Priest scheme: AAP may win ‘better Hindu’ game but what about state coffers?

Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) convenor Arvind Kejriwal’s poll guarantee of providing a monthly honorarium of Rs 18,000 to Hindu and Sikh priests in Delhi, if his party returns to power, isn’t merely his pre-election outreach to the two religious communities. Instead, it is a continuation of the former Delhi CM’s competitive Hindutva meant to hoodwink the BJP ahead of next month’s assembly polls.

With the Pujari Granthi Samman Yojna (PGSY), Kejriwal seeks to not just buttress his party’s avowed commitment to “welfarism” but, more significantly, also showcase him as a better Hindu than the saffron party’s rabid rabble-rousers.

That the proposed scheme, coupled with the AAP government’s other ongoing or promised populist programmes, would wreak fiscal hara-kiri on Delhi’s increasingly burdened exchequer is obviously not a deterrent for Kejriwal as he steers the AAP into its most difficult electoral battle since the party’s formation and meteoric rise over a decade ago.

Deliberately sketchy details of rollout

Details of the PGSY rollout — its total cost to the exchequer or even the total number of intended beneficiaries — are still sketchy. AAP sources say this is “deliberate” as Kejriwal “does not want to alienate” Hindu priests and Sikh granthis who may eventually not qualify for the substantial cash dole.

“The registration process has just begun. Kejriwal is personally enrolling beneficiaries to show his commitment to ensuring that the scheme is implemented successfully but you will have to wait for the final figures (of beneficiaries and the scheme’s budgetary estimate)... obviously the coverage can’t be universal because there are thousands of temples across Delhi; every mohalla and colony has at least one, so there will have to be some criteria but we can’t say all this at the outset or the scheme will backfire,” an AAP MP told The Federal.

Also read: Delhi LG’s office flays Atishi, Kejriwal over charge of temple razing

AAP hits the target

Yet, the scheme has sufficiently riled both the BJP and the Congress to slam it as another of Kejriwal’s “pre-election stunts”. The cacophony of the scheme’s criticism has had arch rivals BJP and Congress wonder in unison why Kejriwal didn’t bring such a scheme for the past 10 years of his party’s rule in Delhi.

Never one to bow out of a verbal duel, Kejriwal and his aides have hit back at the BJP — while not finding the Congress even worthy of a rebuttal — by asserting why the saffron party, which claims sole proprietary rights over Hindu welfare, is angry over a scheme that seeks to financially help Hindu and Sikh priests who have no steady source of income.

Following the scheme’s launch on December 31, with Kejriwal personally enrolling the priest of Kashmere Gate’s Marghat Wala Hanuman Mandir, AAP sources say a “list of Hindu temples (several of them dedicated to Lord Hanuman) and Sikh Gurudwaras is being finalised so that their priests can be registered by Kejriwal, chief minister Atishi, former deputy CM Manish Sisodia and other senior AAP leaders before the Election Commission announces the Delhi election schedule”.

The Hanuman connection

The specific focus on Hanuman temples as well as the Sikh community has its own significance for the AAP; the former tracing its roots to the 2020 Delhi assembly poll campaign.

Ahead of the last assembly polls, with the BJP desperately seeking to communally polarise the electorate in its bid to win Delhi — the saffron party has not won the Delhi elections since its 1998 loss to the Congress though it swept municipal and Lok Sabha polls multiple times — by demonising anti-CAA protestors at Shaheen Bagh, Kejriwal had, in a wily move, appropriated Bajrangbali (a synonym for Lord Hanuman) as the AAP’s mascot just as the BJP has, since the 1980s ‘adopted’ Lord Ram.

Having already supported the CAA publicly and in Parliament, the AAP had kept a safe distance from the protests at Shaheen Bagh, neither condoning nor condemning them. On the other hand, though, Kejriwal and his aides such as Manish Sisodia and Saurabh Bhardwaj robustly countered the BJP’s raucous cries of Jai Shri Ram with Jai Bajrangbali. When the AAP eventually won another landslide victory — 62 of Delhi’s 70 seats, only a marginal dip from its 2015 tally of 68 seats — Kejriwal hailed the triumph as “a blessing from Lord Hanuman”.

Also read: Kejriwal's scheme for priests: Populist gimmick or political strategy?

Electoral masterstroke

The irony of marshalling Hanuman to counter his lord and master, Ram, was nothing short of an electoral masterstroke despite the obvious assault it made on a secular politics that AAP claims to follow. In subsequent years, Kejriwal has repeatedly bolstered his image as a “Hanuman bhakt” while also making a public display of his devotion to Hinduism, celebrating Diwali along with his entire Cabinet at the Akshardham Mandir in 2020, a retinue of TV news cameramen in tow, and frequenting the Hanuman Temple at Connaught Place.

