A Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Aftab Alam on Tuesday directed the Centre to completely phase out the Haj travel subsidy, saying it was against the tenets of Islam.
Citing 'Verse-97 in Surah-3' of the Quran, Justices Alam and Ranjana Prakash Desai said according to the verse, the Haj pilgrimage is only permitted to those who can afford the expenses for 'one’s conveyance and provision for residence' in Mecca.
“We, therefore, direct the Central government to progressively reduce the subsidy so as to completely eliminate it within a period of 10 years from today,” Justice Alam wrote.
“The subsidy money may be more profitably used for upliftment of the community in education and other indices of social development.”
A majority of Muslim clerics and leaders have welcomed the ruling, saying that instead of granting a subsidy, the government should lay down a proper mechanism for open bidding among airlines to take nearly 50,000 Muslims to Mecca every year, and said Air India’s monopoly on Haj flights be done away with.
This verdict, coming from a bench headed by a judge who is himself a Muslim, appears to have silenced criticism of the government from other religious quarters that Muslims were being given a special facility for a religious trip to Mecca.
The court also strongly disapproved the sending of huge 'goodwill' delegations of politicians and bureaucrats to Mecca every year, with the size of such delegations as high as 30 or 36.
The government was directed to bring its size down to just two members. “This court has no claim to speak on behalf of all Muslims of the country, and it will be presumptuous for us to try to tell Muslims what is for them a good or bad religious practice.''
''Nevertheless, we have no doubt that a very large majority of Muslims applying to the Haj committee for going on ‘Haj’ would not be aware of the economics of their pilgrimage. If the facts were known, a good many would not be very comfortable in the knowledge that their ‘Haj’ is funded to a substantial extent by the government,” Justice Alam wrote.
The Supreme Court noted that the government claimed the 2011 Haj airfare was Rs 58,800, though the normal Jeddah airfare was around Rs 25,000, while the government charged each pilgrim just Rs 16,000 for airfare.
“We see no justification for charging from pilgrims an amount that is much lower than even the normal airfare for a return journey to Jeddah,” the Supreme Court bench said.