“Divine tragedy: How widespread corruption is eroding the sanctity of India’s sacred spaces”, The New Indian Express, November 23, 2025
“Today, the pilgrim’s progress to many of India’s great temples winds through a tortuous landscape of corruption, pollution, and careless callousness. The latest in this long chain of misdemeanours includes the Sabarimala gold theft scandal and the abominable adulteration of the sacred Tirupati laddoo—a sweet that has been an unbroken article of faith for centuries. Across the country, from Kerala and Tamil Nadu’s ancient shrines to Odisha and Uttarakhand’s billion-rupee institutions, idols go missing, treasuries are compromised, and governance failures erode trust in custodianship of the divine. And yet, faith itself remains immovable. It is written most visibly on the faces of the countless devotees now making their annual journey to Sabarimala—undeterred, unshaken, and unwavering. In the shadow of wrongdoing, their devotion endures, proving that even when systems falter, belief does not.
The management of the shrine is now at the centre of a widening Goldgate that has exposed deep fissures in its governance. What is praised as a logistical marvel—an annual movement of millions of devotees through dense forests to a remote hill shrine—has begun to look increasingly like a system held together by ad-hoc practices, opaque procedures, and politically influenced decision-making. At the heart of the storm lies the alleged misappropriation of temple gold, a controversy that has triggered judicial censure, criminal investigations and a wave of public anger across Kerala.
The crisis erupted when investigators found major discrepancies in how the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) had recorded and managed the temple’s gold-plated structures. Panels covering the sanctum’s doors, pillars, and dwarapalaka idols—originally plated during a 1998-99 renovation—were dismantled for repairs in 2019. But what should have been carefully logged as gold-clad components were officially recorded as mere “copper plates” in the 2019 mahazar, a misclassification the Kerala High Court later described as deeply suspicious. This reclassification raised immediate red flags: vigilance reports revealed that around 475-475.9 grams of extracted gold from the plating work had never been returned to the temple. The vigilance probe also showed that the plates were transported out of TDB premises for electroplating at a private facility, Smart Creations in Chennai, despite rules mandating that such high-value work be carried out only within temple premises under strict supervision……”
Read full article at newindianexpress.com
