If the National Commission for Linguistic and Religious Minorities has its way Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Union Territory of Lakshadweep can get the status of minority community.
The commission, headed by Justice Ranganath Mishra has recently submitted its recommendations to Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.
“Whatever recommendations we are making here are not only for the communities notified as ‘minorities’ by executive action under the National Commission for Minorities Act 1992, but for all religious minorities — large or small — including the Hindus in the Union Territory of Lakshadweep and the states of Jammu and Kashmir, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Punjab,” the commission said.
“We recommend that in the matter of criteria for identifying backward classes there should be absolutely no discrimination between the majority community and the minorities; and, therefore, the criteria now applied to the majority community must be unreservedly applied also to all the minorities,” it said.
It has been a long-standing demand of the Kashmiri pandits that they should get minority status in Jammu and Kashmir.
The commission recommended that all those classes, sections and groups among the minorities should be treated as backward whose counterparts in the majority community were regarded as backward under the present scheme of things. 

SC/ST status
Seeking to extend the SC status for those in minority communities, the commission has also recommended a constitutional amendment to delink such a status from religion.
The commission observed that appropriate action should be taken so as to completely delink the scheduled caste status from religion and make the scheduled caste net fully religion-neutral like that of the scheduled tribes.
It recommended that all those groups and classes among the Muslims and Christians, whose counterparts among the Hindus, Sikhs or Buddhists were included in the Central or state scheduled castes’ list, should also be covered by the scheduled castes’ net.