Article 29: The Right to Conserve

In one line

Article 29 has two clauses that look like a pair and are not: the first lets a group keep its own language, script or culture, while the second forbids any State or State-aided school from shutting a citizen out because of his religion, race, caste or language, and the second belongs to everybody.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: article 29(1) confers on "any section of the citizens" having a distinct language, script or culture of its own the right to conserve it, and minority status is not a condition of the claim. Article 29(2) is a wholly different guarantee. It is an individual right against exclusion from an educational institution maintained by the State or receiving aid out of State funds, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language or any of them, and it is conferred on every citizen and not on minorities alone. As Khanna J. put it in St. Xaviers, "For invoking this clause it is not necessary that the section of citizens should constitute a minority."

Why the law has this at all

Independence arrived with partition, and the fear in 1950 was not abstract. Communities that spoke a different language or practised a different faith from the people around them expected to be absorbed: their schools closed, their script dropped, their children taught in a tongue not their own. Article 29(1) answers that fear directly. It does not create schools, and it does not give money. It says the State may not stop a group from keeping what makes it distinct.

Article 29(2) answers the opposite fear, and this is what makes the article strange. The same communities were also being kept out of the good schools. A State that funds an institution and then lets it exclude candidates by community is doing with public money what it may not do itself. So clause (2) attaches a condition to the public rupee: take State funds, and the door has to stay open.

One article, therefore, does two jobs pulling in different directions. Clause (1) protects a group's separateness. Clause (2) protects an individual against being kept out. The tension between them is the engine of the whole topic, and it is settled in [The Eleven-Judge Answer].

The provision, in its own words

Article 29 is headed Protection of interests of minorities, and the heading is misleading, because only half the article is about minorities.

Clause (1): "Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same."

Clause (2): "No citizen shall be denied admission into any educational institution maintained by the State or receiving aid out of State funds on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language or any of them."