A section of AAP leaders The Federal spoke to said the PGSY could also be seen as Kejriwal’s “pre-emptive strike” against the BJP over a “nefarious plan that they (BJP leadership) wanted to unleash before the elections using the office of the Lieutenant Governor to paint AAP as anti-Hindu”.

Sources said the AAP government “suspected” that the LG office was “planning to give permission for demolition of some religious structures, a majority of them Hindu temples, allegedly built as encroachments and the decision would have been projected as if it was taken by our government”. These fears in the AAP camp weren’t entirely unfounded.

Letter war

On January 1, two days after Kejriwal announced his PGSY promise, a letter war broke out between Delhi CM Atishi and LG VK Saxena. Atishi claimed Saxena had, through the ‘Religious Committee’, given his approval for demolition of multiple Hindu and Buddhist temples. Saxena shot back accusing the CM of “cheap politics” and asserting that no approval for such demolitions was granted by his office.

Curiously, a few days earlier, speculation was rife that the LG office had approved demolition of the Noor Ilahi Jama Masjid in Delhi’s Pitampura on December 29. The rumours prompted Supreme Court lawyers Anas Tanwir and Ebad Ur Rahman to serve a legal notice to all authorities concerned, including the Delhi LG, informing them that such a demolition, if carried out, would be in violation of the Supreme Court’s guidelines on demolitions.

The demolition of the Noor Ilahi mosque was “stalled”. In light of the ongoing war of words between Atishi and Saxena over the supposedly planned demolition of Hindu and Buddhist structures, what stands out now is the silence of the AAP when speculations over the Noor Ilahi mosque’s demolition began swirling.

Also read: Delhi polls | AAP will give temple, gurdwara priests Rs 18,000 a month: Kejriwal

Imams’ salaries go unpaid

The visible apathy of the AAP leadership on an issue concerning the Muslims stands in stark contrast to the party’s vociferous championing of the Hindu cause. This has, however, been the AAP’s consistent praxis over the years, protecting it from the “Muslim appeasement” charge that the Congress routinely draws from the BJP.

Ironically, Kejriwal’s PGSY promise has come at a time when Imams of various mosques under the aegis of the Delhi State Waqf Board have been protesting against the Delhi government’s failure to pay them salaries for the past 17 months. These Imams, numbering around 250, are paid a monthly salary by the Delhi government as per a 1993 Supreme Court directive which had, at the time, considered the poor financial conditions of such clerics and held that the state must pay them remuneration to “ensure a life of dignity”.

It was Kejriwal who, as chief minister in the run-up to the 2020 Delhi Assembly polls, decided to hike the salaries for Imams from Rs 10,000 to Rs 18,000 per month – the same amount now being promised under PGSY. Maulana Sajid Rashidi, chief of the All India Imam Association, claims that while Kejriwal’s decision to hike the salary of Imams had mobilised Muslim support for the AAP in the 2020 elections, the “salary disbursal became erratic just a year later and then, since mid-2023, the salaries stopped getting credited.”

Where will money come from?

“For the past 17 months, no Imam has been paid a salary and now Kejriwal is going around promising salaries for Hindu and Sikh priests... When they don’t have money to even pay salaries that have for nearly 30 years been part of the official salary bill of the state government, how will they pay Hindu and Sikh priests? They are fooling Hindus and Sikhs for votes,” Rashidi told The Federal.

He added, “We are not against the Pujari Granthi Samman Yojna; those priests should definitely get paid but what we are asking is how will the government pay them when it has not been able to pay the same amount to us for the past 17 months even though our salary is accounted for in the state budget”.

The AAP has predictably maintained a studied silence on the protests by the Imams. The fiscal prudence and jugglery behind the PGSY aside, what is evident is that the AAP’s added outreach beyond Hindus this election season is to the Sikh community whose granthis Kejriwal promises to bring within the ambit of the Samman Yojna. This isn’t without electoral calculations.

Also read: Kejriwal asks RSS if it backs ‘BJP’s wrongdoings’; ‘stop lying’, party hits back

AAP’s Sikh outreach

The Sikhs have a sizeable presence across a dozen assembly segments of the national capital and, much like the Sikh-majority Punjab where the AAP won its first assembly election in 2022 by a landslide almost mirroring Delhi, the BJP has struggled, first against the Congress and now the AAP, to wrest these constituencies.

The loud protests AAP made against the Centre’s decision to have former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh cremated at the Nigambodh Ghat last week instead of the Rashtriya Smriti Sthal, which is dedicated for funerals of former presidents, prime ministers and other departed “national leaders”, were, arguably, a precursor to the party’s latest Sikh outreach.

The AAP, sources said, did not want the Congress, which has also been slamming the BJP-led Centre over the disrespect shown to Dr Singh, to “gain in assembly segments with a sizeable Sikh vote in the aftermath of the controversy over the BJP’s alleged insult” to India’s first and only Sikh Prime Minister, who came from the Grand Old Party.