Minority status to Jamia Millia
By ANIWednesday, February 23, 2011
NEW DELHI - The National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions (NCMEI) has granted minority institution status to Jamia Millia Islamia University.
This will allow Jamia Millia to reserve up to 50 per cent seats for Muslims. It will also be exempted from the quotas for aspirants from the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes.
The 51-page judgment, given by Justice M S A Siddiqui, Mohinder Singh and Cyriac Thomas, said, “We have no hesitation in holding that Jamia was founded by Muslims for the benefit of Muslims and it never lost its identity as a Muslim minority educational institution.”
“We find and hold that Jamia Millia Islamia is a minority educational institution covered under Article 30(1) of the Constitution with section 2 (G) of the NCMEI Act,” the order said. The institute was founded even before the Constitution was in place, it said.
The NCMEI order said: “Jamia did not owe its very existence to a statute. Since its founding in 1920 till the enactment of the Jamia Millia Islamia Act in 1988, Jamia never lost its identity. Even prior to the enactment of the Act, Jamia had legal existence of its own.”
Although Jamia has always been associated with the minority community, it was never spelt out in the law concerned that the varsity was a minority institution because such a concept did not exist when it was set up in 1920.
This meant that the 27 per cent OBC reservation rule for general category institutions applied to Jamia, too, although it had not implemented the quota yet.
Meanwhile, the Union Human Resource Development Ministry had opposed the move on the ground that a petition challenging the minority status of the Aligarh Muslim University was pending in the Supreme Court and its judgment would have a bearing on the Jamia case.
“We find and hold that Jamia Millia Islamia is a minority educational institution covered under Article 30 (1) of the Constitution of India with section 2(G) of the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions Act,” the order said, adding that the University existed even before the Constitution was in place. (ANI)
