We are a nation of minorities. Let's scrap Article 30

A dubious idea called the rights of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions – promised in good faith to reassure India’s anxious Muslims and other minorities at the time of partition – has now taken such deep root in India that it has become the prime source of inequality.

The constitution (Article 30) specifies two kinds of minorities – religious and linguistic – and the Supreme Court has ruled that for the purpose of deciding who is a minority the state will be the geographical unit within which headcounts will decide majority or minority.

Thus, between them, constitution and court have ensured perverse outcomes, where every institution now wants to be declared a minority in order to retain some degree of autonomy from state meddling.

The following are some of the perverse outcomes.

One, if you are a Telugu institution you can’t have autonomy in Andhra Pradesh. So the best way to ensure less meddling is to set it up in Delhi or Gujarat. Gujarati institutions will thus be happier based in Maharashtra and Marathi institutions in Karnataka. In short, with the right location, anyone can call himself a minority. This has essentially made an ass of the law.

Two, minorities have been defined without any reference to size. Are Parsis minorities? Surely, they are, since there are only a few thousand of them around. Are Muslims minorities? When there are 180 million of them around, making India the second-largest Muslim country in the world? Maulana Abul Kalam Azad didn’t think Muslims were minorities – he called them India’s second majority.

Three, since the state cannot meddle in minority institutions, this has perversely come to mean that it can do so with impunity in so-called majority institutions. All majority institutions have become fair game for politicians and bureaucrats. Thus in some southern states, temple funds are merged with that of the state exchequer – when the money does not belong to the state. India’s richest temple, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) – which has over Rs 10,000 crore in cash and annual hundi offerings of Rs 600 crore – is run not by devotees, but by ministers and babus from Andhra Pradesh.

Article 30 has been turned on its head to focus not on the rights of people to administer institutions of their choice, but almost to prevent the majority from exercising this same choice.

Consider the actual wording of Article 30:

_“_Right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions.

“(1) All minorities, whether based on religion or language, shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.”

“(2) The state shall not, in granting aid to educational institutions, discriminate against

any educational institution on the ground that it is under the management of a minority, whether based on religion or language.

The spirit of Article 30 is that it is intended to ensure that minorities are not discriminated against or denied equal treatment. But in practice, it has begun to mean that non-minority institutions can be denied the right to “establish and administer” institutions in their own way.

Article 30 and various court judgments related to it, including the recent one by the Supreme Court on exempting unaided minority institutions from the purview of the 25 percent quota for the poor prescribed under the Right to Education Act, clearly need to be rewritten or even abolished.

It can be abolished for the simple reason that the right of minorities to establish their own institutions is inherent in human rights and citizenship rights. Since any Indian citizen has the right to set up any institution under extant laws of the land, minorities can do so too. The degree of autonomy depends on the extent to which one is funded by the state.

When it comes to religious and linguistic institutions, the state has no right to interfere with any of them - majority or minority – unless it sees mismanagement or denial of human rights or other illegalities. But this applies to all institutions. At best the state can insist on stringent audits or enforcement of minimum wages and things like that. But no religious or linguistic institution should be subordinated to state control.

Consider what would happen if one writes a law to prevent murder thus: Instead of a simple “Thou shalt not Kill” we can specify that “Thou shalt not kill so and so”.

This is what the existence of Article 30 effectively ensures, even though that is not the intent. It is time to abolish it.

It is also worth remembering that a Hinduism is not a monolith which can be deemed a majority in any conventional religious sense. Linguistically, even Hindi, the largest spoken language in India, is not a majority language in India as a whole.

We are a nation of minorities. We should be driven by universal rights, not minority rights.