Six decades in bureaucracy and as the top executive authority in the Prime Minister’s Office couldn’t have prepared Nripendra Misra for this one-line brief — build a temple for Ram that will last at least a thousand years. In February 2020, when Misra expressed his keenness to take on the responsibility, he couldn’t have fathomed what the project entailed — the scale, the complexity, and the need for seamless coordination between not just the contractor (L&T), consultant (Tata Consulting Engineers), and client (Ram Janmabhoomi Trust), but also the architect (C B Sompura), master planner (Design Associates), and various local, state and national agencies.

But for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, civil engineering expertise or knowledge of agama shastra (manual for temple building and rituals) was definitely not the key consideration to pick Misra to helm one of the most important ideological projects of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar.

Modi had, after all, worked closely with Misra over the five years that the latter served as Principal Secretary to the PM, during Modi’s first term in 2014-19. In May 2014, Misra was pitched as the bureaucrat best placed to understand the new Prime Minister, translate his politics into policy, help him navigate the many gol chakkars of Lutyens Delhi, and administer the mammoth government machinery from Raisina Hill.

Pinpointing the attributes that prompted Modi to approve Misra’s appointment as the chairperson of the construction committee under the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, a senior bureaucrat said, “He trusts his colleagues, empowers them to be candid with their views, and is a leader who motivates. He takes decisions quickly, and is a stickler for time schedules. Most importantly, he can convey the Prime Minister’s expectations, and say what the PM would think of a particular idea.”

In January 2020, six months after he resigned as the Principal Secretary to the PM, Misra was named Chairman of the Nehru Memorial (now called the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library Society, PMML).

A month or so after his appointment as PMML chairperson, he told P K Mishra, his successor in the PMO, that he would have liked “something more”. He had two positions at the back of his mind — a Governorship or the chairmanship of the Ram temple construction committee, as envisaged in the Supreme Court’s November 2019 judgment. A surprised Amit Shah, who had joined Modi’s cabinet as Home Minister in the second term, even called Misra to ascertain this. Then came the Prime Minister’s approval.

In the subsequent months and years, as Misra landed the job, he would feel the political urgency and the weight of people’s expectations. A temple at the place where the Babri Masjid once stood has been a lingering demand of a section of Hindus for almost 500 years. It has also been a crucial socio-political and religious project pursued by the BJP, helping it return to power with absolute majority in 2014. With the Supreme Court judgment on November 9, 2019, paving the way for a temple, there was the unsaid imperative of fructifying it ahead of the 2024 general elections.

Eight months ago, in April 2023, when The Indian Express visited Ayodhya, work at the site was on at breakneck speed. At its peak, about 3,500 labourers were working round-the-clock in two shifts at the temple site, and another 1,500 at the mines and workshops where stones were being cut into pillars and slabs and being intricately carved.

“At the moment, the time schedule that is really, really chasing me is December 2023. I do not want to fail the nation. I want the temple ready for the Lord to be installed,” Misra had then said, walking The Indian Express around the site and giving us the first picture of the progress thus far.

For this to happen, Misra had to be where the action was. The Circuit House in Ayodhya’s Civil Lines, and the site office barely 100 metres from the sanctum sanctorum, have been Misra’s second home for the last three years. This Tuesday, he made his 54th trip to the city since his appointment as the construction committee chairperson in February 2020.

At a personal level, Misra is a deeply religious person, and a devotee of Hanuman. This Ram temple in Ayodhya is not the first he built. About 25 years ago, in 1995-96, his mother wished for one in their Lucknow residence. In the residential compound, but outside the living area, he built a small temple and installed Hanuman as the key idol while making space for other Hindu gods too — Ram, Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva and Ganesh. “Hanuman is my ishth devta. I have a lot of personal faith in Hanuman, who is the param sewak of Ram. You can now imagine my religious faith in Ram,” he says.

While he was sort of inclined to this assignment, or thought it could come to him, Misra says he had mixed feelings about the challenge. “This is something of national importance, which has come out of the apex judiciary — if I can live up to it and deliver, it will be my way of paying back to this country and society. I am not accepting the assignment as a religious person who must make a temple,” he says.

According to Misra, this is an “important distinction” to make to understand him — that religion is his private affair, but not his personal conduct.

Born in Meerut district, Misra obtained a Master’s degree in Chemistry — he was the topper in Allahabad University’s Department of Chemistry. With two years to go before he was eligible to appear for the Civil Services exam, he enrolled and completed another Master’s in Political Science from Allahabad University. Mid-career, in 1980, he went to Harvard as a Mason Fellow, and earned a Masters in Public Administration too.

He became an IAS officer in 1967, and was allotted the Uttar Pradesh cadre. As Principal Secretary (Finance), Misra is known to have overhauled the finance department in the state, initiating the process of zero-based budgeting, structuring excise and taxation policies, and computerising the treasury. Those who worked with Misra point to one remarkable ability of his — fast decision-making. As Joint Secretary in the Department of Commerce at the Central government, he is known to have cleared proposals of dozens of Export-Oriented Units “in minutes”.

A competent officer and a quintessential bureaucrat who is conscious of hierarchy, Misra’s political acumen is something many of his contemporaries vouch for.

Misra’s date with Ayodhya goes back to the late 1980s. As Principal Secretary to then chief minister and Janata Dal leader Mulayam Singh Yadav, Misra was on October 30, 1990, sitting in the control room when the Commissioner of Police called him about people assembling near the temple in large numbers. The situation, however, went out of control and Mulayam Singh ordered police to open fire at the kar sewaks – on October 30 and then on November 2 – killing some of them.

