Pakistan's Supreme Court keeps Bait-ul-Mal stipends for two Hindu girls

Pakistan's Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a petition by Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal against monthly support for two Hindu minors in Sindh. Chief Justice Yahya Afridi sat with Justice Naeem Akhtar Afghan and Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb. The 13-page order, written by the Chief Justice, leaves in place a Sindh High Court direction of 1 December 2022.

Jasika and Sanika are the daughters of Shrimati Reeta and the late Ravi Kumar, who married in 2012. Ravi Kumar died by suicide on 20 May 2017. A family court first told the paternal grandfather, Ram Raj, to pay Rs 3,000 a month to each child, with a 10 percent yearly rise. The Sindh High Court, sitting on its Larkana circuit, later held that Ram Raj was not personally liable under the family law that applied. He is aged, infirm, without income and lives in a dharamshala. The High Court then told Bait-ul-Mal to register the girls as regular beneficiaries and pay each of them Rs 10,000 a month, again with a 10 percent annual increase, until marriage.

What the welfare body argued

Bait-ul-Mal went to the Supreme Court on the ground that a court cannot write a standing payment order against a statutory welfare house. The institution runs on a published scheme, eligibility tests and a finite budget. A judicial direction that names a sum, a percentage rise and an end date, it said, steps into that scheme.

The Supreme Court did not accept the attack on this particular order. Bait-ul-Mal had, before the bench, already said it was willing to help the two girls. That concession, the judges wrote, left little room to interfere. The High Court's concern for the children was noted. The amounts stand.

A rule for the next case

The useful part of the judgment is the paragraph that looks past this file. Afridi wrote that courts often meet a legal question whose answer does not end the parties' trouble. A court may, in those files, look past the immediate point of law and try to ease the predicament. When a state body exists for that work, the court may ask for its help.

For later cases the bench set a narrower path. If facts shown in court appear to call for Bait-ul-Mal, the right step is to send the person to the institution for consideration. The amount, the form and the length of help should then be fixed by Bait-ul-Mal under its own statute, policy, eligibility rules and resources. The court should not, as a habit, write the cheque itself.

That is a quiet correction of the High Court's method even as the High Court's result is left untouched. Future benches are told to refer, not to prescribe. Bait-ul-Mal is told that referral is part of its work, not an intrusion it can wave away.

Why the minority point is in the text

The order states that state institutions must keep in mind that religious minorities sit in a thinner place, and that social and money trouble often hits them harder. For Jasika and Sanika, the judges said, minority status is part of the setting in which their need should be read. The sentence is not a new statutory right. It is an instruction to the welfare house and to lower courts about how to weigh a file.

Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal is a federal body created to assist the destitute. Hindu families in interior Sindh have long used local panchayats, temples and irregular charity when a breadwinner dies. A monthly federal stipend that rises with inflation, and that lasts until marriage, is a different instrument. It is also a precedent other widows will now cite, even if the Supreme Court has tried to stop the next bench from copying the exact numbers.

The girls keep the money. The institution keeps its scheme, at least on paper. The test will be the first referral that arrives after this judgment, and whether Bait-ul-Mal treats it as a file to assess or as a file to delay.