'Cite examples at state level': SC on Hindus being denied minority status
New Delhi, July 18
As a PIL demanded minority status for Hindus in states where they were outnumbered by members of other communities, the Supreme Court (SC) on Monday asked the petitioner to come up with “concrete” examples of the community being denied minority status at the state level. “We are not able to understand what injury the petitioner is claiming… We are going ahead with these challenges in the air,” a Bench led by Justice UU Lalit told senior counsel Arvind Datar, who represented petitioner Devkinandan Thakur, a religious preacher.
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Thakur has challenged certain provisions of the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) Act and sought a direction to the Centre to define “minority” and prescribe guidelines for the identification of minorities at the district level.
Datar said a 1993 notification says six communities — Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsi and Jain — are minorities at the national level, and court judgments say minorities have to be notified by states.
Maintaining that a Christian institution claiming minority status in Mizoram will be a reversal of the situation, the Bench asked, “Are you (petitioner) denied the minority status in any state?”
As Datar said he was talking about Hindus being denied minority status and the general perception that Hindus can’t be a minority, the Bench said it could examine the issue only if there was a concrete case of Hindus being denied a minority status. Talking about linguistic minorities, the Bench said Kannada-speaking people in Maharashtra were a minority. “If a Sikh institution claims minority status in Punjab, then it’s a travesty of justice,” it said.
