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Discriminatory law

Discriminatory law

Author: Editorial
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: December 10, 2005

The proposed amendment to the Constitution, to ensure reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes students in private unaided professional institutions, does enjoy support cross-party support in Parliament.

The reason for that has little to do with genuine concern for the welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and more to do with quota politics and votes. But while MPs will be exulting at this opportunity to project themselves as champions of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes welfare, a point of detail runs the risk of getting lost in their vacuous speeches when the amendment is debated upon in Parliament.

The proposed law has been prompted by a recent Supreme Court judgement that allowed the administration of private unaided professional institutions to frame their own admission policy. The order was seen as having the potential of encouraging such colleges to deny admission to students from underprivileged families, especially those belonging to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

There is merit in trying to negate that possibility, not least because positive discrimination continues to be the only means of ensuring a level playing field for students from less privileged families. However, while ensuring that Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes students are not denied the opportunity to excel in studies, the proposed amendment to Article 15 of the Constitution, which deals with "Prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth", violates the fundamental right to equality before law guaranteed by Article 14. For, the quota will not be applicable to minority private unaided professional institutions.

The official reason for the exclusion of such institutions from the purview of the new law is that they are already serving the great cause of empowering minority communities. That is balderdash - only the most ill-informed will claim that minority professional institutions are being run for charitable purposes or to empower minority communities. Surely the UPA Government is not ignorant of this reality. The unstated reason is that the UPA regime, like every other before it, feels compelled to demonstrate its "secular" credentials by exempting minority institutions from the law of the land.

If the proposed amendment to the Constitution gets parliamentary approval - there is no reason to suggest it will not because every party wants to be on the right side of quota politics - then discrimination between non-minority private unaided professional institutions and minority unaided professional institutions will be accorded legal sanctity. In brief, while preventing discrimination against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the Constitution, after being amended, will discriminate against institutions run by Hindus.

This will not be the first time that we will witness such gross perversion of secularism; in the Republic of India where equality, including before law, is supposed to reign supreme, time and again Hindus have been forced to accept unequal status. The resultant social discord has been of no concern for the peddlers of "secularism", nor are our political parties particularly concerned that insidious laws that they vote for surreptitiously undermine the very foundation on which the Constitution rests.

By exempting minority unaided professional institutions from the new quota, the Government has once again underscored the most loathsome aspect of "secularism" as practiced in India - that equality before law is inversely proportionate to a community's numerical strength. Since both executive and legislature are party to this perversion, the pernicious law, after it is enacted, will hopefully be struck down by the judiciary.


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