The Akshardham that rose in New Jersey

Built by volunteers

What BAPS emphasises most is who built it: an estimated 12,500 volunteers from around the world, many of whom took unpaid leave from school and work to serve. In the BAPS tradition, this seva — selfless service — is itself a form of worship, and the temple is presented as the offering of a whole community's hands. It was, the organisation notes, perhaps the first Hindu temple where women worked on the actual construction under the artisans' supervision.

The Swaminarayan tradition

BAPS — the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha — is a global branch of the Swaminarayan school of Hinduism, headquartered in Gujarat, with a genius for monumental temple-building and tightly organised volunteer congregations. Robbinsville is the third structure the order has named "Akshardham" — "the abode of the divine" — after its landmark complexes in New Delhi and Gandhinagar. To build the third in rural New Jersey was a deliberate statement of how far, and how permanently, the tradition has travelled.

A flag planted for a diaspora

For the Indian-American community — among the most prosperous and fastest-growing immigrant groups in the United States — the temple reads as a civilisational anchor, a place on the map that says the diaspora is not passing through but has arrived to stay. Where the first generation worshipped in converted houses and rented halls, their children and grandchildren now have a marble mandir on a scale that India itself can barely match outside its largest cities.

The shadow over the stone

But the temple's story carries a darker thread that honest reporting cannot leave out. In May 2021, FBI agents visited the Robbinsville site after a federal lawsuit was filed on behalf of some two hundred Indian workers. The suit alleged that BAPS had lured low-caste labourers from India on religious-worker visas, then made them work more than twelve hours a day, with as few as five days off in a year, for as little as $1.20 an hour — a fraction of the US federal minimum wage of $7.25. The workers, the suit said, were confined to a fenced, guarded compound on the temple grounds.

Caste, and a widening case

The allegations were pointed about who was recruited. The lawsuit accused BAPS of deliberately targeting marginalised communities — Dalits, those once called "untouchables," and Adivasis, India's indigenous tribal peoples — to do the hardest, lowest-paid labour. Within months the case had widened to allege similar exploitation at BAPS temples in four more states: California, Illinois, Texas and Georgia. BAPS denied the accusations, framing the workers as volunteers and skilled religious artisans.

An unresolved reckoning

In September 2025, more than four years after the raid, the US Department of Justice dropped its forced-labour investigation into the temple, without bringing criminal charges. The related civil claims and the broader questions they raised — about caste, about the line between devotional service and exploited labour, about who really builds the diaspora's monuments — were not so cleanly settled.

Two truths at once

The Robbinsville Akshardham asks its visitors to hold two things in mind at the same time. It is a genuine wonder, raised by the devotion and the unpaid hours of thousands of ordinary worshippers, and a proud declaration that Hinduism has put down deep and permanent roots in America. It is also a building whose construction prompted one of the most serious labour-exploitation lawsuits ever brought against a religious institution in the United States. Both are part of its story, and the diaspora it serves is better understood by keeping both in view.