Chairman of National Commission for Minorities presided over the annual conference of State Minority Commission in New Delhi recently. Among other things, he has strongly recommended that 3700 Kashmiri Pandit families staying back in the valley, be declared a minority community. Under the Constitution of India, it is only the Union Home Ministry that decides the groups of Indian citizens who can be entitled to the status of a minority. Minority issue is one of the internal issues of the State that has remained shrouded in ambiguity. No government ever tried to address the subject. There are two contradictory positions. The Muslims of India have been declared a minority community in the country. As such, certain privileges meant for the Indian minorities under law accrue to them automatically. They are entitled to it by the law of the land. The Muslim populations of J&K, too, have been deriving benefit of this provision. But at the same time, they are a majority in the state. On that basis they enjoy the privileges of being a majority community and thus have majority rights, and rightly so. What is the position of non-Muslim of the state? This has never been addressed by the government. If Article 370 hampers the non-Muslims of the state from entitlement to minority status, then by the same token, it should hamper the state majority community from enjoying the minority status on national level. The actual case is the reverse of it. That is why we say that the issue of minority status in J&K has remained unresolved. There seems no logic is just picking up 3700 families of Kashmri Pandits staying back in the valley and recommending them for minority status because their condition, as per the statement of the Chairman NCM is worse than half a million persons of the community living in exile for last two decades. If we go by the Indian Constitution, then all non-Muslims in the State are in minority and have to be treated as such. In fact this has been the demand of J&K State Minorities Forum which has been fighting for the minority status for Hindus, Sikhs, Bodhs and Christians of the State. The State government should take up the case with the Union Home Ministry and remove the dichotomy in the context of minority status.
