[Anyone who spends much time in India’s Hindu temples is accustomed to being just steps from extreme wealth. Locked away in hundreds of the country’s largest temples is a staggering amount of gold, weighing as much as 8.8 million pounds, the World Gold Council has estimated. Under current market rates, that stockpile would be worth roughly $160 billion.]
By Kai Schultz and Suhasini Raj
To enter Jagannath Temple, dedicated to an
important Hindu deity, the group of 16 archaeologists, Hindu priests and
government officials had to pass through metal detectors. Their skimpy
loincloths were required as a security measure along with oxygen masks in case
the vault, unopened for more than three decades, lacked breathable air.
Their instructions were simple: Check the
structural integrity of the vault and ignore the millions of dollars’ worth of
antiquities stashed inside.
Anyone who spends much time in India’s Hindu
temples is accustomed to being just steps from extreme wealth. Locked away in
hundreds of the country’s largest temples is a staggering amount of gold,
weighing as much as 8.8 million pounds, the World Gold Council has estimated.
Under current market rates, that stockpile would be worth roughly $160 billion.
But despite their abundance of ancient
riches, India’s temples are often poorly managed. With security measures
lacking, they can be a tantalizing target for thieves.
The April expedition did not take long. An
hour after entering the temple, the men emerged, telling a crowd of waiting
pilgrims that they had not needed to enter the locked vault, known as the Ratna
Bhandar, because they had been able to peer inside through the bars of a metal
gate.
But two months later, another explanation was
leaked to local news outlets: The men had not been able to go in because the
keys to the vault were missing.
The response was swift. A top temple
administrator was fired. Officials with the state government of Odisha, which
includes Puri, called for an investigation. Soon after, they discovered that
eight pounds of gold donated by visitors was also missing from the temple’s
administrative offices.
Around Odisha, suspicion quickly mounted that
some of the antique jewelry in the vault had been pilfered by what a local journalist,
Sandeep Sahu, called “a criminal nexus of temple officials and servitors” who
had access to the keys.
The theft of riches from temples is common in
India. In one of the largest such cases, a Manhattan art dealer, Subhash
Kapoor, has been implicated in the theft of $100 million worth of rare
antiquities from remote, unguarded temples across India.
Operation Hidden Idol, as the investigation
involving Mr. Kapoor was called, found that some of the items, such as a
thousand-year-old bronze statue of the elephant-headed Ganesha, ended up at the
world’s leading museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mr. Kapoor is
facing trial in India.
But the hive-shaped Jagannath Temple in Puri,
which forms part of the pilgrimage known as Char Dham — a four-part circuit
traveled by Hindus to attain salvation — is far from an easy target.
A tight-lipped committee controls who can
enter, where donations of money or jewelry are stored and how that information
is disseminated to the public. The strict entry rules are designed to safeguard
both the temple’s status as a sacred space and the treasures it contains.
In 1984, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister,
was famously denied entry because her husband was a follower of Zoroastrianism,
an ancient monotheistic religion. Even today, priests guard the entrance,
turning away non-Hindus and some non-Indians from sects such as Hare Krishna,
which is popular in the West.
An internal temple report from 1978 explained
the policy — unusual for temples in India — with an analogy: “If the petals of
a beautiful rose are torn and dissected for the purpose of investigating the
ingredients of its color and smell, then the rose no longer remains a rose. It
becomes a rubbish to be thrown away.”
In the 1930s, Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of
India’s independence movement, refused to enter the temple in protest against
its entry restrictions, according to Ramachandra Guha, an Indian historian. The
temple eventually opened its doors to some Hindus who had been barred
previously, including Dalits, a lower caste. But the insular mind-set remained.
This year, the temple made headlines when
India’s Supreme Court suggested changing the rule preventing non-Hindus from
entering. But many recommendations were abandoned.
“There’s a very long history of absolute
reactionist bigotry,” Mr. Guha said of the temple’s exclusionary policies.
Reports of internal strife have also
tarnished the temple’s reputation over past decades. Managers of the temple
said in the 1978 report that “misappropriation, theft, lawlessness, harassment
of pilgrims and exploitation had become the order of the day.”
That same year, to encourage transparency, an
inventory was made of the vault. Temple officials reported finding a hoard of
nearly 500 pounds of antique silver and gold ornamental jewelry designed to
adorn statues of gods.
The vault was last opened in 1985, according
to R. N. Mishra, a former temple administrator, who said that he and a group of
officials had retrieved some gold for maintenance work and promptly returned
the key to the district treasury.
After the furor this year over the loss of
the key, temple caretakers said they had found a duplicate in the record room
of the local magistrate’s office. Instead of quelling anger, the apparent
discovery inspired more questions: When was the duplicate key made? Was it
real? And where was the original?
Mr. Mishra called the loss of the original
key a “gross negligence,” saying that a duplicate had not existed when he was
administrator and that he was not aware of one ever having been made. “One key,
one lock,” he said.
Dibyasingha Deb, a member of Puri’s royal
family and the chairman of the temple’s managing committee, said that
accusations of mismanagement were unfair. He shifted blame to outsiders trying
to “make us a laughingstock.”
“When people write about these incidents, and
they don’t have any faith in our religion, our culture, they would like to make
it a very sarcastic sort of a way of projecting things,” he said in an
interview.
But Pitambar Acharya, a lawyer in the Orissa
High Court, the highest one in Odisha State, said he felt that temple
caretakers were bluffing on what he called the “key loss hullabaloo.”
Last month, Mr. Acharya and other officials
from the Bharatiya Janata Party, an opposition party in Odisha, lodged a
complaint with the police against top state officials in charge of tracking
temple valuables, citing their failure to inventory jewelry in the vault
regularly and questioning whether a duplicate key even existed.
“There has been a clear breach of trust,” he
said, relating to unanswered questions on the loss of the temple key and the
supposed discovery of a duplicate.
Outside the temple, in a packed plaza where
men hammered together wooden chariots to be used for a festival, anger was
palpable among priests, shop owners and visitors.
“The government is hiding facts,” said
Satyavaan Sahu, 31, a worker at a nearby trinket shop. “It is a disrespect.
Everybody’s faith in the temple will go away.”
As the sun set in Puri, a throng of devotees
climbed the temple’s broad, stone steps, where a man ushered them in by tapping
their heads with two slender sticks, a transfer of the deity’s blessings.
Inside the temple, priests squatted to light
oil lamps. Flanked by pillars covered in brightly colored motifs, thousands of
men and women threw up their hands at the sight of a life-size statue of Lord
Jagannath. Nearby, the entrance to the vault was shrouded in darkness behind
metal bars.
Sonalata Das, 67, a bespectacled woman in a
brown silk sari, lingered with clasped hands in front of a painting of Lord
Jagannath. Asked about the missing keys, her face hardened.
“I prayed that God would completely finish
off the person who has fooled around with the key for his wealth,” she said.
“May he be destroyed.”