The Tamil Nadu government will file a review petition against the Supreme Court verdict upholding the Madras high court judgment quashing the 2024 government order on reservations for converted Muslims, minister CTR Nirmal Kumar said on Thursday.
The development comes after the Supreme Court on October 15 upheld Madras high court’s decision that barred the state government from allowing a Hindu backward who converted to Islam to retain his backward tag by getting a community certificate of any one of the seven notified Muslim backward communities in the state. “Recently, the 2024 GO which has been published regarding the converted Muslims, was quashed by the court.
We are going for a review petition,” the minister said after a cabinet meeting.
The Madras high court on June 25declared the government order unconstitutional, holding that conversion to Islam alone did not entitle a person to claim membership of a notified backward class Muslim community. “A person who converts from a Hindu social order to a non-Hindu social order cannot claim affirmative action under Article 16(4) of the Constitution merely on the basis of the social backwardness associated with his pre-conversion status. His application relied order issued by the state government on March 9, 2024, which was backed by the recommendation of Tamil Nadu Backward Classes Commission allowed converts from backwards classes, most backward classes, denotified communities and scheduled caste backgrounds to be issued community certificates of one of the seven notified backwards class Muslim sects.
In its verdict, the Surpreme Court bench of justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Shree Chandrashekhar had said that a backward Hindu will lose his community status and accompanying benefits of reservation upon conversion to Islam or Christianity as it held that conversion is to a religion and not to the membership of a historically backward community within that religion. The backwardness suffered in the antecedent social order cannot, by itself, be carried forward so as to confer upon him the status of a backward class in the religion to which he has converted,” the bench had said. “Once we find that the said the government order is illegal, it is our bounden judicial duty to declare it to be so. We accordingly declare that the said the order is unconstitutional,” the bench had said.
