- There are six states and three Union Territories with Hindus as a minority.
- Actual minorities are deprived of government schemes designated for them.
- There are only 1% Hindu in Ladakh, 2.75% in Mizoram, and 2.77% in Lakshadweep.
A petition filed by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay claimed that Hindus are a "minority" in six Indian states and three Union Territories, but that they were unable to benefit from minority-specific initiatives. The states and UTs are Ladakh, Mizoram, Lakshadweep, Jammu and Kashmir, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Punjab, and Manipur.
The long-running dispute over declaring Hindus as minorities in states and Union Territories where they are in less in numbers has erupted yet again in the Supreme Court. The Centre recently intimated to the Supreme Court that the Union government has the authority to notify minorities and that any decision in this regard will be made only after consultation with states and other stakeholders. The Supreme Court had earlier given the Centre four weeks to respond to a petition seeking directives for the formulation of state-level guidelines for the identification of minorities, claiming that Hindus are in the minority in several states.
The Ministry of Minority Affairs responding to a petition filed by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay said that the central government has designated six communities as minority communities under section 2C of the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992. The ministry had previously told the Supreme Court that state governments had the authority to declare any religious or linguistic community, including Hindus, a minority within their borders.
The petition filed by Upadhyay says that denial of benefits to “genuine” minorities and “arbitrary and unjustified” disbursements under schemes designated for them to the majority impinge on their fundamental right.
Hindu minority states and UTs
The plea also stated that Hindus are merely 1% in Ladakh, 2.75% in Mizoram, 2.77% in Lakshadweep, 4% in Jammu & Kashmir, 8.74% in Nagaland, 11.52% in Meghalaya, 29% in Arunachal Pradesh, 38.49% in Punjab, and 41.29% in Manipur, as per an HT report. It’s noteworthy that the petitioner here, in most likely hood is talking about the minority population in the Kashmir region only, since according to the Census of 2011 there were 28.44 per cent Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir.
Upadhyay had challenged the validity of section 2(f) of the National Commission for Minority Education Institution Act, 2004, alleging that it gives unbridled power to the Centre and termed it “manifestly arbitrary, irrational, and offending”. Section 2(f) of the Act empowers the Centre to identify and notify minority communities in India.
Denial of minority rights to actual religious and linguistic minorities, according to the petition, is a breach of the Constitution’s Articles 14 and 21 (no individual shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except in accordance with the legal procedure).
The Supreme Court had already granted a petition seeking transfer of cases from numerous high courts against the Centre’s notification declaring five communities as minorities — Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Parsis — and had linked the matter with the main petition.
State | Hindu | Majority |
Mizoram | 2.75% | 87.16% |
Lakshadweep | 2.77% | |
Jammu *including | 28.44% | 68.31% |
Nagaland | 8.75% | 87.93% |
Meghalaya | 11.53% | 74.59% |
Arunachal | 29.04% | 30.26% |
Punjab | 38.49% | 57.69% |
Manipur | 41.39% | 41.29% |
REPRODUCED FROM FIRSTPOST.COM
How are Hindus treated in states where they are in a minority?
He who pays the piper plays the tune. For over 50 years of independent India’s 75 years, the national polity has been run by the Congress, supported quite often by the communists. This dispensation, by and large, took the Hindu majority for granted, confident that discriminatory and prejudicial practices against them, largely unconstitutional, would not be protested.
So, the Nehruvian regime and the subsequent dynastic rule of the Nehru-Gandhis, assessed that they could get away with it. That they have eventually lost almost all their perches in the states and the Centre is also a consequence of this blatant unfairness.
The Hindus, particularly after the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the 1980s and the 1990s, have decided to vote against Congress domination in increasing numbers. But for at least five decades, the second-class treatment of Hindus was the norm, and set the theme for the states and Union Territories to follow. Accompanied by the Congress-appointed academics and intellectuals with well-paid sinecures and most of the media. Every one of these people made a virtue of their outlook by dressing it up in Marxian hues.
The various coalition governments that came as the Congress hold weakened, began to change things.
These were occasioned by the followers of Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan in the 1970s. Their influence gave birth to a number of strong regional parties of Yadavs and Dalits in the electorally dominant cow belt. In the South, simultaneously, the upper castes in power were overthrown by DMK and AIDMK politics in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere.
The Congress reacted autocratically with the infamous Emergency during which the descriptors ‘Secular’ and ‘Socialist’ were inserted into the Preamble of the Constitution, and subsequently weaponized.
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