While the woman can’t be seen in the grainy pictures, she stands her ground while pushing the sneaky-looking men for answers. This is not the first case of its kind in which a concerned citizen questions the credentials of those involved in fundraising. However, the risk of fraud by individuals claiming to be part of the Ram Temple donation collections is not only concerning for ordinary citizens, at a time when today’s society is deeply polarized and religious intolerance is rampant. on brazen display, but also for those who run the drive.
Over the phone, Champat Rai, general secretary of the Ram Temple Trust and head of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad office, tells us that they have so far filed five FIRs against such scammers. Three of these, he said, have been featured in Ayodhya. One FIR was presented in Bilaspur and another in Mumbai. “There has also been a case from Kanpur,” he said. “These cases keep popping up.”
While Rai declined to disclose details of these FIRs, he offered insight into the types of people currently participating in the ongoing fundraising campaign for the temple. “One is the type who devoutly collects money and deposits it into the bank account mentioned on the website. These people are serious and devoted people of our society. “Rai said.” Then there is the second type: smart and cunning people. Those who are caught face action from the government and the police, or from us. And those who manage to escape .. . God bless you is all I will say. ”
The temple race
Launched on the occasion of Makar Sankranti on January 15 this year, the national fundraising campaign for the Ram temple is officially scheduled until the occasion of Ravidas Jayanti on February 27. The campaign is led by the Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, which was established on the instructions of the Supreme Court in its contentious judgment on November 9, 2019. The Supreme Court granted full control of the disputed land to the Hindu parties in the title lawsuit and ordered the trust to be established for the express purpose of building the Ram temple, among other things.
Shortly after Prime Minister Modi announced the formation of the trust in Parliament on February 5, 2020, a 12-member board was established to govern the trust and execute its mandate. It is now a 15-member body, comprised of former government and serving officials, as well as members of the Sangh Parivar. The trust’s ongoing work was visible in August 2020, despite the pandemic, when Modi presided over a ceremony to lay the foundation stone for the temple’s construction in the presence of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s head, Mohan Bhagwat.
Seen in this context, the 42-day national fundraising campaign is but one more step toward building the temple. If you have caused controversy, it is only consistent with your past record. The small difference this time around is that even the Sangh Parivar officials involved in the fundraising campaign have noticed the problem and seem to have tried to proactively address it.
How fraud happens
In the last week of January, when VHP ‘activists’, led by Yatendra Pal Singh Jadaun, the Saha Mantri district of Veer Savarkar (in Bhopal city) for the team, were on a door fundraising campaign On the doorstep in the Ashoka Garden town of old Bhopal, they ran into people who had already donated the money. Jadaun, who oversees 1,500 volunteers participating in the donation drive, told us they even had fake receipts to prove it.
Alarmed by this, the VHP filed several complaints and subsequently an FIR was also filed at the Ashok Garden Police Station in old Bhopal. Rajesh Bhadoria, Bhopal Deputy Superintendent of Police, confirmed this and told us that an arrest had also been made. “After a technical analysis and detailed questioning of the defendant Manoj, it was found that he had printed a booklet with MP Nagar receipts, which matched the originals, with the intention of forgery,” he said. “Manoj was collecting funds from stores and other places, which he confessed to us, just for his own benefit. So, we arrested him, we presented him in court and from there they sent him to jail ”. The defendant, according to Bhadoria, had collected a total of 2,200 rupees from unsuspecting people when the police detained him.
Several cases have also come to light in Uttar Pradesh. In early February, for example, three people were arrested in the Bulandshahr district just before they allegedly tried to start their own fundraising campaign after printing fake donation receipts. The complainants here were also the local Sangh officials.
Harendra Kumar, Police Superintendent, Bulandshahr (rural) told us that the defendants were in the middle of binding printed receipts when the information was leaked to members of the Sangh Parivar. “People who are part of the fundraising campaign were informed by someone that these receipts had reached the person doing the bookbinding work. They then filed a written complaint against the three defendants who have now been sent to jail by the court for 14 days, “said Kumar.
Narendra Kumar Sharma, the officer from the Khurjanagar police station in the district, said that Sarvachan Singh, an RSS official in the town of Khurja of the Bulandshahr district, had filed the complaint on which the police acted. Sharma said the defendants have been charged under sections 420 and 467 of the Indian Penal Code, which relate to acts of forgery. The FIR, a copy of which was shared with this reporter by a lawyer affiliated with Bajrang Dal, confirmed this.
