Every rising power on this subcontinent has needed a god to complete it. The Marathas, ascending to imperial weight in the eighteenth century, rebuilt Varanasi’s Vishweshwar temple and repopulated the city with Brahmin scholars drawn from across their realm — not restoring an eternal centrality Kashi had always possessed, but manufacturing one, timed precisely to a throne that needed a sacred capital to match its temporal reach. Ranjit Singh, a Sikh emperor ruling a Sikh polity, bequeathed the Kohinoor — his single most spectacular possession — to the Jagannath temple in Puri, a thousand miles from Punjab, in a gesture that says nothing essential about Jagannath and everything about what a throne requires to feel earned rather than merely seized. Vijayanagara did the same for Tirupati centuries before either. The pattern is old enough, and successful enough, that two and a half centuries on, Varanasi’s eminence no longer reads as constructed at all. It simply is tradition. That is what a manufactured sacred centre looks like once it has won.
A constitutional republic cannot do this, and the reason is structural, not a matter of secular squeamishness. A monarchy’s authority is personal; it dies with the king unless transmitted through ritual sanction, which is why it has always needed a god to crown it. A republic’s authority is supposed to be categorically different — derived from the constituent power of a plural citizenry, renewed procedurally rather than ritually, answerable to no presiding deity because its entire claim is that no transcendent sanction is required. The document and the procedure are the whole of the legitimating apparatus. A republic with a state-sponsored sacred centre has stopped being a republic in the relevant sense; it has reverted to the older pattern republics were invented to supersede.
This is the frame the Ram Janmabhoomi movement has to be read inside, because Ayodhya is not a uniquely fraudulent episode bolted onto an otherwise legitimate civilisational story — it is empire’s oldest habit, reasserting itself inside a state explicitly built, on paper, to have outgrown it. And unlike Varanasi or Puri, which could be elevated through patronage layered onto sites of genuine, centuries-old devotional weight, Ayodhya’s planners had no such inheritance to work with. There is no historical, archaeological, or scriptural record marking that specific plot as Ram’s birthplace. What exists is an argument run backwards: there is no temple at the birthplace, therefore one must have been destroyed there — an absence elevated into a casus belli, made real only by the idols planted in the dark in December 1949 and the decades of mobilisation built on top of that founding act. Compare Mathura, where the Shahi Idgah’s predecessor — quite possibly Bir Singh Deo Bundela’s Keshavdev temple, demolished under Aurangzeb in 1670 — is a documented historical fact, recorded by Mughal chroniclers themselves. Mathura is a real grievance with a real referent; it could be litigated, negotiated, even lost, without anyone needing to claim that Hindu civilisation itself was on trial. Ayodhya could never be allowed that modesty, because the absence at its centre is precisely what required inflating the stakes to civilisational scale in the first place. A real claim does not need a thousand years of slavery invoked to back it; a manufactured one does.
The cost of this manufacture has not been borne only by the republic and its Muslim citizens. It has been borne by Hindu devotional life itself. Banke Bihari, the Rangnath temple, Dwarkadhish — sites with unbroken, centuries-deep sampradayic lineages that never needed political proof of their sanctity — are structurally demoted the moment a single artificially elevated site is made to stand in for the whole civilisation’s wound and its restoration. Pilgrimage economy, state infrastructure, media saturation, and now corridor-style investment redirect toward the manufactured site at the expense of the authentic ones, not because Ayodhya is more sacred but because it is more useful. The project has not enriched Hindu religious life; it has cannibalised it, extracting legitimacy from traditions it claims to vindicate while starving them of the attention it has redirected to itself.
It is worth being precise about what kind of public the manufactured site was built to serve, because the movement was never, even rhetorically, answerable to a majority’s actual will. Hindutva’s founding move — Savarkar’s own definition — was never a claim about what most Hindus believe or want; it was a claim about who gets to define the nation’s civilisational ownership, asserted by a committed cadre on behalf of a majority invoked rhetorically but never consulted as a source of authority. This is the distinction between a majoritarian mentality and a majority’s mandate, and it is not a pedantic one. A majority’s mandate is something a government can lose at the ballot box and be corrected by; a majoritarian mentality has no such mechanism of correction, because its legitimacy was never staked on consent in the first place — it is staked on dominance, and dominance requires a subordinate, not a headcount. This is also why occasional electoral defeat costs the project so little. Losing Faizabad’s Lok Sabha seat in 2024 is not a wound to this logic; it is raw material for it — proof that the adversary still has reach, that vigilance is still warranted, that the restoration is not yet complete and therefore nothing may be relaxed. A hegemonic project that swept every contest, permanently, would lose the very friction that makes its dominance feel earned. It needs the contest to continue, not to be won outright, because perpetual grievance and perpetual vigilance, not any particular victory, are what keep the machine running. A scandal survived, an election occasionally lost — both become grist for the next mobilisation rather than a reckoning that arrives in this one.
What the embezzlement has actually exhumed, in this light, is not a wound but a guilt — and the distinction matters more than it first appears to. A wound is something done to you; reopening it would mean the original injury — Partition, demolition, centuries of narrated subjugation — has resurfaced and demands fresh grievance. But the grievance was always manufactured rather than discovered, built before the seizure to make the seizure feel like restitution rather than theft, and the temple’s grandeur since 2024 has functioned as a manic overcompensation, built loud and large enough that the underlying transaction could no longer be examined directly. Embezzlement does not reopen that transaction by injuring anyone; it repeats it, in miniature, with the alibi stripped off — the same gesture of unaccountable taking by those entrusted with custody, this time with no thousand years of slavery available to dignify it. The unconscious does not grade transgressions by scale; it recognises structural repetition. What surfaces, then, is not the pain of an old wound but the unmistakable shape of an old guilt, seen this time without its disguise — which is precisely why the public response is denunciation rather than mourning, and precisely why that denunciation, as any old proverb about teeth and tongue will tell you, never extends to breaking the jaw that bites it.
And this is also why the scandal will not produce contrition. A movement still seeking broad persuasion needs its scandals contained; a movement that has already won its temple, captured its state, and shifted from persuasion to domination needs its scandals visibly survived, because survival without consequence is a more legible proof of power than any consecration — proof not that the wound was healed, but that the movement cannot be made to answer regardless, by voters, by courts, or by its own guilt.
What the embezzlement has exposed, then, is not corruption as scandal usually means it. It is the incompetence of a movement that set out to subvert a republic’s founding refusal — no presiding deity, no sacred centre, no theology underwriting sovereignty — and discovered, the moment it tried to administer the god it had manufactured, that it could not even keep the accounts straight. Empires that earn their sacred centres through generations of patronage do not usually have to explain missing chadhava within a year of consecration. Ayodhya did, within months. The republic was right to refuse this kind of legitimation in the first place. It is now watching, in real time, why.
