Lucknow, June 27 -- After years of association with Ayodhya, Champat Rai, who was said to be well connected with all prominent sadhus and conversant with various aspects of the temple town, is now in troubled waters in the wake of the Ram temple donation controversy and it remains to be seen whether he can weather the storm. Rewarded for his unwavering commitment to the Ram temple cause, he was made general secretary of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust in 2020. The donation controversy surfaced six years later. Decades before that, Champat Rai, a chemistry lecturer turned full-time Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) worker, joined the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) by 1980. He became a close aide of the then VHP president Ashok Singhal under whose leadership Rai was deputed to the Awadh region to mobilise youth for the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. This was after Rai, a physics student, chose the classroom as his first calling and became a chemistry lecturer at the RSM Degree College in Dhampur, Bijnor Arrested from his college while giving a lecture for the RSS, he was jailed for 18 months. After he was released from jail, he walked away from teaching and joined the VHP where he preferred to keep himself away from public glare as he quietly rose through its ranks. Although he strengthened the Sangh network in Agra, Dehradun and Haridwar, Ayodhya became his centre of gravity where he finally settled down after leaving his hometown-Bijnor. Those who worked with him in the 1980s and 90s call him the "encyclopedia of Ayodhya." He knew its alleys, its litigations and its property records. When the Ram Janmabhoomi title suit reached the courts, Rai became the man lawyers turned to. He supplied the documents, traced the revenue maps, and reconstructed oral histories. As a result, the title "Record Keeper of Ram Lalla" stuck. On December 6, 1992, he was among the karsevaks in Ayodhya when the Babri Masjid was demolished. The CBI named him in its chargesheet for criminal conspiracy. Nearly three decades later, in September 2020, a Lucknow court acquitted him and all other accused. When the Centre constituted the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust on February 19, 2020, he was appointed general secretary due to his long association with the Ram Janmabhoomi -Babri Masjid title suit in the Supreme Court. Rai became the operational head of the Ram temple project. From the bhoomi pujan on August 5, 2020, to the grand opening on January 22, 2024, Champat Rai was the key man, virtually the de facto chairman of the Trust as Mahant Nritya Gopal Das, the chairman of the Trust, was ailing. During the construction of the Ram temple, Rai briefed media persons about the progress of work, cleared design files, and coordinated with engineers from Larsen & Toubro. In 2021, he led the nationwide 'Nidhi Samarpan Abhiyan', a donation drive that the Trust says collected over Rs 2,000 crore for the temple. Now that the Ram temple donation controversy has blown into a full-blown scandal, he finds himself at the centre of political attacks. A long-standing aide Ram Shankar Yadav 'Tinnu', once his chauffeur, was among the eight people arrested in the Ram temple donation case on Friday morning....