Nithyakalyani Narayanan. V
The political stance of Aligarh Muslim University’s (AMU) founders during British colonial times would not affect the university’s minority status today, the Supreme Court ruled on January 22. The hearing for the petitions regarding AMU’s minority status is on its fourth day.
The case involves legal considerations of whether a centrally funded university founded by parliamentary statute can be recognised as a minority institution, as well as the conditions under which an educational institution can be granted minority status under Article 30. In February 2019, the case was assigned to a seven-judge panel by a bench presided over by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi.
The 2006 ruling of the Allahabad High Court, which held that even though AMU was founded by a minority community, it was never administered or claimed to be administered by the minority community and therefore cannot be considered a minority institution, is being challenged by a seven-judge bench that includes Chief Justice DY Chandrachud, Justice Sanjiv Khanna, Justice Surya Kant, Justice JB Pardiwala, Justice Dipankar Datta, Justice Manoj Misra, and Justice SC Sharma.
The Central government was represented by Solicitor General (SG), Tushar Mehta, who argued that all historians have said that the AMU founders were British loyalists. The CJI remarked to that claim that although the founders may have been associated with Khilafat or Mahatma Gandhi, this would not have affected the institute’s minority status.
Hearing today
The CJI responded to arguments made by advocate MR Shamshad, who was representing the petitioners, by saying that a minority institute may assert that it has the option to open a school, but it cannot assert that it must be recognised in order to award degrees in the absence of an enabling statute or other legal framework.
R Venkataramani, the Attorney General of India, emphasised that Article 30, which grants the power to create and manage minority institutions, is an enabling clause. Then CJI responded saying, “It cannot be that I as a State decided to whether to grant or not the status, it is not enabling in that sense … Is it the fact that an institution created under a statute has a bar to get a minority status? Suppose there is a minority trust that creates an university; now the foundation is itself a minority. So is there a bar for the university to have a minority recognition?”
The SG highlighted that AMU had given up its claim to be a minority institution, as evidenced by the Basha ruling.
Senior Advocate Rajeev Dhavan claimed that such a surrender applied solely to property owned by the government.
The CJI held that teaching non-minority subjects has no effect on the institute’s minority status. Justice Khanna remarked that the question is whether the community should have daily administrative authority or not.
The next day of the hearing is on January 23.
Name of the case: Aligarh Muslim University Through its Registrar Faizan Mustafa v Naresh Agarwal and ors.
Click here to access the previous articles on AMU’s minority status.