By UCA News reporter
Religious and linguistic minorities in western Indian Gujarat are upset after the state High Court dismissed a bunch of petitions challenging a law that stripped their right to appoint staff in their state-aided schools.
The Gujarat High Court, the state’s top court, dismissed “all the writ petitions” before it that challenged the Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (Amendment) Act, 2021, on Jan 23.
The petitioners challenged amendments to the five-decade-old law, saying they violated the constitutional right of minorities to administer their educational institutions.
The amendment empowered the state’s education board to establish qualifications and a selection method for recruiting teaching and non-teaching staff in state-funded private schools, including those managed by minority communities.
“This amendment took away our right to appointment staff of our choice in our schools,” said Father Telesphoro Fernandes, secretary of Gujarat Education Board of Catholic Institutions.
The amendment violates minorities’ constitutional rights, he said.
The state government, run by the Hindu-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), defended the amendment, saying it makes the process “fair, transparent, and merit-based,” which it said was not the case before.
Father Fernandes told UCA News on Jan 24 that the Indian constitution guarantees religious and linguistic minorities the right to establish and manage educational institutions to protect their communities’ academic interests.
Until the amendment, school managers appointed the staff of their choice without any government scrutiny and forwarded their names to the government for paying salaries.
Father Fernandes said the schools “definitely choose people who understand our ethos and values. That does not mean we appoint unqualified persons.”
“We will now challenge the High Court order in Supreme Court,” the top court in the country, said the priest, who spoke for some 100 Catholic schools in the state. He said some 65 of these schools are state-funded.
The state pays salaries to staff in the state-aided minority-run schools besides paying for annual maintenance.
Although a Christian school took the lead in challenging the amendment in the court, other religious minorities, such as Muslim, Sikh, and linguistic minorities, joined the petition as affected parties of the amendment.
Christians make up barely 0.50 percent of Gujarat’s 63 million people majority of them Hindus. – UCA News
