Year after year governments have increased the budgetary support to Minority Affairs ministry .In the XII five year plan,The total amount given was Rs. 17,323 Cr. A good 30% of this amount is spent on the Minority Institutes, even if they are private bodies. The Minority institutes can be aided through the general Education Budget too and hence they get the sizeable chunk from the general education budget. There is a separate infrastructure development scheme for the Minority Institutes.

There are two central universities namely Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and JMI where most of the students are from minority communities. During the last three years, Rs 3010 crore grant has been released to AMU and Rs 1002 crore to JMI under the head - Salary, Recurring and Capital Assets,confirms  the ministry of minority education.

However, The government-funded AMU can't have minority tag. Earlier, on 11 July, the Supreme Court gave four weeks to AMU to respond to a central government move that defended Allahabad High Court's verdict that the university was not a minority institution.

Under Articles 29 and 30 of the Indian Constitution, minorities have rights to protect their cultural identity and establish educational institutions. Article 30(1) says: "All minorities, whether based on religion or language, shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice." Therefore, the Constitution does not prevent Muslims or other communities from establishing and managing educational institutions. The AMU was established as a college for the scientific advancement of Muslims. Such minority institutions must be funded by minority communities themselves, not by the Indian state.

Aligarh Muslim University was reestablished by an act of Indian Parliament in 1920. The AMU therefore is subject to the provisions of the Constitution. While the Constitution gives rights to minorities to establish educational institutions, such institutions cannot retain a minority character if their funding comes from the Indian state. India being a secular state, AMU cannot get taxpayers' money.

Due to political correctness among politicians, the secular Indian state funds Islam and its religious orthodoxies. For example, at the AMU, the Indian state funds an entire Faculty of Theology which runs the Department of Sunni Theology and the Department of Shia Theology. In addition to non-teaching staff, these departments employ a dozen academics, some of them of the professor's rank, receiving salaries from the secular state for teaching religious orthodoxies to Muslims. Both these departments are funded by the Indian state in violation of the secular character of the Constitution.

It is a fact that AMU' and JMIs minority character gives birth to a ghetto mentality among Muslims and prevents them from thinking that they can enroll in other universities too. Such a ghetto mindset among Muslims creates a sense of grievance, defeatism and victimhood. This sociological alienation among students at such universities acts as obstacles to their progress and integration once they graduate out of the university and enter the nation's workforce.

Financed wholly by the secular state, both AMU and JMI do not contribute anything to India's wider democratic intellectual discourse. Their only function seems to be to keep the Muslim community within the web of religion, which cannot be the responsibility of the Indian state to fund.

Hence it is a humble request to all the concerned citizens of the country to support this initiative to democratize and secularize the structure of these institutes by stopping the state funds at once.