Madras HC

Chennai: The Madras high court has stayed the operation of a government order, framing additional guidelines for grant of minority status to educational institutions by stipulating that all minority institutions to admit not less than 50 per cent of students belonging to the minority community, in every academic year, while fixing the upper limit of 75 per cent in respect of aided institutions.

Justice S.S. Sundar granted the interim stay for two weeks on a petition filed by the Institute of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary represented by its president Rev. Sr. Sriyapushpam, which sought to quash the government order dated April 5, 2018.

According to petitioner, the Supreme Court has held that admission in unaided minority educational institutions at the school education level cannot be regulated by the state, while however, in the aided minority educational institutions the state government can notify the percentage of the non-minority students to be admitted in the minority educational institutions. That will be in respect of minimum admission but never be a maximum limit. That too, has been contemplated only in the context of inter-se-merit and common entrance test, which has no relevance to school education. Nowhere, it was stated that the minority status will be conferred or withdrawn depending on the percentage of minority students admitted in the minority institutions, she added.

She said the impugned government order, under the pretext of promoting the interest of the minority community, was attempting to deprive minority status and in turn deprive the constitutional protection to the minority institutions based on the narrow and hyper-technical interpretation, which contravenes the spirit of the judgment and seeks to interpret the same out of the context.

The Supreme Court has time and again held that the minority institutions gains its minority character because it was established and administered by the minority community and not because of the number of minority students admitted therein. If the minority status was linked to the ratio of admission of minority students it will be fluctuating in minority character/status, each year. There will never be a certainty in the nature of the institution. That was not the intention of the founding fathers of the Constitution and therefore, the judgment of the apex court cannot be misinterpreted by the executive authorities, she added.

She said in the absence of any complaint from the minority community that Christian students have been denied admission in a minority institution, there was no basis for the impugned government order. There cannot be a common rule throughout the state to admit a minimum of 50 per cent minority students in the state of Tamil Nadu, as condition precedent for minority status, while the Christian population was only 6.1 percent in the demography of the state.

The government order suffers from executive mala-fide to indirectly deprive the minority status to the educational institutions established and administered by the minority community by imposing a burdensome and impractical condition, modifying the principles that have stood the test of time, she added.