism of the priest — through the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Jyotiba Phule and others — a very strong movement to take religion away from corrupt people, to question the agents performing the rituals that give sacredness to the mandir.

What the RSS finds itself in now is exactly this position — agents divorced from the main symbol. There were two elements to the sanctity of Ram Janmabhoomi: the main symbol, the Janmabhoomi and the mandir built on it, and the agents. They were indistinguishable till now — that's why the RSS and BJP could command this aura of a divine mission, because the temple was supposed to be a new vision of a mandir altogether, a national symbol which no mandir has ever been.

It's interesting that some RSS spokespersons — who may or may not want to be identified — are arguing that this is nothing new, that this happens to all temples. That argument cuts both ways.

But this is a trust formed by the government of India — and they are hand-picked people.

Correct. But who are the members of that trust? Drawn primarily from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, their hand-picked religious appointees. And after the government of India — since 2014 — and the UP government, we know how institutions work in India.

So at the formal level, yes, it was the court judgment that set up the trust. But the operational aspect — who are its members, where do they come from — that's from the RSS, and they made no pretence about it. Why should they? They were the ones leading the movement for the temple, so naturally they would put their own people in front.

So when they say this "ghotala" is quite routine in the history of temples in India, what they are also saying is that this is as good or as bad a temple as any other. All the claims Modi made on those three occasions I listed were, in effect, just words.

There was a promise of newness. But now, by their own testimony, they are saying there is nothing new in this. Even the defence is weak, and it actually bears out your point.

You talked about the Sangh Parivar's demand to take temples out of state control. What we're seeing in Ayodhya after this episode is the opposite. The temple trust meeting accepted the resignations and, essentially, tried to pin certain scapegoats so a systemic failure isn't recognised. The correction is a three-member panel appointed to help select a CEO.

Among the three is a person who isn't a career bureaucrat but has been chairperson of the Shirdi Sai Baba Temple Trust, and who has a background in the government of India, including as a scientist in the Department of Atomic Energy — an erudite person, not someone from within religious organisations. Are we seeing the beginning of a move away from ideology?

Champat Rai and Anil Mishra were essentially representatives of the ideology. Now power is moving into the hands of the bureaucracy — the opposite of what the VHP has demanded all these years. Does the Sangh Parivar now show it has nothing else to fall back on but the bureaucracy?

I wouldn't go so far as to say power is being transferred to the bureaucracy. But it does suggest a certain weakness in their moral authority. Sanctity gave them moral authority — the RSS, the BJP — it gave them an aura, and on that basis they could argue that all temples should be taken out of state regulation and public oversight. The implication of setting up an SIT — not a judicial body, but what I'd call a "secular" body — indexes the fact that the RSS no longer believes it has the moral authority to conduct this operation itself.

This marks a very major compromise with its own self-image. Remember, Mohan Bhagwat has said the RSS doesn't want to be registered — it cannot be registered, because it is Sanatan Dharma itself.

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Hinduism cannot be registered, and the RSS equates itself with Hinduism. So it sees itself as above the state, above all religious leaders, because Dharma is larger than everything else. Now the inquiry is being conducted by somebody else.

We can make out what that means for their own self-image.

Going back to khaki shorts, saffron flags — it brilliantly analyses how this movement politically enlisted various communities across Hindu society, across caste and class divisions, uniting them, which is why it became possibly the most important mass movement after the freedom struggle.

After the temple was built, and now after this scandal, would that kind of energy and unity be visible again? We've seen fairly desperate efforts at what we used to call "chunavi ganit" — electoral arithmetic. Kameshwar Chaupal, a Dalit, was a trust member and performed the Shilanyas in November 1989 — that was the first message the VHP and RSS sent out, that they had built unity among Hindus across caste. He has since died, and a new co-convener, Krishna Mohan, who is also a Dalit, has been brought in — the same kind of symbolism.

Given the questions now being raised about the government's performance, can that unity across caste, built on identity politics, still hold?

I think there are two issues here. One is the symbolic representation given to certain communities, which is a normal practice of the Congress and other parties too. But the other, much more important, element was that when the RSS was in opposition and leading this movement — the VHP, RSS, BJP, especially the RSS — they had very dedicated cadres. Aesthetic-minded, dedicated, going even to the northeast, where you wouldn't have thought the RSS could create a base. But they did — they were pioneers there.

