NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the Union government to gradually reduce and abolish haj subsidy in 10 years and invest the amount — averaging over Rs 650 crore a year for last five years — in education and other measures for social development of the minority community.

“We direct the Central government to progressively reduce the amount of subsidy so as to completely eliminate it within a period of 10 years from today,” said a bench of Justices Aftab Alam and Ranjana P Desai in an order that reflected a resolve which successive governments had failed to muster in the last 60 years. That the apex court had earlier upheld the constitutional validity of Haj subsidy only adds to the significance of the order.

“The subsidy money may be more profitably used for uplift of the community in education and other indices of social development,” said Justice Alam, who wrote the order. The court said it has no authority to speak on the minority community’s behalf and that it would be presumptuous to tell the Muslims what was a good or bad religious practice even though it cited Quran to say that haj pilgrimage was mandatory only for those who could afford the expenses for travelling, food and accommodation.

“We have no doubt that a very large majority of Muslims applying to the haj committee for going to Haj would not be aware of the economics of their pilgrimage and of all the facts are made known a good many of the pilgrims would not be very comfortable in the knowledge that their haj is funded to a substantial extent by the government,” the bench said while reminding the community about Holy Quran’s verse 97 in Surah 3, Al-e-Imran, which mandated that Muslims should undertake haj only if they could afford it.

The court said it was aware that in many other purely religious events there were direct and indirect deployment of state funds and resources. “Nevertheless, we are of the view that haj subsidy is something that is best done away with,” the bench of Justices Alam and Desai said.

BJP and other Hindutva outfits had traditionally attacked haj subsidy on grounds that it was contrary to the principle of secularism and marked an appeasement of the minority community, before they sought to turn it into justification for subsidy for Hindu pilgrimages.

The apex court also objected to the jumbo size Prime Minister’s goodwill delegation that visits Saudi Arabia every year at the government’s expense. “The present practice of sending goodwill haj delegation must come to a stop,” the bench said.

It asked the government to choose a maximum 10 among the haj pilgrims who were in Saudi Arabia on their own expenses. They could coordinate with the Indian envoy there for conveying goodwill of Indians to Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it said.

“We fully appreciate the idea of the people of India extending their goodwill to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on the auspicious occasion of Haj but we completely fail to see how even that purpose can be served by sending such a large, unwieldy, amorphous and randomly selected delegation,” the bench said.

The size of the delegation was only three between 1967 and 1973, after which it remained 10 till 1987. Subsequently, the delegation picked up flab and became 31 in 1997, 36 (2005), 30 (2010) and 27 (2011).

The court also wanted to examine why the government kept a quota of 11,000 haj pilgrims for itself of which over 3,000 were chosen on recommendation of VVIPs. It wanted to know how the special quota of 11,000 haj pilgrims were allocated for this year, and also the details of procedure adopted by Haj Committee of India (HCOI) in distributing 1.25 lakh haj quota among pilgrims.

dhananjay.mahapatra@timesgroup.com