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Why Mosques and Churches Are Free But Hindu Temples Are Under HR&CE Acts: Is India’s Hindu Temple Law Constitutional?

Bharat News Updates
Tirupati Balaji Mandie and HR&CE Act

Who Owns Hindu Temples? How South India’s States Controlled Hindu Temples and Why the Supreme Court Must Act On.

A 13-year-old constitutional battle, missing gold, diverted millions, sold temple land, and the question India’s secular republic has long refused to answer honestly.

The Law That Was Never Meant to Last This Long

When the Madras Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act was first passed in 1951  and later consolidated into the Tamil Nadu HR&CE Act, 1959, it was sold as a temporary corrective. Temples had fallen into disrepair, hereditary trustees were corrupt in some cases, and post-colonial governance demanded accountability over public institutions. The argument was reasonable, even if the solution was heavy-handed: let the state step in, clean up the mess, and hand the temples back to the community.

That handover never came!

Seventy-five years later, five southern state governments: Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, and Kerala control the administration, finances, staffing, and ritual conduct of tens of thousands of Hindu temples through HR&CE-type legislations. The laws that were meant to protect temples have become the instrument through which those temples are drained, neglected, and politically managed. And it has taken a petition filed in 2012 by the late Shankaracharya Swami Dayananda Saraswathi, one of modern India’s most respected Vedic scholars to finally bring this question to the Supreme Court of India for a definitive answer and justice.

On May 18, 2026, a SC bench of Justices BV Nagarathna and Satish Chandra Sharma did something important: they recalled their April 2025 order that had sent petitioners back to respective High Courts, and decided that the Supreme Court will now proceed to examine the constitutional validity of the HR&CE laws collectively, rather than leaving the matter to multiple High Courts.

The consolidated challenge covers Tamil Nadu (HR&CE Act, 1959), Andhra Pradesh (Charitable and Hindu Religious Institutions and Endowments Act, 1987), Telangana (Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act, 1987), and Puducherry (Hindu Religious Institutions Act, 1972). The petitioners have contended that these provisions violate Articles 14, 19, 25, 26 and 31A of the Constitution by granting excessive State control over Hindu religious institutions.

This is not a fringe petition. This is a constitutional reckoning long overdue.

The Architecture of Control

To understand why this matters, you need to understand how total the state’s grip actually is. These acts do not merely “oversee” temples. They:

Among the specific provisions under challenge in the Tamil Nadu HR&CE Act are Sections 23 and 24 relating to the powers of Commissioners and entry into religious institutions, Sections 35 and 36 dealing with utilization of temple funds, Section 45 concerning appointment of Executive Officers, Sections 47 to 53 governing trustees and their removal, Section 92 relating to annual contribution payments to the government, and Sections 108 and 111 which bar certain legal challenges against temple administration decisions.

Section 108 and 111 deserve special attention: they are legislative self-armour, clauses written specifically to prevent temples and devotees from going to court to challenge how the state manages their sacred institutions. A government that writes laws protecting itself from scrutiny by the very communities it governs is not administering temples, it is occupying them.

Tamil Nadu: When 5.25 Lakh Acres Became a Question Mark

Tamil Nadu’s HR&CE department currently controls over 44,000 temples, the largest such portfolio anywhere in the democratic world. The numbers behind this administrative empire are staggering, and deeply troubling.

In 1986, the HR&CE department itself recorded that Hindu institutions in the state owned 5.25 lakh acres of land. By 2012, that figure had mysteriously shrunk to 4.78 lakh acres, a disappearance of roughly 47,000 acres that no government has ever satisfactorily explained. When temple activist Salem Radhakrishnan filed a PIL seeking information about the missing 47,000 acres, the court directed HRCE to file a rejoinder but the department reportedly has not submitted any reply.

The situation grows more alarming on scrutiny. Of the claimed 4.78 lakh acres, the department states that only 3.43 lakh acres have proper records matching government records. The department never discloses how much of the total land is under encroachment or hostile occupation. Estimates suggest at least 1,50,000 acres of temple land are under encroachments, and when lands without proper lease agreements are included, the figure could be around 2,50,000 acres.

Documents for 1.35 lakh acres gone. In 70 years of state management.

Tamil Nadu BJP chief K Annamalai accused the HR&CE department of diverting temple funds for purposes unrelated to temples, such as constructing offices and colleges, and pointed out that the department had never been subjected to an external audit for decades.

