The Supreme Court granted states and union territories one final chance on Monday to respond to petitions requesting the identification of religious minorities at the state level, as required by the 2002 TMA Pai Foundation case ruling. They received six from a justice panel consisting of S K Kaul and Ahsanuddin Amanullah.
The Supreme Court granted states and union territories one final chance on Monday to respond to petitions requesting the identification of religious minorities at the state level, as required by the 2002 TMA Pai Foundation case ruling.
They were given six weeks by a panel of justices led by S K Kaul and Ahsanuddin Amanullah to respond to the federal government; if they failed to do so, the Supreme Court would assume they had nothing to say about the matter.
The instruction was given after Jammu and Kashmir filed a partial reply, but Rajasthan and Telangana had not yet submitted their responses, according to Additional Solicitor General K M Nataraj, who was representing the Centre before the bench.
In the TMA Pai Foundation case, the SC ruled that religious and linguistic minorities must be designated at the state level for the purposes of Article 30, which deals with the rights of minorities to establish and manage educational institutions.
Although the phrase “minorities” is mentioned in a few articles of the Constitution, it is not defined. The National Minorities Commission Act of 1992, which authorises the Center to inform communities of their status as minorities, does not either.
Citing this, the petitions have also contested Section 2(c) of the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992, which grants the Centre authority to notify minorities. They have questioned how the Centre can do this without a precise definition of what defines a minority.
According to one of the petitions filed by attorney Ashwini Upadhyay, the October 23, 1993 notification by which the Center designated Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Parsis as “minority” communities was effectively rendered invalid following the TMA Pai judgement.
Despite receiving notice from the SC, the BJP-led federal government did not respond to Upadhyay’s petition even though it was filed in August 2020. anything didn’t do anything until March 2022, when it was called out for being slow to act and fined Rs 7,500.
The Centre attempted to shift responsibility for awarding Hindus minority status to state governments in a counter-affidavit submitted on March 25, 2022, asserting that “they, too, have concurrent powers to do so.”
The government filed a second statement on May 9, 2022, “in supersession of the earlier affidavit,” stating that “the power is vested with the Centre to notify minorities,” in response to criticism of the original affidavit.
Then, requesting time from the SC, it claimed that the matter has “far-reaching ramifications” and called for consultations with “state governments and other stakeholders.”
In an affidavit filed in January of this year, the Center claimed that BJP-ruled Gujarat, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh have favoured the current system of identifying and notifying minorities at the national level, which excludes Hindus from the list of religious minorities, while its governments in Assam and Uttarakhand have advocated that the state as laid down in the constitution should be the unit of identification of minorities.
In its affidavit, the Center claimed that 24 states and 6 union territories had expressed their opinions and asked for more time for discussions. The SC approved the petition.
Written by: Neha A. Pardeshi, Thakur Ramnarayan College Of Law, an intern under Legal Vidhiya
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