NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday issued a notice seeking the Centre’s response to a public interest litigation (PIL) demanding the classification of religious minorities based on their population in each state but mainly in Christian dominated Northeastern states of Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland.
A three-judge bench headed by justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul issued a notice to three Central government ministries — Home, Law & Justice and Minority Affairs — based on the PIL filed by BJP leader and lawyer Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay. The matter will be heard after six weeks.
The PIL specifically challenged the validity of Section 2(f) of the NCMEI Act 2004, which, the petition stated, gives unbridled powers to the Centre to restrict minority benefits to five religious communities — Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Parsis.
The PIL seeks guidelines to enable minorities to establish and run institutions under the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions (NCMEI) Act. In addition, the PIL demanded the Centre lay down guidelines for the identification of minority communities at the state-level “to ensure that only those religious and linguistic groups which are socially, economically, politically non-dominant and numerically inferior, can establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.”
Incidentally, in December 2019, Upadhyay had approached the top court with a similar request wherein he had challenged the classification of five religious communities as minorities under Section 2(c) of the National Commission of Minorities (NCM) Act 1992. This was based on a government notification of October 23, 1992 classifying Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Parsis as minority groups based on their national population.
A bench headed by then Chief Justice of India (CJI) SA Bobde had dismissed the petition, observing, “States were formed on linguistic basis but religion has to be pan-India.”