The Ayodhya Ram temple trust on Monday accepted general secretary Champat Rai’s resignation over the donation thefts at a stormy meeting where its treasurer faced questions for letting in an RSS “special invitee”.

Treasurer Govind Giri told reporters after the three-hour meeting that the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra trust had no choice but to accept the resignations of Rai and trust member Anil Mishra.

“Senior member K. Parasaran (a former attorney-general), who was involved in framing the (trust’s) constitution, attended the meeting via videoconferencing and underlined that a member’s resignation is considered accepted the moment it is received,” Giri said.

“But we collectively praised Champat Rai’s work for the Ram temple over the last three decades. We have tremendous respect for him. He resigned because he didn’t want to hold the post until the temple thieves were punished.”

Eight employees of the temple and trust have been arrested over the theft of donations to the temple, with investigators alleging a wider conspiracy and the state government warning of action against everyone involved.

Giri said trust member Krishna Mohan would function as acting general secretary until someone was elected to the post. The trust’s next meeting is on July 22.

Mohan, an RSS member and retired IFS officer, said he would function “as transparently as possible” to regain the public’s faith in the trust.

Sources said the meeting didn’t mention Anil Mishra even once by name, the antipathy apparently stemming from allegations that most of the accused had been recruited to the temple on his recommendations.

At least two trust members were quoted as saying at the meeting that they were all partners in the crime because it had happened under their nose.

“What were we doing when the theft was going on in the home of Lord Ram? It killed the faith of many Hindus,” said one of them, local sadhu Dinendra Das.

Swami Vishwaprasanna Teerth, a sadhu from Udupi in Karnataka and a trust member, was quoted as saying: “This is a permanent blot on us because we represent the trust. We’ll never be able to wash our hands clean.”

Sources said some members shouted at Giri, asking how he could have let an RSS member, Gopal Rao, attend the meeting.

Rao claims he has been appointed administrator of the temple and is a special invitee to the trust. But the trust members said they hadn’t heard of any such appointment.

“When Giri said Rao was a ‘special invitee’, two members asked him to resign as treasurer. Giri refused to respond,” an angry trust member told reporters. “Rao then left the meeting smiling.”

Sources said the trust members rejected a suggestion from Narendra Modi confidant Nripendra Mishra — an ex-officio trust member and chairman of the temple construction committee — to appoint a government official as the trust’s chief executive officer.

The trustees discussed the names of three people associated with the RSS and the VHP for possible appointment as trust members but left the final decision to the central government. It was the Modi administration that had formed the trust and appointed the members after the Supreme Court’s November 2019 Ayodhya verdict.

Eight members physically attended Monday’s meeting while two joined it through videoconferencing. Rai, Anil Mishra and Nripendra Mishra were absent.

Giri and Mohan later led the media to a room where gold and silver donated by the devotees are stored, as proof that “expensive donations from the devotees are safe with us”.

HC snub

Allahabad High Court has rejected a public interest plea that sought a CBI probe into the Ram temple theft and a CAG audit of the shrine funds.

The bench of Justice Rajan Roy and Justice Manjive Shukla disposed of Lucknow lawyer Mohit Ashok’s petition after additional advocate-general Vinod Shahi said a similar case was pending before the Supreme Court.