Welcome excision: After Haj, govt must cut subsidies to other events

The Narendra Modi government’s decision to scrap the Haj subsidy, in response to a 2012 court order recommending its phase-out, and redirect the money towards minority education is an unexceptionable one within India’s secular rubric. One hopes the government will apply this secular value across the board. The Haj subsidy had become a contentious issue in recent years, upheld as an example of minority appeasement by majoritarian politicians. This remains open to interpretation, since the Haj subsidy, which is paid to state-owned Air India and not to individual pilgrims, had its origins in the oil shock of the 1970s and, as all Indian subsidies tend to do, continued long after its raison d’etre had ceased to exist. Besides, with the grant falling 75 per cent in six years — from Rs 7.8 billion in 2012 to Rs 2 billion in 2017 — scrapping it amounted to plucking a low-hanging policy fruit. The obvious follow-up to this move should be for the central government to walk away from financing all religious events. 

Indeed, it is well known that successive central governments have for years spent big money developing infrastructure for key Hindu religious events, some of which involve explicit subsidies, such for as the Kailash Mansarovar, Amarnath Yatra, and the Char Dham. The elaborate and awe-inspiring bandobast that is on display for each Maha Kumbh Mela has been the subject of an admiring Harvard case study. All of this central funding comes on top of explicit subsidies by states for sundry temple trusts (Kerala and Tamil Nadu), imams (Gujarat and West Bengal), churches (Karnataka), madrasas (Bihar), not to forget state subsidies to individual pilgrims on key routes. Till recently, all of this could have found justification in a 2011 ruling by the Supreme Court, which upheld the constitutionality of the Haj subsidy on the grounds that it was too small an amount to be ruled out by Article 27 of the Constitution, which, in turn, strikes down any religious subsidy that absorbs a “major” part of tax revenues. This interpretation could as well apply to subsidies for other religions; none of them is so large as to absorb major proportions of state budgets. 

However, now that the Haj subsidy has been scrapped, it would certainly burnish the government’s secular credentials if it were to apply the same axe to other explicit religious subsidies. After all, a secular state should not provide subsidies for pilgrimages to any community and no exceptions should be made. The approach, however, demands a degree of common sense as well. Indians are a religious people where periodic mass observance of faith involving large gatherings of the faithful is a fact of life. In that sense, both the Centre and the states would be justified in spending money on infrastructure to ensure the security and comfort of those attending these events, just as they do, for instance, for cricket matches or open-air concerts and so on — although some examples may fall in the grey area such as building a road on a pilgrim route. The broad point is that the expenditure principle here, too, should be applied in accordance with secular principles. Scrapping the Haj subsidy alone will do nothing to enhance India’s global reputation for multiculturalism.