AIMIM Chief Owaisi Decries Alleged Double Standard in Public Religious Practices

On the thirtieth day of May in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty‑six, the Honourable Asaduddin Owaisi, chief of the All India Majlis‑e‑Ittehadul Muslimeen, addressed a gathering in the capital city of New Delhi, wherein he alleged the existence of a manifest double standard in the application of constitutional safeguards to religious observances conducted upon public thoroughfares.

He further contended, invoking Article Twenty‑Five of the Constitution of India, that were the practice of congregational namaz upon municipal roads to be deemed illicit, then, by logical extension, all celebratory processions and festivals of any faith ought likewise to be proscribed, lest the state abandon the professed principle of equal treatment before the law.

The remarks were occasioned, according to reports disseminated by local press agencies, by a municipal directive earlier in the month which allegedly demanded the removal of an assemblage of worshippers performing the Islamic prayer publicly, a measure which, he asserted, had been applied without parallel scrutiny to Hindu, Sikh or Christian processional rites occupying comparable civic spaces.

In the wake of the statements, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Department of Urban Development of the Union and the respective State Government of Delhi each issued no formal rejoinder, a silence which, to the measured observer, may be interpreted as either tacit endorsement of the status quo or a deliberate avoidance of a potentially volatile discourse concerning the delicate balance between public order and constitutional liberty.

The public consequence of the episode, as chronicled by civic commentators, has been the emergence of heated deliberations within municipal council chambers and among citizen forums, wherein the invocation of Article Twenty‑Five serves as both a shield for minority religious expression and a sword wielded by opponents who demand uniformity of regulation across all faith‑based gatherings.

No legislative amendment or judicial pronouncement has yet been recorded as a direct outcome of the Owaisi pronouncement, though several public interest litigations have been filed in the High Court of Delhi alleging violation of the equality clause, thereby illustrating the protracted nature of redressal mechanisms when constitutional doctrine collides with municipal ordinance.

Given the apparent asymmetry between the municipal insistence upon prohibiting open‑air namaz and the conspicuous absence of comparable prohibitions on Hindu processions such as Rath Yatra, Durga Puja or Sikh Vaisakhi parades, one is compelled to ask whether the existing regulatory framework sufficiently delineates the criteria by which public religious expression is assessed, and whether the discretion afforded to local authorities is exercised in a manner consistent with the egalitarian guarantees articulated in Article Twenty‑Five, or whether it devolves into arbitrary preference guided by sociopolitical considerations rather than neutral standards.

Furthermore, the silence of the Union Ministry and the State Government, which may be interpreted as either tacit endorsement or strategic withdrawal, invites inquiry into the accountability mechanisms that bind executive agencies to respond to allegations of inequitable enforcement, and whether the lack of a documented rebuttal constitutes a breach of the procedural duty to address grievances raised by elected representatives, thereby challenging the very premise of participatory governance under a constitutional democracy.

In light of the pending public interest litigations that allege contravention of the equality clause, it becomes essential to examine whether the judiciary possesses adequate capacity and willingness to scrutinize municipal orders for constitutional compliance, and whether the evidentiary standards applied in such reviews are sufficiently robust to prevent selective enforcement that privileges certain faiths over others, and whether the procedural safeguards enshrined in the Code of Civil Procedure and the Supreme Court's own precedents are being faithfully observed, thereby ensuring that the principle of legal parity does not become merely rhetorical.

Consequently, one must also ponder whether the expenditure of public funds on police deployment and administrative directives to disband peaceful religious assemblies, absent transparent justification, violates the fiscal responsibility owed to taxpayers, and whether such allocations reflect a policy bias that subordinates constitutional liberty to a narrowly construed notion of civic order, thereby eroding public confidence in the impartiality of state institutions, and whether the lack of an audit trail or parliamentary scrutiny concerning these deployments further deepens the opacity that surrounds executive action in matters of faith.

Published: May 30, 2026