The special investigation team formed last week to probe the theft of daily offerings and donations from Ayodhya's Ram temple submitted its primary report to chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s office in the presence of the media on Tuesday.
A detailed report would be presented after a few days.
"We submitted the initial report with the additional chief secretary (Sanjay Prasad) to the CM," said Vijay Vishwas Pant, divisional commissioner of Lucknow and head of the three-member SIT. "It is a confidential report and we can't divulge its findings at this stage," he added.
Sources in the home department said the report has not blamed any member of Sri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra, the trust entrusted to manage the affairs of the shrine. It has blamed six persons employed to collect and count cash and other valuables and deposit them in the trust’s account with the State Bank of India in Ayodhya.
"But the report has questioned the role of one particular person who was unofficially made the manager of the temple for all practical purposes. He was making every decision on who would be deployed for which work on the temple premises. The SIT interrogated him more than four times and never got a conclusive reply from him," the source said.
The report has also questioned the role of a driver with the trust. He was previously a tea seller and then an autorickshaw driver. He joined the trust as a driver of one of its cars and allegedly accumulated wealth in recent times.
Nripendra Mishra, a former bureaucrat assigned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office to monitor the construction of the temple, has advocated the appointment of a chief executive officer to look after the temple. "There should be a CEO to look after its works," he had said a few days ago.
A veteran journalist based in Ayodhya said: "It is unlikely that they (BJP government) will do this because they want the control of the RSS and the BJP on the Ayodhya temple even if there is a non-BJP government at the Centre and the state in future. It will not be possible if they have a CEO.
"Going by the precedence, we know that a district magistrate or a divisional commissioner controls the management of Varanasi’s Kashi Vishwanath temple through an officer of sub-divisional magistrate rank as its CEO. What is interesting is that the government is more interested in showing people that it is probing the theft case but little is happening in catching the thieves," he added.
The trust has still not filed a written complaint against the thieves and the SIT usually doesn’t file an FIR on the basis of its findings.