How the Trust Really Raises the Fund
“The temple is being built at Lord Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya. That’s why it doesn’t look like any other Ram Mandir ever built, ”Rai explained. “For the trust, this temple should be referred to as the temple of the nation, which means that we want the maximum possible number of indigenous people to contribute to its construction.”
The trust hopes to reach every village and district in the country, from the poorest, who can pay up to 10 rupees, to the richest, for whom there is no upper limit. “Our goal is to reach four lakh villages, which should cover half the population of India,” said the VHP veteran and administrator of the temple trust. “Our goal is to reach 14 major families and 70 million people. This is a very broad campaign. This may be the biggest campaign in the world. ”
Although there is officially no obligation for anyone on how much they should donate, the trust has printed coupons worth Rs 10, Rs 100 and Rs 1,000. To ensure that the fundraising process is formally structured, specific responsibilities have been assigned to members of Sangh Parivar organizations, including VHP, RSS, and BJP. The most basic unit of this fundraising campaign is a ‘toli’, a group of four to five volunteers from the Sangh Parivar teams, who go door-to-door to raise funds. According to Rai, there are about 1.50,000 of these tolis deployed, who have recruited nine to ten lakhs of people across the country. For every four tolis, there is one person who is responsible for depositing money in the bank. That person is the “depositor”. There are currently 37,000 such depositors in the campaign. They deposit the amounts raised in local branches of any of the following three banks: Punjab National Bank, State Bank of India, and Bank of Baroda.
Depositors can only deposit the money, Rai told us, not withdraw it. In addition, he said, banks are “only collection centers.” People are given a code. The account has no number. All of this is centrally mapped by a ‘monitoring center’ or ‘control center’, based in the Kailash colony town of New Delhi. A strong team of 25 members sits in the center every day and analyzes the funds that come in. It is made up of authorized accountants and people who answer inquiries on calls and resolve issues. They are also monitoring the mobile app.
This toolkit is not foolproof
Despite these seemingly sound arrangements, the fundraising campaign has continued to generate controversy and raise fears. According to Dhirendra K Jha, co-author of
Ayodhya: The Dark Night – The Secret Story of Rama’s Appearance at Babri MasjidThrough this fundraising campaign, the Sangh Parivar is “collecting money and communalizing society.”
The RSS is concerned “that outsiders, and not just its foot soldiers, have also begun to misuse the opportunity,” he said. “The business they are doing in the name of religion … they are going to harm this nation and this religion.”
There may be some merit in Jha’s concerns if you take a look at what happened recently in Moradabad in UP, where members of the Bajrang Dal group exposed a dissident faction, which includes their former members, for the unauthorized collection of funds for the Temple of Ram. “The complainants said that they were the ones authorized to collect funds for the Ram temple, but others were printing their own receipts to collect money,” said Amit Kumar Anand, additional superintendent of the Moradabad (city) police. “Now cases have been registered. One of these groups was a splinter group from the Bajrang Dal. They may have owned the Bajrang Dal office before, but they started their own fundraising. They have reconciled this now, but we are still investigating the matter and will proceed according to law. Statements are being recorded and documentary evidence is also being examined ”.
The fact that it is a concern, though not a serious one, is how the Sangh Parivar would like to perceive this. Vimlendra Mohan Pratap Mishra, one of the administrators of the Ram Temple trust, over the phone from Ayodhya, told us: “Ab dekhiye beimaani har jagah hai … bahut log farzi kar rahe hain … koi farzi chapwa liye hain toh koi uska kya kar sakta hain? Jo humko jaankari milti hai toh uske khilaaf fir hoti hain. Sab cheeze hoti hain. (Now see, unethical behavior is everywhere … a lot of people are doing it … if someone has printed a fake coupon, what can be done about it? If we find out about a fraud case, we make sure that a FIR is on file in this regard “).
Prafulla Ketkar, editor of the
Organizer The magazine, which is widely viewed as a supporter of the Sangh ideology, believes that the real goal behind this is not just fundraising, but the restoration of “national consciousness.” “This fight was never just about the temple …”, he told us. “All of society has to be connected. That feeling of belonging over the whole process of rebuilding the temple has to be there. So the amount doesn’t matter. The fact that everyone participates in it is more important. ”
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