New Delhi, India - The Supreme Court has said the practice of listing religious groups as minority communities should be discouraged, even as it rejected a plea to give minority status to the Jain community.
A bench of Chief Justice R.C. Lahoti and judges D.M. Dharmadhikari and P.K. Balasubramanyan Monday dismissed a petition that sought a direction to the government to notify the Jain community as a minority group within the meaning of the National Commission for Minorities Act.
Significantly, the court asked the National Commission for Minorities to suggest ways to help create social conditions where the list of notified minorities "is gradually reduced and done away with altogether".
The bench was of the view that different treatment for linguistic minorities based on language within the state was understandable.
"But if the same concept for minorities on the basis of religion was encouraged, the whole country, which is already under class and social conflicts due to various divisive forces, will further face division on the basis of religious diversities," the bench said.
Writing the judgment, Dharmadhikari said: "Such claims to minority status based on religion would increase in the fond hope of various sections of people getting special protections, privileges and treatment as part of constitutional guarantees.
"Encouragement to such fissiparous tendencies would be a serious jolt to the secular structure of constitutional democracy."
The bench said: "We should guard against making our country akin to a theocratic state based on multi-nationalism. Our concept of secularism is that `state' will have no religion.
"The state will treat all religions and religious groups equally and with equal respect without in any manner interfering with their individual rights of religion, faith and worship."
The judges asked the minorities commissions set up by the central and state governments to keep in mind that the goal of the constitution was to create social conditions where there was no need to protect the rights of minority or majority communities.
The court said if each minority group felt afraid of the others, an atmosphere of mutual fear and distrust would be created that would pose serious threat to the integrity of the nation and lead to the sowing of seeds of multi-nationalism.
"It is, therefore, necessary that minorities commissions should act in a manner so as to prevent generating feelings of multi-nationalism in various sections of people of Bharat," the bench said.
Petitioner Bal Patil had said that while Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Zoroastrians (Parsis) had already been notified as minority communities, the refusal of the National Commission for Minorities to declare Jains a minority community was unjustified.
The government informed the court that it was for respective states to take a decision on the claim of Jains to be declared a minority community, depending on their social condition.