One forgets that RSS shakhas work very hard at the ground level, unlike most other political parties. They still do.

So the symbolic representation had substance, because they were also working with communities on the ground. Why do people work so hard, so selflessly? It's a voluntary organisation — when you're out of power, you work not because you're going to get immediate patronage but because of certain self-driven goals, because you're supposed to be selfless and ascetic. But once in power, and the way the RSS has gone about it, you also become part of an institution of power and patronage. And that, I find, is becoming corrupting — in inverted commas — in institutional life more broadly, because there is patronage, there are factions, there are older and newer generations, and the RSS has been expanding massively, bringing in a lot of new recruits who are not as well-trained as before, and who are attracted by the power of the RSS rather than its selflessness.

So this Ram Janmabhoomi affair raises a major question about the selflessness of the organisation itself. Once you don't have that, the representation becomes purely symbolic — the workers, the sevaks, the RSS pracharaks start losing confidence in themselves, because so much of what inspired them is now seen to have clay feet. Ram Janmabhoomi is now associated with corruption, which they could never have imagined publicly.

So it's a real question whether they can galvanise energy for a forward-looking movement. Modi tried to do that in 2024 — the argument that the movement for the temple is over, and now they are about to establish Hindu Rashtra. That was meant to be galvanising. But it didn't work in 2024, and it will work even less now, because what we have today isn't just the Ram Janmabhoomi ghotala — we also have NEET, ethanol, paper leaks, and something new almost every second day.

Looking at newspapers through June, there's always some scandal, small or large. In a way, we're returning to the 1980s, and to the period of the UPA, which this movement posed itself as an alternative to. Now it is becoming just like any other political formation, just like any other mandir.

That is a major problem they have to get over. I don't know how they will, because they have enormous resources and incredible intelligence — but it is a very major challenge and a big question mark.

You've spoken elsewhere about the emergence of the individual over the institution — that in the RSS it was always said the "vyakti," the individual, is not as important as the "sangathan," the organisation, but that hasn't been the case since 2014.

The RSS has had a problem with the promotion of the Modi cult. To what extent do you think this episode is a result of the individual becoming more powerful than the institution? At one point the RSS was the moral monitor — during the Vajpayee period, we remember how often it insisted on the government changing policy, on the economy, on national security.

I'm not entirely sure there is a culture of individualism creeping into the BJP purely because of Modi's symbolism as the sole leader. On the other hand, before Modi, the BJP was deeply divided between the Modi and Vajpayee camps — that period was full of factionalism. What Modi does is present himself as a leader who can bring together all the factions, who is above all of them, producing a unified front. No minister speaks out of turn.

The media is completely starved of information from within the BJP or RSS, unless they choose to give it. So there has been a consolidation under the central leader.

But what hasn't happened is the moral purity that was promised. There is a huge amount of inequality — the number of contracts the state gives to favoured businessmen, a culture of working in an organised way, but for more profit, more gains, more money, more power. That, I think, has seeped into the RSS itself. So it's not that the organisation has become individualistic as such — but a consequence of this, and something that may already be happening, going by the responses within the BJP to the ghotala, is a phenomenon of factionalism.

I can only see it from the outside, I don't know what's happening within. But I'd assume this is a very major impact of coming into power itself, and that is what the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir ghotala has brought into public view.

I should mention here a wonderful ground report from Ayodhya by the veteran journalist Sheetal Singh. She was reporting that people are too scared to talk — this is after the SIT began its work, a few days ago. But when they do talk, they are critical of the government, of the "Nagpur-Delhi-Gujarat nexus" and the RSS.

Beyond the general Ram bhakts, the RSS workers themselves are disillusioned, on the verge of despair — to the extent that some of them are looking to Yogi Adityanath for deliverance, as the person who may rescue them.

That mention of Yogi is actually opening a new chapter — we shall keep watching the evolution of Yogi Adityanath and whether he has any space within the RSS-BJP, given that he is, in a sense, a lateral entry into the Sangh Parivar from outside. We definitely understand that the RSS, the BJP and the government of India are going to face a lot of challenges.

How they negotiate it is obviously difficult to say at this stage, but we shall keep watching.