After Haj, will other pilgrim subsidies go?

It’s just as well that the Centre decided on Tuesday to put an end to subsidising the airfares of Muslim pilgrims going to perform the Haj in Saudi Arabia. This is a key point on which the RSS and its affiliates, including the BJP, had campaigned, accusing the Congress Party, which held power for long, of Muslim “appeasement”.

It may be useful if the Narendra Modi government were to take up every single policy pertaining to the “appeasement” of the country’s largest minority on which the saffron platform has campaigned for decades, and remove these in one stroke so that the issue is removed from our public discourse for good.

Critics of the Sangh Parivar have held that “appeasement” never existed, and was in fact a bogey to be raked up as a political trick to create resentment against Muslims among Hindus, and electorally benefit from the polarisation that followed.

As for the Haj subsidy, it has been argued that the ticket of Muslim pilgrims on Air India that was subsidised actually amounted to creating demand for the national carrier which had a monopoly of the Haj business. Going by this argument, each ticket might have cost less than the subsidised ticket on Air India if free competition prevailed among airlines.

If each of the so-called appeasement policies were to be ticked off one by one and removed, the country will know how much Muslim appeasement really existed. Who knows if the BJP may even benefit in 2019 from the exercise of nullifying the so-called Congress-era appeasement policies.

There are many pressing issues before the country that deal with day-to-day concerns of ordinary people, but it was the Haj subsidy matter that was taken up with express zeal in order to “empower” Muslims by bestowing on them “dignity” that would flow from not using subsidised tickets, according to minority affairs minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi.

The grandeur of thought here is unmistakable. Mr Naqvi would be speaking truly selflessly if he were to canvass for the winding up of his own ministry since his party, taking its cue from the RSS, believes that there is no majority faith in the country and no minority, and that all are equal citizens.

Going a step further, the government might think to withdraw all elements of Central subsidy involved in the Hindu pilgrimages to Amarnath, Mansarovar and the various Kumbhs, and call upon all state governments, specially those of the BJP, to do the same.

Since the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the Haj subsidy should be phased out and ended by 2022, the amount has progressively declined from '837 crores in 2012. The Supreme Court had cited the Quranic injunction that only those people should go on Haj who could afford to do so.