How Uttarakhand’s new minority education law unsettles a constitutional promise

The lanes of Dehradun on a quiet afternoon are filled with sounds from a nearby madrasa. In one classroom, the Qur’an is being recited in low tones. From another comes the singsong of Hindi grammar recitation. A teacher’s chalk grates against a blackboard while children stumble through basic sums.

These schools are neither citadels of dogma nor enclaves of privilege. They are born out of necessity, set up where State institutions never arrived and are sustained by communities that feared their children would be left behind. To disturb them is to disturb a compact: that education could be secured without erasure of identity.

That compact is shaken by the Uttarakhand Minority Educational Institutions Bill, 2025. The Bill passed by the State Assembly now awaits assent by the Governor. At first glance, the measure looks like administrative tidying. It repeals the 2016 Madrasa Education Board Act, abolishes its authority and introduces a single licensing system for Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists and Jains as well. But beneath the surface, the changes do not merely promise to bring about efficiency. The consequences are far more dire.

One clause, deleted after protest, capped non-minority admissions in madrasas at 15 per cent. Its presence alone reeked of an attempt to alter demography. The Constitution tries to balance two principles: Article 30 grants minorities the autonomy to run their institutions, while Article 29(2) forbids exclusion on grounds of religion in state-aided institutions. In TMA Pai, the Supreme Court said that the balance must be struck by the institution itself. Once the government fixes the quota, it stops regulating and begins running. Courts have said for half a century that this is a line that cannot be crossed.

Another clause of the Bill bars compelling students or staff to take part in religious activity. Read narrowly, it appears to protect individual rights. Placed next to licensing leverage, staffing control and board-level oversight, it works differently: a lever to shape ethos from outside. In combination, these measures do not simply standardise process; they transfer the core of administration from the minority to the licensing authority, cutting into Article 30 as interpreted in TMA Pai and its successors.

The Bill also speaks of “protection of communal and social harmony.” Courts have been wary of such phrases. In Shreya Singhal, the Court struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, saying that vague and overbroad provisions encourage arbitrary action and chill rights. The same risk is visible here. A licensing authority with discretion to deny or withdraw recognition on a harmony test can pressure institutions to self-censor their identity. 

A constitutional guarantee becomes a conditional permit. The Kerala Education Bill opinion had already drawn that line: standards may be regulated, but identity cannot be hollowed out. Harmony clauses without limits cross into standardless discretion, offending Article 14 as well as Article 30.

The larger structural shift is even sharper. Recognition is dissolved, institutions must seek fresh licences and all must align with a single board monitored by inspectors with compliance powers. Courts have accepted regulation to ensure standards, but only if proportionate. In Modern Dental College, it was held that restrictions on rights must not go further than their aim. St Xavier’s and PA Inamdar both stressed that core administrative choices rest with minorities. Wholesale re-licensing under an open-ended harmony test looks less like oversight and more like substitution. A State may prune; it cannot uproot.

When Article 30 was drafted, it was not framed out of courtesy. It was a covenant. KM Munshi told the Constituent Assembly that minorities must be free to conserve what they valued in their way of life. TT Krishnamachari warned that hollowing out this right would make constitutional promises ring false. For Muslims, who had been excluded from literacy campaigns and much of formal schooling, madrasas carried a dual role: religious learning but also the first step to literacy. The Sachar Committee in 2006 confirmed that many poor Muslim families relied on madrasas because state schools were absent or out of reach. They were bridges, sometimes the only bridges.

Uttarakhand created a Madrasa Board in 2016 to acknowledge that reality. It was not indulgence, but compact: recognition that madrasas formed part of the educational landscape, aligning them with curricular standards while respecting identity. The new law breaks that compact.

Courts have said consistently that minority rights are guarantees, not gifts. In 1974, in St. Xavier’s College, Justice HR Khanna wrote that without the right to administer institutions, minorities would in practice lose the right to conserve culture. In 2002, the eleven-judge bench in TMA Pai reaffirmed that Article 30 was a core constitutional principle. In 2005, PA Inamdar said that regulation was possible, but must not annihilate minority character.

These rulings often concerned colleges and universities, but the logic applies with more force to madrasas, which exist because state schools never did for the students. Folding them into uniform licensing does what the Court has said must not be done: erase identity under the cover of regulation.

The difference is important. A Christian-run engineering college is secular in curriculum but minority in foundation, and it is protected. A madrasa was born as a substitute where the state did not build schools. A dedicated board gave accountability without assimilation. To scrap it for a generic licensing body blurs the distinction deliberately. Requiring Sanskrit and Pali alongside Urdu and Arabic inside a madrasa does not enrich, but undermines its purpose. A framework for protection begins to look like a charade.

The Constituent Assembly had anticipated these tensions. Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra said that minorities must feel they held an honourable place. HC Mookherjee, who chaired the Minority Rights Committee, said they must remain free to educate their children in traditions they valued. Replacing a community-specific board with a generic licensing authority walks away from that assurance. A shield against assimilation risks becoming its tool.

The State’s defence is familiar: national integration. A uniform curriculum, common subjects, standardisation across institutions are said to foster cohesion. History points the other way. Forced assimilation rarely breeds harmony. The Sachar Committee noted that Muslim literacy rates were nearly twenty points below the national average. Withdrawal of recognition does not move madrasa children smoothly into state schools. Many drop out. What is presented as a bridge to inclusion becomes a push towards exclusion.

And the warning is echoed abroad. In Quebec, denominational Catholic and Protestant boards were constitutionally entrenched. In re Education Act (Quebec) (1993), the Supreme Court of Canada underlined that provincial law could not strip away those rights without constitutional amendment. Only with the Constitution Amendment, 1997 (Quebec) were denominational boards replaced by linguistic ones. The episode showed that even in Canada, such rights could not be undone by ordinary law.

In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights in Hasan and Eylem Zengin v. Turkey struck down curriculum that ignored minority perspectives, warning that pluralism required more than a single state narrative.

Malaysia too shows the limits. In Merdeka University Bhd v Government of Malaysia (1981), the Federal Court rejected the proposal for a Chinese-medium university. The case has since been read as a reminder that constitutional promises for minority education can be interpreted narrowly, restricting linguistic and cultural preservation.

Britain’s experience is another caution. In R (Begum) v Denbigh High School [2006], a student challenged her school’s dress policy. Lord Bingham said that schools had to balance uniform rules with respect for community identity. The case was about clothing, not curriculum, but the principle is the same: when state regulation presses too hard against expression, identity is at risk.

The thread running through these examples is clear. Weakening minority schools does not build integration, it corrodes trust.

The stakes in Uttarakhand are constitutional. Indian secularism was never meant as uniformity, but as respect for different ways of life. In SR Bommai (1994), the Supreme Court called it a positive concept of equal treatment. By folding madrasas into a uniform licensing framework, the State risks turning secularism into uniformity, and uniformity into erasure. For communities already at the margins, this is not inclusion but disenfranchisement written as reform.

Nehru’s warning in the Assembly still rings true: if you impose on people what they do not want, you will create trouble. Madrasas in Uttarakhand are not relics but survival institutions, created because the state did not deliver. To dissolve their board and dilute their character is to make survival itself negotiable. That is not integration. It is exclusion in the language of procedure. And history, in India and elsewhere, shows that once such compacts are broken, they are rarely repaired.