LI Network
Published on: January 13, 2024 at 14:50 IST
The Supreme Court announced its intention to levy penalties on state governments that fail to provide their responses to the Central government regarding the identification of minorities at the state or district level.
Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta, constituting the bench, declared that states not submitting affidavits or furnishing data or comments to the Centre within six weeks would incur a penalty of Rs 10,000.
The bench scheduled the discussion on the identification of minorities for April and directed the Union Ministry of Minority Affairs to file an updated status report at least two weeks before the next listing date.
The group of petitions challenges a provision of the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) Act, which designates Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Parsis, Sikhs, and Jains as minorities at the national level. The pleas seek a directive for the Centre to define “minority” and establish guidelines for identifying minorities at the district and state levels.
Previously, the Supreme Court had expressed the view that religious and linguistic minority status should be determined state-wise, emphasizing the difficulty in entertaining requests to identify such minorities at the district level.
Referring to the TMA Pai and others vs State of Karnataka case in 2002, the Supreme Court had ruled that minorities must be identified at the state level.
