INDIA’S TOP COURT STAYS ALLAHABAD HC’S DECISION TO QUASH MADRASA ACT

Fri 05 April 2024:

New Delhi: The Supreme Court today, April 5, stayed the Allahabad high court judgment quashing Uttar Pradesh’s madrasa law.

The Wire has reported on how the March 22 verdict by the high court, declaring the Uttar Pradesh Madrasa Act, 2004 – through which madrasas are governed in the state – unconstitutional, has left around 10,000 madrasa teachers and over 26 lakh madrasa students with an uncertain future.

Five Special Leave Petitions were filed challenging the high court’s judgment.

LiveLaw has reported that a bench of Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud, Justice J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra said that the issues raised in the challenges against the verdict “merit closer reflection.”

The court noted that the “future course of education of nearly 17 lakh students” will be affected.

The court also highlighted that the high court has also not seen the act correctly. As The Wire has reported, the high court in an 86-page judgment, ruled that the Madrasa Act was “violative of the principle of Secularism, which is a part of the basic structure” of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court expounded on this:

“In striking down the Act, the High Court prima facie misconstrued the provisions of the Act. The Act does not provide for any religious instruction. The object and purpose of the Statute is regulatory in character,” the bench said, according to LiveLaw.

The court also, significantly, added that if the concern was to ensure that the students of madrasas receive quality education, the remedy would not lie in striking down the Act but in issuing suitable directions to ensure that the students are not deprived of quality education.

“The state has a legitimate public interest to ensure all students get quality education; however, whether this purpose would require jettisoning the entire statute enacted in 2004 needed consideration,” the court said, reported LiveLaw.

-The Wire

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