The DMK government responded by pointing to encroachment recovery drives. Since May 2021, Tamil Nadu claims to have recovered 6,071 acres of encroached temple land worth Rs 5,718 crore. These numbers sound impressive until you set them against the 1.5–2.5 lakh acres still believed to be under encroachment. Recovering 6,000 acres while 150,000 remain encroached is not administration, it is optics.

More quietly damning: the Madras High Court issued contempt notices to five IAS officers and an HR&CE Joint Commissioner over the alleged non-compliance with a court order regarding encroachment on land belonging to Devanathaswamy Temple in Cuddalore, where a Christian school was found to be occupying the temple land.

A Christian school? On Hindu temple land. With IAS officers held in contempt for failing to act. This is not a minor administrative lapse. It is a microcosm of the entire system.

The question of fund diversion is equally stark. Opposition leader Palaniswami questioned how it is justified to divert devotees’ donations to build colleges, asking: “Can’t the government build colleges using its own funds? You are deliberately using temple funds through the HR&CE department.” The DMK minister’s response was remarkable: he asked Palaniswami to “read history and learn how successive chief ministers since the 1950s have used temple funds to establish colleges.” In other words, the defense for diverting temple funds is, everyone has been doing it.

There is also the matter of temple land rents. Across Tamil Nadu, shops, commercial establishments, and properties built on temple land are leased at rents fixed decades ago, sometimes as low as ₹5 to ₹100 per month for prime commercial properties. The temple receives a pittance; the lessee extracts enormous commercial value. This is not administration. This is a structured subsidy to private parties using sacred assets as collateral.

Andhra Pradesh and the Tirupati Paradox

Sri Venkateswara Temple at Tirumala Tirupati is the richest Hindu temple in the world. Its annual income exceeds ₹3,000 crore. It holds gold deposits exceeding 10,000 kg. Millions of devotees from across the globe make the climb to the seven hills.

And it has spent years governed by a Chief Minister who is a practising Christian.

The controversy under Jagan Mohan Reddy‘s government (2019–2024) was not merely political noise. The Andhra Pradesh government under Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy was alleged to be using Lord Balaji’s funds: the TTD Board included a clause to deposit temple funds in state government securities, which critics described as a calculated move to allow the Jagan regime access to temple wealth.

The family connection made this especially egregious. TTD Chairman YV Subba Reddy was closely related to Jagan, being his uncle through marriage to Jagan’s maternal aunt. A temple with ₹3,000 crore in annual income, governed by a government whose first family is Christian, with a Chairman who is the CM’s uncle. The temple endowment law was supposed to prevent this kind of capture. Instead, it enabled it perfectly.

In February 2020, it emerged that A Rajasekhar Rao, Assistant Executive Officer of the SV Group of temples, was seen praying at a Lutheran church in Puttur. He had claimed to be Hindu but acknowledged his wife had converted to Christianity.

The deeper irony: when Jagan Mohan Reddy visited Tirumala temple, he entered without signing the mandatory declaration form required of non-Hindus under TTD regulations, a form that explicitly requires non-Hindu visitors to declare faith in Lord Sri Venkateswara and seek special permission to enter the temple.

The man who controlled the world’s richest Hindu temple for five years, through his loyalists on its board, could not or would not sign a declaration affirming faith in the deity whose wealth he administered.

After the TDP returned to power in 2024, the newly formed TTD board passed a resolution that only Hindus would be allowed to serve at the temple, and non-Hindu employees would be offered voluntary retirement or transfer to other government departments. That this had to be passed as a formal resolution rather than being a basic, unquestioned default, tells you everything about how far the system had drifted.

Kerala: When the CPM Became Temple Administrator

Kerala’s temples are managed through the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) and the Malabar Devaswom Board, which together oversee nearly 1,200 temples. Both boards are government-appointed, and through successive CPM governments, they have been staffed overwhelmingly by party functionaries who have no relation to Hindu worship.

Then came the Sabarimala scandal.

The Kerala High Court ordered a probe into the drop of 4.541 kilograms in the weight of the gold-plated copper covering of the ‘Dwarapalaka’ idols at the entrance of the sanctum sanctorum of the Sabarimala Ayyappa temple. The gold had simply vanished not from a heist one night, but during a supervised renovation project in 2019 carried out under the board’s watch.

