A bigger irony is that the government of Saudi Arabia, home of Mecca, believes that any subsidy for the Haj pilgrimage goes against the spirit of the Shariat. In fact, Islamic religious authorities have been quoted to the effect that, strictly speaking, Haj is a religious duty only for those who can afford it and that the pilgrimage may not be 'accepted by God' if expenditure on transport to the holy sites and on food is not the pilgrim's own.An incidental, but critical, mystery is why our so-called Muslim scholars like Asghar Ali Engineer -- who dashes off an article in our 'secular' English media every now and then to project some or the other Islamic point of view and criticises the Sangh Parivar in the process -- have maintained silence on the continuation of the un-Islamic dole by the Government of India.
This silence can perhaps be traced to the mindset of 'grab what you get and demand more' created among the Muslims by Jawaharlal Nehru, patron saint of India's pseudo-secularism. Thus, instead of scrapping the Port Haj Committee Act, 1932, established by the British to woo the Muslims, Nehru got our Parliament to enact the Haj Committee Act, 1959. That piece of legislation is totally non-secular insofar as i
