Ayodhya finally got its answer on Wednesday. Weeks of speculation, a shortlist whittled down to three names, and a search process that had to work through 5,585 applications ended with the trust settling on retired Air Marshal Jeetendra Mishra to run the temple's day-to-day affairs.
The call was made at a marathon meeting at Shri Maniramdas Chhawni. Trust president Mahant Nritya Gopal Das was there. So was treasurer Swami Govind Dev Giri, along with a roomful of other senior functionaries. A three-member search panel, comprising retired Lieutenant General Vishnu Kant Chaturvedi, former scientist Suresh Haware, and retired Justice Pramod Kohli, had handed in its final report just a day earlier.
Mishra, for what it's worth, found out the way most of the country did: through the news. He told the Times of India he hadn't yet received any formal word from the trust when the story broke. But he wasn't fazed by it. Whatever pulled the other 5,584 applicants toward this job, he said, pulled him too a shot at serving the nation once more.
It's not hard to see why the trust bit. Mishra joined the National Defence Academy back in 1983, was commissioned as a fighter pilot in December 1986, and racked up more than 3,000 flying hours over a career that stretched almost four decades. He qualified as a Fighter Combat Leader. Later, as an experimental test pilot one of the trickier jobs in military aviation he spent time evaluating aircraft at the Aircraft and Systems Testing Establishment in Bengaluru.
He commanded a fighter squadron at one point. Ran two frontline air bases as Air Officer Commanding. Studied at the Air Command and Staff College in the US and the Royal College of Defence Studies in London, the kind of postings reserved for officers already marked out for bigger things.
But the posting that actually matters here came last. In January 2025, Mishra took charge of the IAF's Western Air Command. Four months on, that command found itself running India's air operations during Operation Sindoor, the retaliatory strikes launched after the Pahalgam terror attack on May 7, 2025. President Droupadi Murmu later gave him the Sarvottam Yudh Seva Medal, one of the country's rarer wartime honours, for how he handled it. He hung up his uniform in April 2026. Five months later, Ayodhya came calling.
This didn't happen in a clean, neutral moment. The trust has spent most of this year trying to put out a donation-theft fire. It started in June, when a former temple employee named Mahipal Singh alleged that something was off in how cash offerings were being counted. Samajwadi Party leaders grabbed the thread, and once party chief Akhilesh Yadav got behind it publicly, things moved quickly.
A special investigation team, set up that same month, found footage nobody wanted to see. Between late April and early June, staff were allegedly caught on CCTV pocketing cash roughly 70 times, investigators said, which points to a pattern rather than a one-off. It cost people their jobs at the top too. Champat Rai, the trust's powerful general secretary, resigned on moral grounds as the pressure built, and the SIT eventually named a former employee, Avinash Shukla, as its prime accused.
Devotees noticed. Reporting out of Ayodhya in July described thinner queues at the temple, with pilgrims saying they'd still come to pray but weren't ready to hand over large sums until the allegations were sorted out. Some said they'd rather give the money straight to a family in need at least then they'd know where it went.
So Wednesday's announcement was never just an HR decision. As the trust meeting got underway, Akhilesh Yadav told reporters he hoped there'd be no repeat theft of what he called "Ram Dhan." He made a point of noting that ordinary employees had been jailed over the earlier scandal while, in his words, the bigger names got away clean.
He didn't leave it there either. Yadav also went after the state's ruling party over land compensation, arguing that poor residents were losing out even as Ayodhya's profile kept rising, and that the city should have been developed without pushing out the people who already lived in it. The trust has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and says its financial processes follow established procedure a line it's had to repeat a lot this year.
The CEO appointment wasn't the only thing to come out of that meeting. Three new trustees joined the fold: Delhi-based Mahesh Bhagchandka, a relative of the late VHP leader Ashok Singhal; Ayodhya resident Madan Mohan Pandey; and Nirmala Yadav, a retired Hindi professor from Shikohabad. Govind Dev Giri, who was treasurer, now moves into the general secretary's chair that Champat Rai vacated. Members are also said to have discussed amendments to the trust deed and floated the idea of appointing a dedicated spokesperson.
As for what Mishra actually walks into: temple administration, financial oversight, operational planning, and keeping the daily flood of pilgrims moving through Ayodhya without chaos. It's a wide brief, and a strangely public one for a man who spent most of his career well away from cameras. Whether four decades of flying fighter jets prepares someone for rebuilding donor trust is anyone's guess. Ayodhya's about to find out.
The Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust has picked retired Air Marshal Jeetendra Mishra as the Ram Temple's first full-time CEO, plucking him out of a pool of more than 5,500 applicants. The announcement landed in Ayodhya on September 2, alongside three new trustee appointments and a bit of internal reshuffling, all playing out against a donation-theft controversy that has been dogging the trust for months. Opposition leader Akhilesh Yadav, naturally, had something to say about the timing.