A probe by the Travancore Devaswom Board‘s vigilance wing revealed that gold from the temple was illegally taken by Bangalore-based Unnikrishnan Potti, and also exposed serious procedural irregularities. It further came to light that the ‘yoga danda’ and ‘rudraksha’ bead chain of the Ayyappa deity were gold-plated in 2019 by then Devaswom Board president A Padmakumar’s son, without following any procedures.

BJP leaders alleged that the looting at the Lord Ayyappa temple was not limited to the reported 4.5 kg of gold, claiming that investigations showed four Panchaloha idols were taken out of Sabarimala and sold to international criminal networks under the LDF-appointed Devaswom Board.

The government’s response was to call it a “slip-up.” CPM Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan went to Delhi and referred to the four-and-a-half kg gold loss as a slip-up, prompting BJP leaders to call it a “grave act of sacrilege.”

4.5 kilograms of sacred temple gold: a slip-up?

Critics alleged that the CPM was interfering in the SIT investigation, as some of its leaders were accused and suspects in the case. While the CPM swiftly removed party whistleblower V Kunhikrishnan, no action was taken against former TDB president and CPM district committee member A Padmakumar, who was arrested in the case.

Sabarimala is perhaps the most visited pilgrimage site in the world by footfall, over 50 million devotees annually. It is managed by a communist government whose ideology is explicitly atheist, whose party functionaries run the board, and under whose watch consecrated gold disappeared and idols may have been trafficked.

If this had happened in a mosque or church, it would dominate national headlines indefinitely.

Sabarimala Swamy Ayyappa Temple

The Constitutional Asymmetry That Cannot Be Ignored

Here is the question that the Supreme Court’s May 2026 revival finally forces into the open: Why only Hindu temples?

India has the Waqf Act, which governs Muslim religious endowments across the country. The Waqf Act grants sweeping autonomy to Muslim religious endowments, allowing them to manage vast properties with little to no governmental oversight. The selective nature of state control, where Hindu temples are subjected to extensive government oversight while religious institutions of other communities enjoy greater autonomy has justifiably led to accusations of bias and discrimination.

According to government data, there are around 872,351 immovable Waqf properties across the country with an estimated total value of $14.22 billion. Waqf Boards were empowered to designate properties as Waqf and manage them. Until the 2025 central amendment, the state had minimal power even to question a Waqf Board‘s designation of a property.

Churches across India operate under the management of their respective dioceses, synods, and trusts, entirely self-governed, with no IAS officer appointed to oversee their finances and no state government extracting annual contributions from Sunday collections.

The government’s standard defense for this asymmetry is that Article 25 of the Constitution allows the state to regulate “secular activities” associated with religion, and that temple administration is a secular function. But this argument collapses on its own logic. If temple administration is purely secular, why must the Executive Officer be Hindu? Why are archaka appointments, deeply religious decisions made or approved by the HR&CE Commissioner? Why does the department control what rituals are performed and how often?

The truth is more uncomfortable: these acts were framed under a post-colonial ideology that viewed Hinduism as a social problem to be reformed rather than a living civilization to be protected. The Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu, which shaped the HR&CE framework there, was explicitly anti-Brahmin and anti-temple in its ideological roots. The use of HR&CE as an instrument of social engineering  rather than temple administration was baked into its origins.

Swami Dayananda Saraswathi understood this. His 2012 petition was not filed in anger but in anguish by a man who spent his life teaching the Upanishads and watched the state strip temples of their capacity to sustain that very tradition.

The Shirur Mutt Precedent, Violated in Plain Sight

The Supreme Court is not entering new territory. It ruled on this question once before.

In the Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v. Sri Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt (1954), the landmark Shirur Mutt case, the Supreme Court held that certain provisions of the Madras HR&CE Act, 1951 violated Article 26, which protects the right of religious denominations to manage their own affairs. The review petitioners relied on this precedent, arguing that provisions similar to those invalidated in Shirur Mutt were subsequently reintroduced through later enactments.

This is the hidden reality that makes the constitutional challenge so damning: the government was told by the Supreme Court in 1954 that its temple control laws violated the Constitution. It went away, rewrote the same laws in slightly different language, and passed them again. Tamil Nadu’s HR&CE Act, 1959, passed just five years after Shirur Mutt is largely that exercise in legislative cosmetic surgery.

