"In the 1980s, when the Ramakrish­na Mission deemed it necessary to declare itself a non-Hindu minority (a self-definition challenged in court by its own members and struck down) in order to prevent the West Bengal government from nationalizing its schools.[1] Art.30 constitutes a very serious discrimination on grounds of religion, and is in conflict with the professed secular character of the Indian Republic. In no democratic country would a majority community tolerate such discrimination, and it says a lot about the stranglehold which the secularist intelligentsia has on public discourse that this article hardly ever figures in debates on secularism and communalism. It also says a lot about the meekness of the Hindus in general and about the incompetence of the Hindutva movement in particular. Amending Art.30 to extend the privileges of the minorities to every community including the Hindus would benefit Hindu society as a whole, would terminate a humiliating and damaging inequality, but would not affect the minorities; they retain the rights conceded to them in the present version of Art.30... Article 30 is the Constitutional bedrock of a considerable list of similar anti-Hindu discriminations.[4] Among them is the unequal treatment of Hindu and non-Hindu places of worship. Muslims have full control of their mosques, Christians have full control of their churches, but Hindus are systematically deprived of the control of their temples. Recently the authorities tried (unsuccessfully) to have the Shirdi Sai Baba temple in Hyderabad declared a Hindu temple, because that would allow them to take it over and do what they have been doing everywhere to Hindu temples: siphon the income off to their own pockets or to other non-Hindu purposes. This is a major factor in the dire poverty which Hindu temple priests (whose wages have not been adjusted for decades) and their families suffer."