Barely a week after two priceless pieces from Bhubaneswar's Lingaraj temple disappeared, two sacred idols from the Sri Jagannath temple in Puri went missing. While Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik rushed to Puri and promised to ask the CBI to investigate, Bijoy Mohapatra of the Orissa Gana Parishad declared that under the present dispensation in the state, even the gods were not safe.

Though some of the idols were later found, the motive behind the burglaries are still cloudy. Speculation is rife. Some say that ancient scriptures had predicted the disappearance, while others say the burglaries were attempts to embarrass the Government. The recovery of some of the idols a few days later was as remarkable as their disappearance: the police fished out the Damodar Munda, a silver mask stolen from the Lingaraj temple, from a nearby well, and fireman Dharanidhar Baral dived into a 60-ft well in the Jagannath temple complex to emerge with the priceless Madanmohan idol. Both idols are an essential part of temple rituals, which could come to a halt in their absence.

"We will soon get to the bottom of the story," says Arun Sarangi, superintendent of police, Khurdah district. The Crime Branch has all but crossed off antique dealers from the list of suspects, as other priceless idols from both temples were left untouched. Senior police officers discount the involvement of the usual suspect, Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), saying that they could have done much worse than pitching idols into wells.

LOOTED AND FOUND: Damodar Munda, recovered from wells

The police is increasingly convinced that if at all the disappearances were burglaries, they must have been the handiwork of small-time thieves on the look out for ornaments. Thefts of jewellery were reported from four temples in Berhampur in Ganjam district during the last week of October. "That may have emboldened the thieves to try their luck in as big a temple as the Lingaraj," says a senior police officer. But that doesn't explain why the burglars spared other antique idols and the silver platforms on which the idols were placed.

Other possibilities abound. At the Lingaraj temple, the former Congress-dominated trust board has taken the new panel to court, while at the Puri temple, the dispute between two factions of sevayats has deepened. Could it be that one faction pulled off the mischief to malign the other?

What is clear, though, is that the security around Orissa's 3,000-odd temples and archaeological sites is extremely porous. To guard the Lingaraj temple, the police has just four constables while the Archaeological Survey of India has deployed another two. The special cultural theft squad of the Crime Branch comprises nine police officers for the entire state.

So perhaps the burglaries aren't much of a surprise. In the past five years, 39 antique thefts have taken place across the state, and 25 thefts reported from temples. "The numbers are still not very high," says a police officer. What he doesn't say is that there may not be many period pieces left to be stolen.