In Ayodhya this summer, ordinary Hindus have been coming forward one by one to ask where their gold went.

They had carried it to the Ram Temple — jewelry, ornaments, bricks of silver — and pressed it into the hands of the men who run the place. They were given no receipts. “We have been betrayed,” one Ayodhya man told Al Jazeera. The management, he said, “have looted our faith, nothing less.” This fraud at the Ram Temple is said to be the largest in a temple since independence.