The petitioners are now asking the Supreme Court to see through the cosmetics.

Uncommon Truths the Debate Rarely Acknowledges

The IAS officer problem. Executive Officers appointed to major temples under HR&CE are almost always IAS or IPS officers, career bureaucrats whose promotion, transfer, and career trajectory depend entirely on the state government. They have no accountability to the deity, to the devotees, or to the temple tradition. They have total accountability to the Chief Minister’s office. Expecting them to stand up for temple interests against government encroachment is structurally impossible.

The ‘fit person’ fiction. Under Tamil Nadu’s HR&CE Act, when no trustee is appointed for a temple, the Commissioner can appoint a “fit person” to manage it. The Foundation for HR&CE Reform argued that funds transferred from temples under these circumstances were not voluntary contributions but made under coercion because temples had been “under effective control and management of the HR and CE Department” with no trustees appointed for years. In other words, the state first removes trustees, then calls itself a “fit person” to manage the temple’s funds and then argues the subsequent transfers were voluntary.

The micro-temple tragedy. Of Tamil Nadu’s 44,000 temples, the vast majority are small, rural neighbourhood shrines where the deity is often an archaic local manifestation, a village goddess, a clan deity, a nature spirit. These temples have negligible hundi income. The state barely registers their existence, no trustees are appointed, no accounts are maintained, and the temple crumbles. Meanwhile, the 10 to 15 large temples with significant income subsidies the HR&CE department‘s administrative costs through mandatory contributions. The small temples don’t get the protection of the state. They merely fund it.

The priest pay paradox. Archakas (temple priests) in HR&CE-controlled temples in Tamil Nadu earn some of the lowest wages of any skilled professional in the state, often ₹3,000 to ₹8,000 per month, depending on the temple’s income category. A temple that earns ₹10 crore a year in donations may pay its chief priest ₹6,000 a month. The same priest, if the temple were freed from HR&CE control, could receive a fraction of the hundi income as was the tradition and often did. State control has impoverished the very custodians of the tradition it claims to protect.

The rent scandal no one fixes. Across thousands of temples, shops and commercial establishments built on temple land pay rents fixed in the 1960s and never revised. A shop in a prime Chennai locality pays ₹50 per month. A restaurant near a major temple pays ₹200 per month. The HR&CE department has had 65 years to fix this. It has not. Devotees whose donations are meant to sustain a living temple instead subsidies commercial tenants through below-market rents.

The audit that never happened. The HR&CE department in Tamil Nadu had reportedly never been subjected to an external audit for decades. The institution entrusted with auditing every temple’s accounts has itself never been audited. This is the structural core of why the system produces corruption: accountability runs in only one direction.

Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh: The Pattern Repeats

Karnataka’s Hindu Religious Institutions and Charitable Endowments Act, 1997 (amended 2001) mirrors the Tamil Nadu model with one addition: the state created the Hindu Religious Institutions and Charitable Endowments Department with power not just to administer but to amalgamate temple funds. Smaller temples’ surplus funds can be “pooled” into a common corpus managed by the department.

In Karnataka, the same complaints recur: temple lands leased below market rates to politically connected parties; executive officers transferred mid-tenure when they resist political pressure; archaka wages stagnant for years; hundi collections disputed between the department and the temple trusts.

In Telangana, the recently formed state government under the BRS and subsequently Congress has treated temple funds as a supplementary development budget. The Yadadri Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy Temple, renovated with state fanfare, was partially funded by endowments from other temples, temple money being used to build a state-branded showcase. Whether devotees’ donations from one temple should fund another temple’s political showcase renovation is a question nobody in power seems to have asked.

What the Supreme Court Must Now Decide

At the core of the challenge are statutory provisions dealing with the powers of HR&CE Commissioners, appointment and control of Executive Officers and trustees, audit of temple accounts, utilization of surplus temple funds, and alienation of temple property.

The petitioners are not asking the Supreme Court to abolish all temple regulation. They are asking it to hold the line that the Constitution already draws. Article 26 is unambiguous: religious denominations have the right to manage their own affairs in matters of religion. The state can regulate secular aspects — safety, hygiene, financial transparency but cannot colonize the management of religious institutions.

