Mumbai: A week ago, on March 23, a delegation representing three Christian groups met Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis in Mumbai.

The groups – the Indian National Christian Council, Bombay Catholic Sabha and United Churches of Mumbai – sought an assurance from Fadnavis that those who vandalised a church property in New Panvel recently will be apprehended.

They also put forward six demands concerning the Christian community – one of them was a government subsidy to Christian pilgrims from Maharashtra visiting Jerusalem and other sites in Israel and Palestine associated with the life of Jesus Christ.

The demand for a pilgrimage subsidy piggybacks on similar schemes introduced by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy in 2008 and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in 2011. Under those programs, the southern states had earmarked 10 million rupees for a maximum of 500 Christian pilgrims, each of whom could receive 20,000 rupees at most as subsidy to visit Jerusalem.

Jayalalithaa sweetened the deal for her state a year later by offering an allowance of 12.5 million rupees to Hindu pilgrims travelling to Mansarovar in Tibet and Muktinath in Nepal. Six other Indian states – Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand – also cover a slice of the Mansarovar expenses of pilgrims from their states.

Jayalalithaa’s largesse to Hindu devotees in 2012 came even as the Supreme Court ruled that another pilgrimage allowance, the Haj subsidy, should be discontinued. While upholding the subsidy as constitutional, the apex court argued that the Qur’anic injunction to visit Mecca only applied to those who could “afford the expenses.” It asked the federal government to progressively reduce the amount of subsidy until it was completely eliminated by 2022.

At the time, Muslim public opinion welcomed the verdict, arguing that the subsidy unfairly benefited the terminally ill Air India, allowing it to stay afloat through its Haj monopoly, even as other carriers offered cheaper deals to pilgrims. With the rising costs of airfare and the increase in the number of pilgrims, the annual Haj subsidy had swollen from 100 million rupees in 1994 to 6.85 billion rupees by 2011.

Though the allowances granted by Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu to the Jerusalem pilgrimage are meager compared to the Haj, these annual allocations could rise rapidly if lawmakers felt they were a secure way to corner community patronage. There is no dearth of portentous signs around.

Creating new bureaucracies

The Christian groups’ meeting with Fadnavis was facilitated by Ashish Shelar, the first-time Bharatiya Janata Party legislator from Bandra West in Mumbai. In 2009, after Shelar lost narrowly to the Congress’s Baba Siddique in the heavily Christian Bandra West constituency, he actively began courting the Christian community. He first aided the re-naming of a public square in Santa Cruz, a part of this constituency, after the cartoonist Mario Miranda. This led one priest to eulogize him as “an honest and upright politician” who “helps Christians.”

Then, in 2013, he met then Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar to urge him to provide a subsidy for the Jerusalem pilgrimage.

During the assembly elections in 2014, Shelar found himself in the midst of robust Christian support. The Catholic Secular Forum nailed its colors to Shelar’s mast, and Cardinal Oswald Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay, exhorted the community to vote for “good governance.”

Gordon D’Souza of the Bombay Catholic Sabha, who accompanied Shelar to meet Fadnavis last week, also enthusiastically cheered the cardinal’s entreaty to the community last October. In the end, Shelar defeat Siddique by a margin of over 26,000 votes.

While Shelar insists his proposed subsidy is “entirely voluntary,” this pork barrelling of Christians through superficial community concerns has met with anger, including from a former office-bearer of the Catholic Sabha who decried the politics of sponsorship. Creating new state bureaucracies to screen both pilgrims and tour operators will only strengthen these patronage relationships and increase their clout over communities.

Unlike the Haj, Christians are under no scriptural obligation to visit Jerusalem. As the anthropologist Margaret Meibohm has shown, pilgrimages of Mumbai’s Catholics have long been directed not toward Jerusalem or Rome, but syncretic Indian sites such as Vailankanni in Tamil Nadu. In rituals shared across religious divides, devotees at this shrine dedicated to Mary offer coconuts, shave their heads, don the saffron clothes of ascetics, and roll through the mud in obeisance.

Public ceremonies at Vailankanni include carrying Mary’s sculpture on enormous chariots through the town, much in the way that Tamil Hindus carry the goddess Mariamman in procession. While a few Indian Christians do visit Jerusalem, a government subsidy will substantially veer Maharashtra’s Catholics away from these eclectic and inclusive places.

Subsidies for international religious pilgrimages also generate a hostile public discourse that serves to channel resentment against the minorities. Furthermore, they overshadow far more substantive issues, such as the crippling rates of poverty among, and continued denial of affirmative action to, Dalit Muslims and Christians.

The colossal Haj subsidy does nothing to change the fact that Muslims across castes in urban Maharashtra have a poverty rate of 49 percent: the rate for members of the scheduled castes and tribes in the state is 33 percent.

Approximately 32 percent of Dalit Christians live below the poverty line in urban India. As long as these figures stand, diverting public resources toward international pilgrimages will not serve Maharashtra’s Christians.

(This article appeared in scroll.in on April 1, 2015)