Journalism of Courage
The RSS education wing, Bhartiya Shikshan Mandal (BSM), wants to file a review petition in the Supreme Court for reconsidering the definition of minority institutions.
Alleging that minority institutions have “misused” their privileges, the BSM says the minority status should be determined by the composition of students, not the management.
“The purpose of giving privileges to minority institutions was to help the students belonging to minority communities. This purpose is not served because many of the minority institutions have more general students than minority students,” said BSM organising secretary Mukul Kantikar.
“There are many minority institutions where the minorities form the management but there are more general students. Despite this, they don’t implement the Right to Education (RTE) Act or the government’s public welfare policies. Such misuse has happened,” Kantikar added.
“So, the definition of minority status should be reviewed, for which there should either be a Supreme Court intervention or a constitutional amendment. We want to explore both the possibilities,” said Kantikar.
“The beneficiary should be minority. Just because the management is minority, you cannot have minority status,” he said, adding that the BSM was seeking legal advice to see if it can intervene as a stakeholder and file a review petition.
Article 30 (1) of the Constitution gives linguistic and religious minorities the fundamental right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice. These rights are protected in Article 13, which says any law in breach of the fundamental rights would be void to the extent of such violation.
Currently, the percentage of minority students to be admitted in government-aided minority institutions is decided by the state governments, depending on the minority population of the area and nature of the course. According to a 2002 Supreme Court order, if there aren’t enough minority students, the management can admit students from other communities.
The BSM, which has prepared a draft of the National Education Policy, alleged that many minority institutions have misused the privilege. The draft also proposes a statutory autonomous authority for regulating education.
