Gaya: The quashing of appointment of 20 assistant professors of Mirza Ghalib College, Gaya, by the Patna high court is being regarded as a wakeup call for all the five govt-funded minority colleges of the state as the issue has cropped up in other colleges as well.The high court, while quashing the appointment, observed that ‘the right to establish and administer educational institutions is not absolute. Nor does it include the right to maladminister’.The other govt-funded minority colleges of the state are Allama Iqbal College (Biharsharif), Soghra College (Biharsharif), Oriental College (Patna City) and Z A Islamia College (Siwan).According to Rashid Izhar, senior lawyer at the Patna high court, these institutions have been established in accordance with Articles 29 and 30 of the Constitution that gives right to religious and linguistic minorities to establish and manage educational institutions of their own for the furtherance of their group interests. He said the govt is mandated not to discriminate against these institutions in matters of grant and other facilitators for the growth of these institutions.Reference is also being given to Justice Anjani Kumar Sharan’s observation in his 65-page judgment in (CWJC no. 10935/21) in which he said that “there can be regulatory measures for ensuring educational character and standards and maintaining academic excellence. There can be checks on administration as are necessary to ensure that it is efficient and sound, so as to serve the academic needs of the institution.”In the same judgement, Justice Anjani also said that “children of the minority are entitled to get the same standard of education like in the state-run or other private institution, otherwise the students belonging to minority would not be able to compete with others who are fortunate enough to get quality education in the other institutions”.Emphasising the need for transparency in the administration of the minority educational institutions, M A Kazmi, IPS (retd) and an intellectual said there was a general complaint of nepotism and extraneous considerations in the matter of appointments and misuse of the constitutional protection given to the minority educational institutions and some of these complaints were not entirely unfounded.The growing culture of litigation in Muslim minority educational institutions was a cause for concern, he said.As per information available on the official website of the Patna high court, several dozen cases are pending with regard to the functioning of these colleges. No less than nine cases, including seven writ petitions, one contempt petition and one LPA was filed in the high court in 2025 in respect of just one minority college. Seven writ petitions were also filed in respect of the same college in 2024. Final judgment is yet to come in 15 of these 16 cases.