The petitioners argued that all these laws are based on the same framework and originate from the old Madras Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act; that the matter has remained pending before the Supreme Court for 13 years, and sending it back to High Courts would amount to injustice; and that under Article 32, approaching the Supreme Court directly for the protection of fundamental rights is itself a fundamental right.

The bench accepted all three arguments. The review petitions were allowed. The consolidated constitutional challenge will now be heard.

This is significant because it closes the escape route the state governments preferred: fragmented High Court hearings, different outcomes in different jurisdictions, years more of delay while the status quo continued to drain temple resources. A single Supreme Court bench will now decide whether Article 26 means what it says, for Hindu temples too.

Why Repeal Is the Only Honest Answer

The HR&CE Acts cannot be reformed into acceptability. They are constitutionally infected at their root. The very premise, that the state can appoint officers to govern the internal affairs of Hindu religious institutions was challenged in Shirur Mutt (1954) and remains constitutionally suspect today.

Reform proposals that keep the state’s hand on the wheel while tweaking which fingers touch it miss the point. A reformed HR&CE that still allows the government to appoint Executive Officers, still channels temple funds through state accounts, and still extracts annual contributions to fund its own administration is not a reformed HR&CE. It is the same instrument with better public relations.

The alternative modelled on how every other religious community in India governs its own institutions, is a self-governing trust structure for each temple, with:

The argument that temples cannot be trusted to govern themselves collapses when you look at what state governance has actually produced: 1.35 lakh acres of land without documents, 4.5 kg of sacred gold missing from Sabarimala, archaka priests earning ₹5,000 a month while their temple earns crores, commercial tenants paying ₹50 monthly rents fixed in 1965, and a department that has never submitted itself to an external audit.

If a trust ran a temple this way, the HR&CE Commissioner would take it over for mismanagement. The department runs temples this way, and is accountable to no one.

The Question India’s Republic Must Answer

India is not a Hindu state. But it is also not a state that should single out one religion’s institutions for total government control while leaving others free. That is not secularism. It is selective governance that disproportionately burdens the majority community, a strange inversion of what minority protections are designed to do, but an inversion nonetheless.

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear this matter in full, after 13 years of delay is the beginning of an answer. Whether that answer will be complete depends on whether the bench is willing to look squarely at what these laws have produced: not protection of temples, but their systematic capture; not administration, but extraction; not preservation of Sanatan Dharma, but its slow institutional strangulation through bureaucratic control.

The late Swami Dayananda Saraswathi filed this petition in 2012. He passed away in 2015, without seeing it heard. Tens of millions of Hindu devotees who climb hills barefoot at dawn, who fast before offering flowers at the sanctum, who drop their week’s earnings into a hundi trusting that it will serve the deity and the tradition, are still waiting in frustration.

They deserve an honest answer. India’s Constitution, correctly read, already contains it.

Current Legal Status State by State

Tamil Nadu: The primary case, Swami Dayananda Saraswathi v. State of Tamil Nadu is now before the Supreme Court. Multiple PILs in the Madras High Court on specific issues (land encroachments, fund diversion, archaka service conditions) continue in parallel. Madras HC has issued contempt notices to IAS officers over temple land violations.

Andhra Pradesh: The AP Endowments Act, 1987 is under direct challenge in the Supreme Court batch. AP High Court has separately heard petitions on TTD management, non-Hindu appointments, and fund investment in state securities.

Telangana: The same 1987 Act (applicable to Telangana after bifurcation) is part of the Supreme Court challenge. Telangana High Court has heard petitions on specific temple takeovers and EO appointments.

Karnataka: Karnataka’s 1997/2001 Act is not part of the current Supreme Court batch but faces separate petitions in the Karnataka High Court challenging the pooling of temple funds and the government’s power to amalgamate smaller temples’ endowments.

Kerala: Kerala’s Devaswom Boards operate under separate legislation and are not part of the Supreme Court batch. The Kerala High Court, however, took suo motu cognizance of the Sabarimala gold disappearance and ordered an SIT probe, marking a rare instance of judicial intervention in Devaswom Board management.

 

 

Next Hearing: Swami Dayananda Saraswathi v. State of Tamil Nadu,  scheduled the next hearing on July 24, 2026 the Supreme Court bench of Justices BV Nagarathna and Satish Chandra Sharma following the recall order of May 18, 2026.

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