Apex court could have ended the AMU debate

The Court said that an institution cannot be denied minority character because it happened to be one of national importance

The Supreme Court did well to overrule the 1967 Azeez Basha judgment that had denied minority status to the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). The debate about AMU’s minority character has been a political issue, going beyond the specific case of the university to influence the discourse on the constitutional provisions concerning minorities. Hence, the apex court’s elaborations on Article 30 (1), which guarantees linguistic and religious minorities the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice, and the provision of a detailed framework for assessing if an institution can claim minority status under the said constitutional provision, will help clarify issues concerning the administration of minority institutions, especially the autonomy they seek in their functioning. The Court said that an institution cannot be denied minority character because it happened to be one of national importance, it has received grants or land from the government, or a statute instituted it: All these had been flagged by the State while contesting minority status for AMU.

Aligarh Muslim University. (Sourced)

This is why it is baffling that the seven-judge bench did not go the distance and settle the question about AMU’s minority character — the 4:3 majority verdict, instead, passed the ball to a future bench. This issue, however, was flagged in the dissenting minority judgment authored by justice Dipankar Datta, who right said that the decision to revisit the specific case of AMU would be a waste of “precious judicial time”. It may well be because of the lack of collaborative engagement or “meeting of minds” among the seven judges — justice Datta highlighted that there was no physical or virtual meeting of the members of the bench post reservation of the judgment. In fact, justice Datta concluded that given the majority judgment, the court declaring AMU “as a minority educational institution is only a matter of time”. A closure would have helped AMU to move on.