Dr Syed Ali Mujtaba | Clarion India
WHILE closing arguments in the Supreme Court that continued for eight days in the Aligarh Muslim University’s minority status case, Chief Justice DY Chandrachud (now retired) observed that “The 1981 amendment did a ‘half-hearted job’ and did not restore to the institution the position it had before 1951. Now it needs to be seen what the 1981 amendment did and whether it could restore the institution the status it enjoyed before 1951.”
Now the seven-member Supreme Court bench led by Chandrachud also did a ‘half-hearted job.’ It has left it to a regular bench to decide whether AMU can have minority status. It also said a regular bench would decide the correctness of the Allahabad High Court judgment of 2006 that struck down the 1981 parliamentary amendment conferring minority status on the prestigious university founded by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.
This month’s Supreme Court judgment has created a great deal of confusion among all the stakeholders and people with good intentions. Various legal experts and leaders of the Muslim community assert that the seven-member bench has ruled on the matter half-heartedly and left the operative part of deciding whether AMU is a minority institution or not to a three-judge bench. The regular bench will also look into the correctness of the Allahabad High Court judgment which annulled the AMU Amendment Act of 1981.
Syed Azeez Bhasha from Chennai made a prayer before the Supreme Court to decide whether AMU is a minority institution or not. He argued whether Muslims have the right to administer and govern their educational institution without any interference from the government. In simple words, he asked the Supreme Court whether the AMU management has control over the enrolment of students and the hiring of teaching and non-teaching staff. Can this be allowed even if the government is funding such a minority institution?
The five-judge bench of the Supreme Court looked into the Syed Azeez Basha versus Government of India case and in 1967 ruled that AMU being a Central university cannot claim to have a minority status.
Now the seven-member bench, led by Chandrachud struck down the 1967 judgement. Now what can be deducted is that AMU is a minority institution and it can control admissions and appointments based on rights enshrined in the constitution. But, the seven-member bench has left this part to be decided by the three-member bench that would be constituted to look fresh into the minority status of the AMU.
The row over the minority status of AMU has been caught in a legal maze for the last several decades. The legal wrangling of whether AMU could retain its pre-1951 status began when a controversy erupted after compulsory religious education for Muslim students was withdrawn from AMU.
Aligarh Muslim University enjoyed a minority character from 1920 to 1951. The British government granted the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College the status of a university in 1920 and granted it a minority status to promote modern education to the backward Muslim community.
Here it needs to be reiterated that AMU was built not on the land allocated by the British government but on the private property owned by Muslims in Aligarh. The hostels and educational buildings were constructed from community donations from all over the country. Each hostel in AMU has a name plaque that tells which individual has given funds for its construction.
The AMU Act of 1920 incorporated modern education in a residential model of a Muslim university in Aligarh, where Muslim students from all over India came to experience the Aligarh flavour of modern cum religious education. The 1951 amendment took away compulsory religious instructions for Muslim students at the AMU. That was the first assault on the minority status of the university.
Subsequently, the 1967 judgment took away the minority status of the AMU. In 1981, the AMU Amendment Act envisaged a return to the original 1920 status restoring the complete minority character to the AMU. In 2006, the Allahabad High Court without defining its legal power had overruled the parliamentary order of 1981.
The then Congress-led UPA government at the Centre appealed in the Supreme Court against the 2006 verdict of the Allahabad High Court. There were other appeals in the Supreme Court, including one by the AMU.
The BJP government in 2016 told the Supreme Court that it would withdraw the appeal filed by the Congress-led UPA government against the Allahabad High Court judgment of 2006. The government counsel cited the Supreme Court judgment in the Azeez Basha case of 1967.
Following this, the Supreme Court constituted a seven-member Bench to deal with a reference arising out of the 2006 order passed by the Allahabad High Court. This bench of the Supreme Court overruled its 1967 judgment and opened the gates to look at the minority status of the AMU in light of its current judgment. That means SC judgment has once again brought the AMU minority status reference to the starting point. That is to say, the new bench would decide what kind of minority character AMU will have in the light of the current judgment. Will it go back to 1951 or it would be a diluted one? However, one thing is clear the seal of minority status has been stamped on the AMU by the seven-member bench of the Supreme Court.
Here a mention of former Congress leader Arjun Singh, who batted for the minority character of the AMU, should be appropriate. The late leader had publicly said that AMU is a standalone case and funds must be provided by the government to promote modern education to the Muslim community.
“If the contribution of AMU in imparting higher education to the Muslim community is discounted then the statistics of Muslims in higher education will fall flat,” he said and added, “So AMU should be provided funds by the government along with the minority status for improving the educational graph of the Muslims. This minority character has made AMU the institution of academic excellence not only in India but among the top universities of the world,” he further added.
The summary of the long AMU story is the seven-judge bench has left it to a regular (not constituted yet) three-judge bench to decide if the university should have pre-1951 minority status or not. As such the Supreme Court has left us with some hope and despair.
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Dr Syed Ali Mujtaba is a Chennai-based journalist. He can be contacted at syedalimujtaba2007@gmail.com