Misra says he got along “perfectly well” with CM Mulayam Singh initially, but his advice that the CM should not arrest BJP leader L K Advani, who was on a rath yatra with plans to reach Ayodhya on October 30, did not go down too well. Misra’s logic was that the Janata Dal government headed by V P Singh at the Centre was dependent on the BJP for support and arresting Advani might lead to the BJP withdrawing support. But this advice is said to have “infuriated Mulayam Singh” and, as history would have it, it was Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad who ended up arresting Advani on October 23 in Samastipur, about a week before he was scheduled to reach Uttar Pradesh.

When Kalyan Singh succeeded Mulayam as CM in June 1991, the BJP leader retained Misra as his Principal Secretary. But many within the state BJP objected, with an article in the RSS’s Panchjanya even calling Misra “a CIA agent”, making it difficult for Kalyan Singh to hold on to Misra. Misra was eventually transfered from Lucknow and posted as the Chairman of the Greater Noida Authority in November 1992, just a month before the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

After being Fertiliser Secretary and Telecom Secretary at the Centre, Misra was in 2006 appointed Chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). Post his three-year tenure as the telecom regulator, in 2009, Misra ran what he would refer to as a “one-person NGO”, the Public Interest Foundation, whose charter was to “reinforce democratic traditions in the country”, and wrote opinion pieces in newspapers. One such write-up in a newspaper in April 2014, in which he defended Modi over Opposition allegations about gaps in his election affidavit, caught the attention of the top BJP leadership.

A month later, with the BJP winning a massive mandate and coming to power, Misra says he was driving his car around 4 pm, when he received a call from Arun Jaitley asking him if he could come the next morning, May 20, to Gujarat Bhawan, where the prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, was camping.

On May 19, just a day before Misra was to meet Modi, the BJP’s senior OBC leader and former UP CM Kalyan Singh called on Modi. It was probably a mere coincidence, but its significance is not lost on those who follow UP politics and bureaucracy closely.

Among those Misra saw at Gujarat Bhawan on May 20 was A K Doval (now National Security Advisor), and a few others. He was soon summoned inside to meet Modi, who spoke about his key priorities, including housing, the 75th year of Independence, swachhata, rationalisation of government departments and ministries, among others. Over the next three to four days, sitting in a room at Gujarat Bhawan, Misra would work on a blueprint on Modi’s priorities. On May 25, Modi finally offered him the job of Principal Secretary in the PMO. At least three others were in the race to the same post: K Kailashnathan (now Chief Principal Secretary to the Gujarat Chief Minister), Anil Baijal (who served as Lieutenant Governor of Delhi for five-and-a-half years till May 2022) and P K Mishra (the current Principal Secretary to the PM).

Misra joined office on May 27, the same day that Modi took charge as the Prime Minister. But there was a legal hurdle in formally issuing an order appointing him the Principal Secretary because of his earlier stint as the telecom regulator. The TRAI Act specifically barred its Chairman from taking any government position post the tenure. Jaitley came to the rescue — he said an ordinance to rectify this anomaly would take care of the obstacle. The ordinance came through a day later, on May 28. It is learnt Misra would not take the Principal Secretary’s chair and instead sit on the visitors’ sofa in his office till a formal appointment order was issued.

Over the next five years, Misra developed a rapport and gained the PM’s confidence.

In the initial couple of years, Misra says, he would on occasions “overstep” his brief and tell the Prime Minister that a particular idea expressed by him may not be politically acceptable or tenable. Modi would politely but firmly convey to him that he should stick to administrative issues and leave the political arena to him. Over time, however, the Prime Minister would go on to appreciate Misra’s advice. “The moment an idea was floated, the PM would want to know whether the policy appeared to be elitist, whether it would reach the masses… his go-to person would often be Misra,” said a source, who wished to remain anonymous.

Given Prime Minister Modi’s instinctive opposition to freebies, it was initially not easy for ministries and ministers to push through policies such as PM Kisan and Ujjwala. That’s where Misra would step in – often reorienting discussions on policies and schemes, moving them away from political considerations to more economic and developmental aspects. For instance, the PM Kisan scheme could find salience with Modi when it was projected as a means to boost rural consumption demand, and hence aid economic growth. Similarly, Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan would sit down with Misra to frame the free cylinder schemer in the developmental context, with data and evidence to suggest how it would benefit women in poor households.

In Modi’s first term as PM, it was Misra who was often called upon to convince the party and its then president, Amit Shah, on some of the key policy decisions that the government took – from demonetisation to the need for a unified Goods and Services Tax (GST) given Gujarat’s long-standing opposition.

Misra’s role, his colleagues would say, was akin to that of an elder brother, ready to stand up for them before the Prime Minister, and convey to secretaries of the Government of India the Prime Minister’s expectations from their ministries or departments.

On Friday, around noon, 72 hours before the pran pratistha (consecration) ceremony that is scheduled for 12.30 hours on January 22, Misra undertook a “site walk down” to review the completion of Phase I of the temple project. This has been a daily routine since he landed in Ayodhya on Tuesday. The day wasn’t spectacular — he prodded key executives from L&T and Tata Consulting Engineers to work on snag list rectification, phasing the construction of the first and second floors of the temple, completion of the parkota (perimeter wall) and the seven temples representing social harmony.

But the feeling, at the end of the day, of having not failed the nation, and having the Lord installed in the garba griha was, in his own words, “divine”.