Author: Omer Farooq
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: February 22, 2007
In a bid to provide reservations to Muslims
in Government jobs and education from the coming academic year, the Andhra
Pradesh Government is planning to come out with a new Ordinance soon.
The Minister for Information and Energy Mohammed
Ali Shabbir told the media that the reservation this time will be reduced
to four per cent to overcome some of the objections raised by the High Court.
To keep the total reservations within the limit of 50 per cent set by the
Supreme Court in another case, the State Government will now reduce the quota
for Muslims from five per cent to four per cent. Scheduled Castes, tribes
and backward classes' reservation in the State has already reached 46 per
cent leaving scope for only four per cent reservation.
The State Government is making this move at
a time when a petition filed by it challenging the High Court's judgement
against reservations to Muslim is pending before the Supreme Court.
Shabbir said the Government was committed
to providing reservation to Muslims from the academic year 2007-08. "We
are exploring various options for this," he said.
To overcome another objection of the Andhra
Pradesh High Court that the reservations cannot be provided on the basis of
religion, the State Government was planning to do it on the basis of socio-economic
backwardness. The Government was also consulting the constitutional experts
like FS Nariman and KK Venugopal on the legal hurdles in implementing its
new strategy. One of the options was to pass a new Bill in the State Assembly
on the issue.
Special Secretary to Chief Minister Jannat
Hussain is handling the issue and meeting officials regularly to review the
progress.
The failure of the State Government in ensuring
the continuation of reservation was making the minority community increasingly
restless. Muslims constitute about 10 per cent of the population in the 80
million population of the State.
It may be recalled that the Congress had made
an election promise of five per cent reservations to the Muslim minority in
the State and issued its first order in June 2004, which was struck down by
the High Court. On the direction of the court to constitute a backward classes
commission to go into the issue of backwardness of Muslim community, the Government
constituted a commission and on the basis of its report it came out with an
ordinance in 2005. But it was also struck down by the High Court on a bunch
of petitions filed by the RSS-VHP activists.
However, before the court orders, the Government
could implement five per cent quota for Muslims in education for 2005-06 and
providing 250 seats in medical colleges, 4000 seats in engineering colleges
and hundreds of seats in other professional colleges to Muslim boys and girls.
