Umamageswari Maruthappan
Supreme Court issued notice on plea seeking transfer of all petitions challenging the constitutionality of Section 2(c) of the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992. A three-judge Bench of CJI S.A. Bobde, and Justices A.S. Bopanna and V. Ramasubramanian had issued this notice.
The petition filed by Advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay seeks a direction to invalidate the provisions of section 2(c) of the Act and consider it “ultravires”.
The section defines “minorities” in the following words: “”minority”, for the purposes of this Act, means a community notified as such by the Central Government.”
Accordingly, the Central Government, by its notification, declared Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Zoroastrians as “minorities”. However, the petition alleges that the Government ignored the followers of Bahaism and Judaism which is “arbitrary” and “unjustified”.
The petitioner cited the T.M.A.Pai Foundation & Ors vs State Of Karnataka & Ors (Civil Writ Petition 317 of 1993) case law. The most important contention raised in this case was the meaning of “minority” under section 30 of the Indian Constitution.
The Eleven-judge Bench held that: “Linguistic and religious minorities are covered by expression ‘minority’ under Article 30 of the Constitution. Since reorganization of the States has been on linguistic lines, therefore, for the purpose of determining the minority, the unit will be State and not whole India. Thus, religious and linguistic minorities, who have been put on a par in Article 30, have to be considered state wise.”
Relying on the above judgement that the unit of determining the minority is ‘State’, the petitioner stated that population of Hindus in Laddakh, Mizoram, Lakshdweep, Kashmir, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Punjab and Manipur should lawfully come under the minority community. By denying classification, the Centre is depriving such Hindus of their rights under Articles 29 and 30.
Since similar petitions were filed before almost six High Courts, a transfer petition was filed before the Apex Court to transfer all the related petitions to itself in order to avoid multiple hearings.
- National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992 ↑
- T.M.A.Pai Foundation & Ors vs State Of Karnataka & Ors (2002) ↑
