By reopening the Puri Jagannath temple’s Ratna Bhandar on Sunday, the Odisha government has ended a 46-year-old quest to catalogue the treasures of the 12th-century shrine. An 11-member expert committee broke open three locks of the treasury’s inner chamber, whose contents were last inspected and audited in 1978. The BJP state government made elaborate arrangements as it fast-tracked the process—devising protocols for reopening in consonance with temple laws and tending to the logistical priorities. The exercise was followed with great curiosity from across India.
It is no small feat, considering the big narrative built around the issue for the last six years—since a reopening was unsuccessfully attempted in 2018. In the recent general elections, the BJP reaped rich electoral dividends by making the Ratna Bhandar reopening a major poll plank against the Biju Janata Dal.
What makes the achievement even more momentous is that five chief ministers—under Congress, Janata Dal, NDA and BJD regimes spanning over four decades—had remained reluctant to open the treasury of one of India’s most revered places of worship for audit. By making it happen, the four-week-old Mohan Majhi-led government has broken through a long-held political and administrative resistance to the idea.
Having delivered on its promise, the BJP government must take this forward with care. It must investigate the curious case of the keys, which were in possession of the district treasury, failing to open the locks to the inner chamber, prompting the use of cutters. The status of the original keys must not be left to speculation and any semblance of foul play must be eliminated with a probe. Similarly, after the valuables are shifted, the Ratna Bhandar must be handed over to the Archaeological Survey of India for assessment and conservation.
Its structural safety and restoration is a top priority and the most fitting conservation strategy must be adopted. Every content of the treasury must be thoroughly examined and matched with the audited list from almost half a century back. Any mismatched or missing article should be taken up with utmost seriousness. The contents of the treasury are an invaluable link to the history of Odisha, Kalinga, Odra and the many other avatars the state has gone by through the ages. Now they can help unravel unknown chapters from its glorious past.