A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State

by Harsh Gupta 'Madhusudan'

MP Subramanian Swamy wrote an essay in 2014 on how the government control of temples is proving to be disastrous for the Hindu community. Swamy wrote: Tamil Nadu temples, under the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department, has control over more than 4.7 lakh acres of agricultural land, 2.6 crore square feet of buildings and 29 crore square feet of urban sites of temples. By any reasonable measure, the income from these properties should be in thousands of crores of rupees. The government, however, collects a mere 36 crore in rent against a ‘demand’ of mere 304 crore—around a 12 per cent realisation.113 As the scientist and writer Anand Ranganathan has pointed out, just five states in southern India control 90,700 temples, with Tamil Nadu controlling 36,425 temples and 56 mathas, from which the state government leeches huge sums of money at will.