For centuries, Indian Muslims have managed tens of thousands of holy sites across India, stewarding properties such as mosques, madrasas, orphanages, and graveyards – endowments made by Indian Muslims over generations for the benefit of the community. These properties, known as waqf, are now under attack from India’s Hindu nationalist government.
Waqf properties are foundational to Muslim life in India, providing an institutional foundation for alleviating poverty and improving literacy.
These properties are now under attack, with India’s Hindu nationalist ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its Prime Minister Narendra Modi, proposing a set of amendments which could be utilized to undercut the state-level waqf boards that govern waqf properties, transferring transfer power into the hands of leaders hostile to Muslim Indians.
The scale of the threat is hard to overstate. There are 32 state waqf boards throughout India, which collectively run more than 2,000 educational institutions and hundreds of health clinics, primarily for the poor. According to the Indian government, there are at least 872,351 waqf properties across India with an estimated cumulative value of 1.2 trillion rupees ($14.22 billion).
Though not without their fair share of problems and instances of corruption, the state waqf boards have served for decades to protect waqf properties which serve the needs of India’s poorest populations.
With these latest amendments, the Modi regime could expand its broader assaults on Muslim rights and freedoms – its empowerment of anti-Muslim paramilitaries, its criminalization of interfaith marriages and conversion to Islam and Christianity – into an all out campaign of dispossession.
Perhaps the most concerning waqf amendment is one that would eliminate the requirement that state-level waqf board members be Muslim and mandate the appointment of non-Muslims to the board. The move is not only an unprecedented deviation from the norms of other religious boards – Hindu, Jain, and Sikh endowments all require members of their respective faiths to govern – but could also pave the way for a hostile takeover of the boards themselves.
The waqf amendment would also eliminate the “waqf by user provision,” which legally recognizes the rights of waqf properties so long as they have historically been used by Muslims. This would reverse the policy of the 1954 waqf bill, which recognizes that while some Muslim structures have been utilized for religious purposes for centuries, ownership has sometimes passed down via oral, not paper, contracts. Eliminating the “waqf by user provision” could jeopardize the legal status accorded to thousands of Muslim-owned structures.
The Modi-led Indian government has already used the lack of formal title as a pretext to destroy hundreds of Muslim-owned properties, deploying a brand of so-called “bulldozer justice” condemned by India’s supreme court and human rights organizations all over the world. Considering this previous use of state violence, it would not be surprising if the elimination of the “waqf by user provision” could be used to legally expand this persecutory campaign.
A final change that could undermine Muslim governance is the requirement that waqf boards register their properties with district collectors or magistrates, who would in turn report to the government whether the waqf’s property claim is valid or not. These district collectors answer directly to Modi’s party-led state government and are strongly incentivized to report issues with the structure that set the stage for government seizure of property.
Although the Modi administration has justified the waqf amendments in the name of transparency and anti-corruption, there is little reason to take their reasoning in good faith. The Modi regime has constantly, flagrantly violated the rights of Muslims.
Modi has used state funds to build a Hindu temple complex directly over the remains of a razed mosque, called off police protections for Muslims being killed en-masse by members of allied paramilitary groups in Gujarat, and aired Islamophobic conspiracy theories on the campaign trail. Given his own history, it is better to view these latest proposals as a new plank in his regime’s campaign of Muslim dispossession.
Indians of all faiths and proponents of peace all over the world should join together in opposing the waqf amendments, instead demanding that the property rights of Indian Muslims, and Indians of all faith be protected. In line with its own government’s findings on the Modi regime’s human rights abuses, the U.S. can and should follow the recommendations of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and deem India a “country of particular concern.”
In India, the two parties that make up the remainder of Modi’s fragile political coalition – the Telugu Desam Party and Janata Dal (United) – should utilize their leverage to demand greater Muslim participation in the reform of waqf law, or to urge legislators to abandon these disingenuous amendments entirely. Modi depends on these two parties’ support to govern, and they have the power to stand up for the rights of religious minorities.
The Indian Muslim community cannot function without its institutions and if its rights are undermined, those of any other groups deemed antithetical to the regime could be undermined too. Modi cannot be allowed to further erode the rights of the Indian Muslims.