Jains were also added in the list of minorities as classified by the Union Government. In this regard consider the following statements :
(a) Now there are six designated minority communities in the c

Question

Jains were also added in the list of minorities as classified by the Union Government. In this regard consider the following statements :
(a) Now there are six designated minority communities in the country.
(b) A Constitutional Amendment passed by the Parliament with simple majority is required to bring any community in the list of minorities.
(c) The Ministry of Minority Affairs of the Government of India established in 2009.
Which of the above statement/s is/are correct ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), Only (a). The closing line asks which statements are CORRECT — the word is printed in bold in the English column and योग्य in bold in the Marathi — and only three statements are printed, (a) to (c). Take them one at a time. Statement (a) is true. The Central Government notified five communities as minorities by a Gazette notification of 23 October 1993 issued by the then Ministry of Welfare — Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Zoroastrians, that is Parsis — and added Jains by a notification dated 27 January 2014. That makes six notified minority communities, which is what the statement says. Statement (b) is false, and it is false twice over. It is wrong about the instrument: adding a community to the list requires no constitutional amendment at all, but only a notification by the Central Government in the Official Gazette under Section 2(c) of the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992, which is how the Jains were in fact added in 2014 — a statutory executive act, done without Parliament sitting on it. It is also wrong about the majority: an amendment of the Constitution under Article 368 can never be passed by a simple majority, since it requires in every case a majority of the total membership of each House and a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members present and voting, and for certain provisions the ratification of half the State legislatures as well. Statement (c) is false too. The Ministry of Minority Affairs was created on 29 January 2006, carved out of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, and not in 2009 as the statement says. Note that the sentence as printed is also ungrammatical — 'The Ministry of Minority Affairs of the Government of India established in 2009' has lost its verb — and it is reproduced here exactly as the Commission printed it. With (b) and (c) both out and (a) standing, the only possible choice is option (1).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This choice keeps the statement that is most confidently wrong. The notification of a minority community is not a constitutional act but a statutory and executive one: Section 2(c) of the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992 defines 'minority' as a community notified as such by the Central Government, and the power is exercised by a notification published in the Official Gazette. That is how the five communities were notified on 23 October 1993 and how the Jains were added on 27 January 2014, in neither case by an amendment of the Constitution. The statement's second error is worth learning independently, because it recurs: Article 368 knows no simple-majority route to amending the Constitution. Every amendment needs a majority of the total membership of each House together with two-thirds of those present and voting, and the entrenched provisions need ratification by the legislatures of not less than one-half of the States in addition.  (c) This choice takes both of the false statements and leaves out the only true one, so it fails twice. Statement (b) misdescribes how a community is notified; statement (c) misdates the Ministry of Minority Affairs, which was created on 29 January 2006 and not in 2009. The 2006 date is worth attaching to its context, because that context is examinable in its own right: the Ministry was carved out of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment to give the minority communities a dedicated department of government, and it took over the work on the schemes and programmes for them, later administering scholarship and skilling programmes and the machinery under the National Commission for Minorities Act. A candidate who has the year of its creation attached to the reason for it will not be shaken by a plausible-looking alternative date.  (d) This is the option most likely to attract a well-prepared candidate, because it contains the statement that is actually true. Statement (a) is right — there are six notified minority communities since the Jains were added in 2014 — and a candidate who verifies it and then accepts statement (b) without the same scrutiny will take this choice. But statement (b) cannot survive even a careless reading, because it asserts two things that are separately wrong: that a constitutional amendment is needed, when a Gazette notification under Section 2(c) of the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992 is what is actually used, and that such an amendment could be passed by a simple majority, which Article 368 does not permit for any amendment whatsoever. In a set of only three statements, each has to be tested on its own provision; the truth of one is never evidence for the one printed beside it.

Concept: India's constitutional protection of minorities and its statutory recognition of them are two different things, and this question lives in the gap between them. The Constitution protects minorities without defining the word: Article 29 protects the right of any section of citizens with a distinct language, script or culture to conserve it, and Article 30 gives all minorities, whether based on religion or on language, the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice, with a guarantee that the State shall not discriminate against such an institution in granting aid. Article 350B provides for a Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities appointed by the President. None of these provisions says who counts as a minority. That question is answered by ordinary law. A Minorities Commission was first set up in 1978 by an executive resolution, and the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992 gave it statutory status; Section 2(c) of that Act defines a minority as a community notified as such by the Central Government, which is the hinge on which this question turns. The five communities notified on 23 October 1993 were Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Zoroastrians or Parsis; Jains were added on 27 January 2014, bringing the number to six. Together these six accounted for about 18.8 per cent of the population at the 2001 Census. Because the notification is executive and statutory rather than constitutional, the list can be changed without touching the Constitution — and equally, minority status under the Act is a matter of national notification, while the question of whether a community is a minority for the purposes of Article 30 has been held to be determined with reference to the State concerned.

State PCS 2021 Q91 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q91 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer