MANY extraordinary things are happening in Yogiraj, Uttar Pradesh: opposition candidates prevented from filing their nominations for zilla panchayat presidentship elections, corona patients in villages being asked to sit under neem trees in order to breathe oxygen because of the unavailability of medical facilities...The most extraordinary, however, are the scandalous land deals being entered into in Ayodhya by members of the trust entrusted with the construction of the Ram Temple for which thousands of crores of rupees have been collected from devotees.

On June 13, leaders belonging to the Samajwadi Party (Pawan Pandey) and AAP Party (Sanjay Singh) held separate press conferences in which they presented documents to prove that on March 18, a piece of land bought for Rs 2 crores was sold fifteen minutes later for Rs 18.5 crores to the Ramjanmabhoomi Trust.  There was documentary evidence that Sultan Ansari and Ravi Mohan Tiwari had first bought the land from Harish and Kusum Pathak and then sold it to the trust which paid them at the rate of Rs 4,123 per square foot when the official circle rate was only Rs 763. Rishikesh Upadhyaya (BJP mayor of Ayodhya) and Anil Misra (a trustee of the Ramjanmabhoomi Trust) were witnesses to both sale deeds while Ravi Mohan Tiwari happens to be closely related to Upadhyaya.
The secretary of the trust, Champat Rai, was quick to respond to allegations of fraud.  He said that Ansari and Tiwari had entered into an agreement to sell with the Pathaks ten years previously and had benefitted from land prices that had sky-rocketted. 

Harish and Kusum Pathak are wanted criminals whom the UP administration claims are ‘absconders’.  Their company, the Saket Goat farming company, ran a Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of people who were promised huge returns on investments in the form of money or goats.  Cases have been filed against them in several districts of UP including Faizabad, now Ayodhya.  Their son, Vikas, was arrested in January of this year.

Incredible as it may sound, this couple that the UP police of several districts claims that it was unable to trace, were regular visitors to the Ayodhya Court where they finalised various property deals.

They were certainly present there all day on March 18 when they sold altogether five plots of land: three to Ansari and Tiwari for Rs 2 crores which were then sold to the trust for Rs 18.5 crores; and two plots for which the official circle rate was Rs 4.97 crores directly to the trust for Rs 8 crores.   

Now it transpires that their acquisition of these five plots was itself questionable.  They bought the plots in 2017, giving the lie to Champat Rai’s assertion that the agreement to sell that they entered into with Tiwari and Ansari was ten years old, from four brothers Javed, Mehfooz, Firoz and Noor for a total sum of Rs 2 crores.  The sale, however, is alleged to be fraudulent since the land in question was waqf land. The manager (mutawalli) of the trust challenged this sale and, apparently, it was ‘stayed’ by the administration.  In fact, right up to May 2021, there was a notice on this property that said that it was a ‘disputed site’ which, according to the mutawalli, was removed by Pathak.

Yet another questionable land deal has come to light. On February 20, Deep Narayan, an active member of the BJP who is the nephew of Rishikesh Upadhyaya, the BJP mayor of Ayodhya, bought a plot of 890 square metres from a mahant, Devendra Prasadacharya for Rs 20 lakhs.  This plot is just adjacent to the site for the proposed temple.  On May 11, Deep Narayan sold this same plot to the Janmabhoomi Trust for Rs 2.5 crores.  The circle rate of this property was Rs 35.6 lakhs.  Anil Misra is a witness to this sale deed too.  When these documents were accessed, another sale deed also surfaced.  On the very day, February 20, that Deep Narayan bought the property from Devendra Prasadacharya he also sold another plot to the Ramjanmabhoomi trust for Rs 1 crore.  The circle rate for this land was Rs 4,000 a square metre and it was therefore valued at Rs 27.08 lakhs while it was sold for Rs 1 crore.  Once again, Anil Misra was the witness. 

Now it seems that this sale too was questionable since the land that was bought from Devendra Prasadacharya and sold to the trust was actually nazul land or government land that had been leased out but could not be sold.  While the records are clear about the land in question being government land, when the district magistrate was questioned about the validity of these sales he said that he could only make enquiries if a formal complaint was made and this had not happened so far.

It is simply not possible that responsible persons, managing a trust brought into being by a Supreme Court judgment, consisting of persons hand-picked by the government of India, entrusted with the responsibility of constructing a temple dedicated to Lord Ram could have been involved in buying property for this purpose for huge sums of money without studying all the relevant papers and with no regard for the highly inflated prices that were being charged.  This could not have happened without collusion at all levels in the perpetration of a shameful misappropriation of money collected in the name of religious faith and belief.

More than two weeks have passed since the facts regarding so many suspicious land deals entered into by the Ramjanmabhoomi Trust have been in the public domain. They have, however, elicited no comments from either the state or the central government both of which are deeply involved with the establishment and the workings of the trust.  In complete contrast to this refusal to act where alleged malpractices of the trust are concerned, the state government has acted with great alacrity against a senior journalist who went public with a story of land-grab by Champat Rai and his brothers in their home district of Bijnor.

In a recent Facebook post, Vineet Narain, a senior investigative journalist accused Champat Rai of helping his brothers grab 20,000 square metres of land belonging to a cow shelter owned by an NRI, Alka Lahoti also a BJP supporter.  He said that Lahoti had been trying to get the encroachers vacated since 2018 and had appealed for help to the UP chief minister, Yogi Adityanath. 

As soon as the post appeared, one of Champat Rai’s brothers, Sanjay Bansal, complained to the police against Vineet Narain, Lahoti and one other person and, within half a day, the police registered an FIR against all the three listing 18 charges including ‘promoting enmity in the name of religion’.  This is typical of the working of BJP governments.  While their supporters are guaranteed complete impunity, their critics face immediate and vengeful action.

The stench of corruption emanating from Ayodhya is now forcing many important players to speak out against the way in which the trust is being run.

There have been newspaper reports according to which the representative of the president of the trust, Mahant Nritya Gopal Das, Mahant Kamal Nayan Das, has said that Nritya Gopal Das was kept in the dark about all the activities of the trust for the last one year and no written or verbal reports were given to him.  He added that Champat Rai did not take his calls when Nritya Gopal Das tried to contact him for information about the land deals.  Two other members of the trust, Dinendra Das of the Nirmohi Akhada and Kameshwar Chaupal were also reported as saying that they have no information about the land transactions entered into by the trust. 

Various mahants in Ayodhya, including Mahant Dharam Das, Mahant Suresh Das and Mahant Sitaram Das who were all party to the Ram Janmabhoomi land dispute case held a press conference in Ayodhya in which they demanded a CBI probe into the allegations of fraud against the trust.

Media management by the state and central government has so far kept the murky land deals entered into by the trust off the front pages and the news channels.  In the last fortnight, media attention has been concentrated on allegations of large-scale conversion of Hindus to Islam, on the refusal to accept family planning by Muslims and on various incidents of inter-faith marriages, ‘forced’ and otherwise.  With the UP assembly elections looming ahead, communal polarisation and diversion of public attention from Ayodhya are necessary tactics for the BJP to resort to.  Whether it will be able to silence the questions and voices being raised about the shameless skulduggery that its followers are indulging in Ayodhya is going to prove crucial to political developments in the coming days.