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India says Sikhs out but makes
Jains a minority
Amends new law that may shunt out Sikhs from minority quota
WSN Bureau
 NEW
DELHI: Indian Government is moving full steam ahead to pass the bill
that will re-define minorities at the state level, thus making Sikhs
a majority in
Punjab
and depriving them of all the benefits accruing to the community's
members because of their minority status.
But under
pressure from a strong lobby of the Jain community, led by a large
media house and several other pressure groups, the Union Cabinet
meeting under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last
Friday decided to amend slightly the Constitution 103rd (Amendment)
Bill that will re-define the construct of "minority" by including
the Jain community as a minority group.
A few states —
Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Jharkhand,
Chhattisgarh,
Delhi and Uttar
Pradesh — have already accorded minority status to Jains.
Sources said
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is being advised by many well wishers
of his to make sure that the Sikhs do not lose their minority status
in the country, including in
Punjab. However,
an interested section that is opposing the inclusion of Sikhs as a
minority is quoting a court judgment that says a majority in the
state cannot be considered a minority.
What is shameful
is that the law aimed at shutting Sikhs out of the benefits accruing
to the minorities is happening under the watch of a Sikh Prime
Minister.
It is understood
that the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Social Justice and
Empowerment has suggested many amendments in the Bill. With this
Bill, the National Commission for Minorities will for the first time
get a constitutional status; something that was perceived to be
there already but what in law and fact was never the case.
The WSN
investigation bureau has been tracking the issue for many months
now. In May 2007, the WSN had reported the Center’s intentions to
define the term 'minority' and the decision to recognize minorities
only at the state level. In such a scenario, Sikhs will not be a
minority anymore.
The Centre had
claimed that the move was in keeping with the spirit of a number of
Supreme Court judgments. In 1980, the National Commission for
Minorities had told the government it was treating Muslims,
Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Zoroastrians as religious
minorities at the national level. The communities were notified when
the National Commission for Minorities Act came into force in 1993.
The new move
defines a ‘minority’ as a section of citizens of a state which has
been specified as a minority in that state, by a presidential
notification issued after consultations with the state government.
Another
provision gives Parliament the final say in the matter of defining
‘minorities’. Parliament will be empowered to enact laws to include
or exclude any section of citizens from the list of minorities.
This means that
the Indian Parliament can still term Sikhs in
India
a minority even if they do not make it to the list of minorities
going by the fact that they outnumber the Hindus in Punjab. But for
this, the Sikhs will have to beseech the Centre first.
Thus, Muslims in
UP may be a minority, but those in
Kashmir may not
be.
Thus, the SGPC
may lose its right to run medical or dental colleges as minority
institutions, while the Christians will be able to run the CMC,
Ludhiana
because they will be a minority. Muslims' institutions in
Kashmir will not
be treated as minority institutions.
Various courts
in India have given judgments which should have alerted the
minorities, particularly the 2007 Allahabad High Court judgment
which had held that Muslims — 18.5 per cent of Uttar Pradesh’s
population in 2001 — were not a religious minority in the state. It
had said that the state government should treat members of the
Muslim community as equal to those belonging to the non-minority
communities without discrimination in accordance with the law. A
division bench, however, had stayed the ruling the next day.
Experts now say
that as the government did not bring this draft bill before the
Parliament till Tuesday when the session adjourned sine die, it may
not do so in the budget session either as by that time the elections
will be too near. Any next government will find it rather easy to
then pass the law claiming that it was the earlier government that
decided the main thrust. With both Congress and BJP representing the
soft and hardcore varieties of Hindutva, such shrewd cooperation has
been routine.
24 December
2008
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