Supreme Court overturns 1967 verdict, paves way for restoration of AMU's minority status

A seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court has overturned its ruling in the ‘Azeez Basha v Union of India’ (1967) case, essentially paving way for the restoration of Aligarh Muslim University’s (AMU) minority institution status under Article 30 of the Constitution.

In a 4:3 judgement, the bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud did not restore AMU’s minority status but instead laid down the criteria for determining whether an institution is a minority institution.

Whether AMU is a minority institution or not will have to be decided separately based on the criteria laid down in the present ruling, said the verdict, as per The Times of India.

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In the ‘Azeez Basha’ case, the Supreme Court had ruled that AMU did not have minority institution status. Then, in 1981, the then-Union government passed an amendment to the AMU Act to restore the status, which was then struck down by the Allahabad High Court in 2005. In 2014, the new government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) withdrew the appeal against the HC’s ruling.

Of the seven judges, CJI Chandrachud and Justices Sanjeev Khanna, JB Pardiwala, and Manoj Misra were in the majority and Justices Surya Kant, Dipankar Datta, and SC Sharma dissented. Chandrachud wrote the majority verdict while three opinions were written by three dissenting judges.

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In the 1967 judgement, the SC had revoked AMU’s minority institution status based on the argument that as AMU was neither set up nor administered by the Muslim community, but by the British rulers of the time, it could not be considered a minority institution. In the present judgement, the SC has overturned this rationale.

In the present judgement, Chandrachud said that “it is not necessary to prove that administration rests with the minority to prove the institution to be a minority institution”, as per Live Law.

The SC also said that is it the intent behind the establishment of an institution that matters and not who managed it in deciding the minority institution.

A thorough reading of the statute of the institution should be done to understand its intent of establishment and valid proof of ideation of minority community to establish the institution can be done from letters of communication and other materials, said Chandrachud, as per Live Law.