TEAM HERALD
teamherald@herald-goa.com
NEW DELHI: The Union Minority Affairs Ministry has written to the states asking them to constitute State Minorities Commission and ensure the rights of the minority communities are not neglected, as a sequel to the equal opportunity commission set up on February 20 to help the minorities.
There are still some States that have no constituted these commissions rationalising that minorities can redress their problems with the given mechanism, a ministry official said.
The bill has already been cleared, but is at present lying with the screening committee, sources say. It is also a budget promise.
However, Goa is not the only state under the scanner. The state of BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi – Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Odisha, the northeastern states of Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh and most of the union territories except Delhi have not constituted Minorities commissions.
While the government cited a recommendation of the Justice Sachar Committee in constituting the Equal Opportunity Commission, a statutory body to check discrimination faced by religious minorities, it has come under criticism from committee member Abusaleh Shariff for distorting the committee recommendation. “We had recommended such a body for all socio-religious communities and deprived groups, and not just religious minorities, so that the opportunities are ensured equally and justly and the level-playing field can be provided to all of them,” he argued.
He asserted that the kind of commission constituted by the government for just the religious minorities violates the very idea of an anti-discrimination body as conceptualised by the Sachar Committee. He pointed out that the committee recommended formation of the commission after considerable deliberations on the existing institutions not capable of addressing issues of equal opportunities.
