Shashwati Chowdhury
Published on: August 9, 2022 at 18:52 IST
The Supreme Court said that declaring Hindus a minority in a state where they are less in numbers than other communities was not the job of the Court.
The Court stated that because it depends on a number of factual variables and data, process of determining minority is outside the purview of the law.
Devkinandan Thakur had petitioned the Supreme Court, contesting a provision of the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) Act of 1992, and asking that the Centre define the term “minority” and establish criteria for recognising minorities at the district level.
The bench led by Justices Uday U Lalit and S Ravindra Bhat said, “It is not the job of the court to declare minorities. This has to be on a case-by-case basis. There cannot be a general declaration to declare Hindus as a minority unless you show us something concrete about denial of rights”.
The petition Thakur filed in June alleged that because the Center had not notified the Hindus as a “minority” under the NCM Act, 1992, their rights under Articles 29 and 30 were being unjustly siphoned to the state’s majority population.
The Act’s Section 2(C), which deemed Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Parsis, Sikhs, and Jains to be national minorities, was challenged in the petition. It also requested for guidance on how to classify minorities on a district-by-district and state-by-state basis.
In the meantime, Upadhyay asked that the Supreme Court’s bench associate Thakur’s PIL to another matter that was already being heard by a different Bench. Upadhyay is the one submitting the plea in that case.
The other bench’s matter is scheduled to be heard on August 30 according to Upadhyay’s submission, thus the court listed Thakur’s petition for the first week of September together with the other PIL.
Before the Bench before the judge Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Upadhyay’s plea is still pending. Upadhyay makes the claim that the NCMEI Act’s Section 2(f) is unlawful since it gives the Center unrestricted authority to only provide minority privileges to the six registered religious communities.