Activist files PIL over religion’s name in forms

The Asian Age: Mumbai: Monday, 04 August 2014.

A Nashik-based social activist has filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Bombay high court, seeking that the registrar general and census commissioner should be restrained from carrying out the census survey and declaring the results of survey conducted for 2011-12 because, in several cases, the word “Muslim” and not “Islam” was filled in the “religion” column. The petitioner also prayed that corrections be made in the forms of census already conducted before declaring results.

Petitioner Aziz Abbas Pathan’s lawyer Akhlaque Solkar, who is appearing along with advocate Afroz Siddiqui, told this newspaper that the contention of petitioner is that those who practice Islam are called Muslims, but the name of religion is Islam, not Muslim; so the “religion” column in census forms, birth certificates, leaving certificates and other forms should bear the word “Islam”. He further said that the petitioner has collected documents through the right to information (RTI) which shows that many census forms were bearing the name of the religion as Muslim, and many educational institutes were issuing leaving certificates with the religion “Muslim” and their petitioner is seeking rectification. The petitioner has attested copies of documents collected through the RTI to support his claim and through this PIL he has challenged the census survey carried out by government i.e. the Socio Economic and Caste/Religious Survey-2011. According to Mr Solkar, the census guideline manual, in illustrative examples for filling in the entries of religion, shows “Muslim” in the column of religion, and this is wrong and, so, the correction should be made to the public document.

A division bench of Justice Abhay S. Oka and Justice A.S. Chandurkar has admitted the petition for hearing and expedited it for final hearing. However the judges said since the work of census survey of the year 2011-12 has been substantially completed therefore no interim relief could be granted, as sought in the petition.