Preserve digital evidence now, Supreme Court urged in Ram Temple donations case
The Supreme Court, for the second time during its summer break, did not commit to an urgent hearing of petitions seeking intervention in the alleged embezzlement of donations at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. On Monday, advocate N.K. Goswami, appearing before a Vacation Bench led by Justice M.M. Sundresh, warned that electronic evidence such as CCTV footage could be “quietly lost” if not secured immediately.
“Electronic evidence is unlike a stone inscription. A CCTV system does not wait for court vacations. A DVR does not respect a listing schedule. Digital payment logs and access records can be modified, migrated or deleted. Therefore, when the relief sought is preservation of evidence, postponement itself may become denial of justice,” Mr. Goswami argued during an unlisted oral mention.
The advocate clarified that he was not seeking a final hearing but only a non-prejudicial order to preserve evidence. He expressed concern that CCTV/DVR data, QR-UPI logs, hundi registers, counting sheets, and bank and vault records might be lost before the case is listed for hearing.
The Supreme Court Registry had informed Mr. Goswami that the petition would be taken up only after the summer vacation ends on July 12. In response, the Bench, without directly addressing the preservation issue, asked him to follow the procedure for mentioning and listing cases.
This follows a similar petition filed the previous week by advocates Ajay Kumar Rai and Dinesh Kumar Yadav, seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) or multi-disciplinary Special Investigation Team probe into the misappropriation of donations. When Mr. Rai mentioned that petition, Justice Sundresh remarked that “heavens are not going to fall if the case is heard after the Supreme Court resumes regular functioning.”
Mr. Goswami’s petition seeks a declaration from the apex court that offerings made to a deity in a public temple constitute “sacred trust property vesting in the deity as a juristic person,” and those handling such offerings are “fiduciaries bound by duties of transparency, accountability, and preservation.”
The petition cites the Supreme Court’s judgment in the State of Kerala versus Guruvayur Devaswom Managing Committee (October 2025), which held that temple offerings, whether cash, gold, or kind, are the “absolute and inalienable property of the deity as a juristic person.” The court had observed, “When a devotee drops a coin into the hundiyal with faith, that money instantly ceases to be secular currency and becomes the personal property of the deity.”
Besides immediate preservation of all evidence, including CCTV footage and digital logs, the petition asks the court to call for a status report from the ongoing SIT investigation. It also seeks an independent forensic audit of donations and valuable items received by the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust from its inception.
The petition argues that this is not merely a local crime but a matter of constitutional safeguards for sacred public endowments. It urges the court to constitute an expert committee comprising representatives of Union and State authorities, audit and accounting experts, digital payment and cyber forensic experts, and temple administration experts. The committee would frame a ‘National Minimum Temple Donation Transparency Framework’ for public temples and religious endowments of national importance, including the Ram Temple at Ayodhya and the Krishna Janmasthan at Mathura.
