The year that was–11 | SC’s UP Madarsa Act judgment: Restoring the unity–diversity balance
The theme of forcing unity through law and suspicion of distinctness has been common in the discourse of the autonomy of religious minority institutions. The judgment in the UP Madarsa Act is a crucial stand against that trend, writes Afeef Mohammed.
Mohammed Afeef
Published on: 3 January 2025, 10:21 am
THE Supreme Court on November 5, 2024 overturned the Allahabad High Court decision that struck down the Uttar Pradesh Board of Madarsa Education Act, 2004 as unconstitutional.
The high court had held that the Act violated Articles 14 (equality) and 21A and the principles of secularism and was therefore against the basic structure of the Indian Constitution.
The UP Madarsa Act, in essence, regulates madarsa education across Uttar Pradesh, in terms of upholding good standards of education, qualification of tutors and conducting examinations, etc.
At that point, there were about 13,000 madarsas, providing education to over 12 lakh students in the state. The high court judgment, in effect, had left these 12 lakh Muslim students without educational recognition and without any existing alternate infrastructure to absorb them into other schools. That was the colossal impact of the high court judgment.
The UP Madarsa Act, in essence, regulates madarsa education across Uttar Pradesh, in terms of upholding good standards of education, qualification of tutors and conducting examinations, etc.
What started as a writ petition by a madarsa teacher to regularise his service, snowballed into constitutional challenges to the entire Act, after a series of petitions were tagged together before a division Bench of the high court.
The court directed that the students be absorbed by creating new schools. The UP government planned to convert madarsas into regular schools by granting them recognition. On appeal, the Supreme Court framed three issues: whether the Act violates secularism as understood in the Indian constitutional context? Can an Act be struck down for being violative of the basic structure of the Indian Constitution? Whether the state legislature had the legislative competence to enact such a law, given the federal structure of the Constitution?
