The Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust is in the middle of a public reckoning. Eight people have been arrested, the general secretary and other senior trustees have stepped down and the chairperson of the construction committee has publicly suggested that the temple be run on the lines of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam’s, a statutory body of the Andhra Pradesh government. That suggestion deserves serious attention, because it opens a question about the trust’s own design and about the broader argument that put trusts in charge of temples in the first place.Any such conversation has to begin with how the trust came into being, because the genealogy shapes the governance. The temple stands on a site whose history includes a militant mobilisation leading to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and a Supreme Court judgment in 2019 that awarded the site for the temple’s construction while calling the demolition itself an egregious violation of the rule of law. For millions of devotees, the temple is the culmination of an intimately manufactured aspiration.The trust that now manages it was constituted by the Union government in 2020 in the manner directed by the court, its composition reflecting the movement that had spent decades pressing for the temple to be built. This inheritance is not incidental to how the temple is administered. It defines who sits on the trust, whose moral authority it draws on and how questions of accountability travel through it.A conversation about governance that treats the trust as a neutral private body, comparable to any other charitable trust, misses the point. The trust is the institutional form that a specific public legitimacy took. The management question begins there.That question sits inside a wider argument that has run for some years now. A strand of opinion has held that Hindu temples should be freed from state control and handed over to private trusts or to “the people”. The reasoning has been straightforward. Government departments are bureaucratic. They are slow. They are politically pliable. They are accused of using temple income for non-religious purposes. Devotees, the argument goes, would be better served by trusts run by people who care about the faith.The Ayodhya episode is an occasion to test that reasoning honestly. This is the highest-profile temple in the country. It is managed by a trust populated by people closely associated with the movement that built it. It commands the attention of national media, the state government and the central political leadership. It is also, by the trust’s own admission, the site of an embezzlement allegation serious enough to warrant a state-led criminal investigation and the stepping aside of senior figures.If this is what high visibility produces, the question that follows is uncomfortable. What about the thousands of smaller temples under private trusts that have no media oxygen, no political stakes and no devotees willing to march to the press? Where does the accountability come from?Also read: Ram Temple Donation Theft Case: Blame Game Intensifies as Bigwigs Come Under SIT ScannerState control of temples, for all its undeniable problems, has a fairly specific institutional architecture. There is a department, usually called Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments in Tamil Nadu, Devaswom Boards in Kerala, the Endowments Department in Andhra Pradesh, the Muzrai Department in Karnataka. Each large temple has an Executive Officer who is typically a civil servant, drawn from a service with its own rules of conduct and disciplinary procedures.The temple’s accounts are open to audit, often by the Comptroller and Auditor General. The Right to Information Act applies. A minister is answerable in the state legislature. None of this prevents wrongdoing. But when wrongdoing happens, the lines of responsibility are visible. There is a person whose job it was to prevent it and that person can be named, suspended, prosecuted, or transferred.The trust model works differently. A trust is a juristic person. Its assets belong to the trust, not to the state. Its accounts are subject to the trust deed and to whatever audit provisions the deed lays down. Ex-officio members from the bureaucracy may sit on the trust, but they are wearing a second hat that does not carry the same weight as a civil servant whose primary responsibility is the temple’s day-to-day administration. When something goes wrong, the question of who was in charge becomes harder to answer.The trustees are senior figures whose moral authority comes from their association with the cause. The staff are appointed by the trust. The investigation, when it comes, has to be initiated by an outside agency, which in the Ayodhya case has meant the state government and the police.It is worth pausing here on a structural similarity. In contemporary Indian electoral politics, a familiar arrangement has emerged in which the party absorbs scandal while the leader stays clean. The chief minister or the prime minister is at the helm and is in principle responsible, but the distance between the leader and the party machine is what keeps the leader insulated when the machine misbehaves. Lower-level functionaries are renominated less, prosecuted more and serve as the dispensable layer through which accountability is absorbed without reaching the top.The trust model produces a comparable separation and not only at the level of the deity. The senior figures not directly associated with the trust and the political patrons who lend it its moral authority, are themselves at a careful distance from day-to-day management. When the embezzlement comes to light, it is the counting staff who are arrested first. The trustees who have stepped down have done so under public pressure, not through the operation of any institutional mechanism that would have caught them anyway.The insulation is in some ways a feature. The standing of a sacred place should not be hostage to the failings of those who manage it. But the same insulation extends upwards in a way that makes accountability harder to enforce on those who set the direction.Also read: Here’s Why the RSS Campaign to ‘Free’ Temples is Facing ResistanceIn the state-run model, the accountability flows the other way. The work of administration is owned by the state, which is held responsible for it. The minister cannot easily say that the temple is one thing and the department is another. A minister must answer in the legislature. A department must respond to audit. A civil servant’s record follows them to their next posting. The leader at the helm is not insulated in the same way, because the institutional design does not allow it. The devotee has a clear line of complaint and a clear address to send it to.In the trust model, the deity floats above the trustees, the trustees float above the staff and the devotee who feels cheated has to find the right court, the right activist, or the right political party to take up the cause. The Ayodhya devotees who have come forward to ask about their silver bricks and gold artefacts are visible because the temple is visible. Most devotees, at most temples, are not so lucky.Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Uttar Pradesh Governor Anandiben Patel, chief minister Adityanath and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat during a ceremony at the Ram Temple, in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh on November 25, 2025. Photo: PMO via PTI.The South Indian experience is worth examining honestly. The Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments department in Tamil Nadu has faced real criticism over the years. Land disputes, allegations of mismanagement, debates about how temple income is spent, controversies over priest recruitment. All of these are part of the public record and that is precisely the point. The system is contested in public, debated in the legislature, examined in court and reformed over time.The 2021 decision to appoint priests from backward castes and women priests, building on the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Seshammal v. Union of India (1972), is a recent example of how the system can be pushed in a direction many devotees would consider an expansion of the temple’s reach. None of this would be easy under a trust model where the right to set policy lies with a small group of unelected figures.Also read: VHP Says Govt Control on Temples Reflects Mindset of ‘Muslim Invaders’, ‘Colonial British’The piety argument is worth revisiting on its own terms. The historical case for keeping people out of temples was a case about sanctity. That case has been steadily dismantled over the last century, from the Vaikom Satyagraha onwards, often with the state’s active involvement. A century later, the temples that admit women, that admit Dalits, that admit all comers regardless of birth, ought to be widely understood by their own devotees to be more pious, not less. Accessibility and inclusion should become part of how sanctity is reckoned. By that logic, the state-run arrangement that secures accessibility and inclusion has a claim to be the one that secures piety as well.The point is not to defend every action of every Devaswom Board or HR and CE department. They have their failings and reform is always needed. The point is that the failings are knowable, the reforms are possible and the conversation is a public one. Those are not small things. They are, in fact, the substance of what it means to administer a public institution.The Ayodhya case is a difficult moment for everyone who cares about the temple, including those who built the movement that brought it into being. It is also an opportunity. Nripendra Misra’s suggestion that the temple be run on the lines of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams is not a political concession. It can be seen as a practical recognition that some of the most successful, transparent and large-scale temple administrations in the country are statutory bodies of state governments.A fresh look at the South Indian model, without ideological commitments on either side, would be a useful exercise.Vignesh Karthik K.R. is a postdoctoral research fellow in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden and a Research Affiliate at King’s India Institute, King’s College London.