New Delhi, October 05: Three proposed universities for minorities are set to come up but on land owned by wakf boards to pre-empt controversy over their status and avoid another legal wrangle like the one that has embroiled AMU.
“We are already in touch with the wakf boards and have got a positive response. We took this decision as it would save these universities from controversies regarding their minority status,” said an official with the minority affairs ministry.
So far, no central university has got the minority tag, though there have been demands for granting the status to Jamia Millia Islamia and to Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), which is waiting for a decision from the Supreme Court.
The minority ministry official said half the seats in the three proposed universities — to be set up in Mysore (Karnataka), Kishanganj (Bihar) and Ajmer (Rajasthan) — would be reserved for minority students, provided the institutions get the minority tag. The governments in the three states had also approved the proposal, the official added.
The university in Karnataka will be called Tipu Sultan University of Science and Technology; the one in Kishanganj will be called Rafi Ahmed Kidwai University of Health Science; and the one in Ajmer will be named Khwaja Gharib Nawaz University.
Ministry sources said they hoped legal issues would not come in the way of keeping aside 50 per cent of the seats for students from minority communities if these universities came up on wakf property. “We don’t want another AMU kind of controversy,” the ministry official said.
The status of AMU has rarely been free of controversy since the Supreme Court scrapped the university’s minority status in 1968 following a lawsuit.
In 1981, Indira Gandhi, who was the Prime Minister then, restored the status through legislation. But in 2006, an Allahabad High Court division bench struck down the AMU Amendment Act, 1981. The bench rejected the central government’s plea for restoring the university’s minority status and scrapped the provision for reserving 50 per cent seats for Muslim students. The Centre then moved the apex court, which is yet to take a decision.
The minority ministry official said the proposed universities would be “a right mix” of modernity and tradition. “The universities will offer modern job-oriented courses in all advanced subjects along with traditional subjects like theology.”
A “large number” of wakf plots, the official added, were lying “under-utilised” and a number of them had been “encroached on”.
The official said his ministry was holding talks with the human resource development ministry regarding these universities.
The decision to set up the minority universities followed several representations from religious leaders. During the previous tenure of the UPA government, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh directed the ministry to set up an expert committee to oversee the formation of these universities.
-Agencies