Karnataka govt exempts Muslim education institutions from 'minority' tag policy

Bengaluru: The Siddaramaiah administration has allowed schools and colleges run by Muslims to enroll a fixed percentage of students belonging to their community in order to receive the 'religious minority institution' tag.

Only Muslims have been given this exemption, according to a recent government order.

Educational institutions run by Christians, Jains and Parsis need not enroll a fixed percentage of students belonging to their communities in order to obtain the 'religious minority' tag.

Schools seeking the 'minority' tag had to provide a 25 per cent quota for students belonging to that particular minority religion. Institutions offering higher education, technical education and skill development had to admit 50 per cent students belonging to the minority religion they cater to.

These requirements were scrapped in March 2024, making it a major policy decision redefining the character of 'religious minority' institutions. The decision was made as minority institutions were facing difficulty in finding the required number of students from their communities to meet the criterion.

The order came after Chief Minister Siddaramaiah's political secretary Naseer Ahmed, an MLC, petitioned the government in December 2023 to relax the criteria on declaring educational institutions as 'religious minority' institutions. In his letter, Ahmed had stated that religious minorities, except Muslims, were unable to meet the admission criterion.

In the March 2024 order, however, the government relaxed the admission criterion for all religious minorities, including Muslims.

Citing the 2011 Census, the government pointed out that 96.01 lakh, or 16.28 per cent, of the state's population belonged to minority religions. This included 78.94 lakh Muslims, 11.43 lakh Christians, 4.4 lakh Jains, 95,000 Buddhists, 28,000 Sikhs and 1,100 Parsis. "Because the population of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and Parsis is low, finding the required percentage of students for the declaration of religious minority educational institutions is difficult," it stated.

Muslim minority institutions, however, opposed their inclusion in the order. Minority Welfare Minister BZ Zameer Ahmed Khan raised this at a Cabinet meeting in November last year. Muslim minority institutions argued that they have enough students from their community to meet the admission norm. Relaxation could mean non-minority students outnumbering minorities in their institutions, they feared. This resulted in the government modifying its March 2024 order to leave Muslims out of it.

This effectively means that the government has adopted a different policy for Muslims while granting 'religious minority' tag to educational institutions run by them.