India’s opposition parties say they will challenge a recently passed bill that overhauls laws governing Muslim religious endowments in the country’s Supreme Court.
The waqf amendment bill, hailed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a “major milestone for reform and transparency”, was passed by the parliament’s upper house early on Friday, a day after it was approved by the lower house.
The amendments to a 1995 law governing Muslim endowments would add non-Muslims to boards that manage such properties and give the government a larger role in validating their land holdings.
Waqf refers to personal property – moveable or immovable – that is permanently donated by Muslims for religious or charitable purposes. Waqf properties cannot be sold or transferred.
The government says the changes to the laws governing waqf properties will help fight corruption and mismanagement while promoting diversity, but critics fear that they will further undermine the rights of the country’s Muslim minority and could be used to confiscate historic mosques and other properties.
Two days of intense debates in parliament over the bill saw the Congress party condemning it as “unconstitutional”, with party leader Sonia Gandhi calling it “a brazen assault on the constitution”.
“It is very much part of the BJP’s deliberate strategy to keep our society in a state of permanent polarisation,” she said, referring to Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party.
On Friday, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said the party “will very soon be challenging in the Supreme Court the constitutionality of the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024“, as the proposal is officially called.
“We are confident and will continue to resist all assaults of the Modi government on the principles, provisions, and practices that are contained in the Constitution of India,” Ramesh posted on X.
One of the most controversial changes to the waqf bill is in its ownership rules, which could affect hundreds of mosques, shrines and graveyards. Many such properties lack formal documentation as they were donated without legal records decades, even centuries, ago.
Home Minister Amit Shah, a close Modi aide, said the changes will help “catch the people who lease out properties” for individual gains.
“That money, which could be used to aid the development of minorities, is being stolen,” he said.
But Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Subhashini Ali accused the government of using the bill to polarise voters before state elections in Bihar, a key northern Indian state the BJP is yet to govern directly.
Tamil Nadu state’s Chief Minister M K Stalin said his party also plans to challenge the legislation in the Supreme Court. Legislators in the state assembly earlier passed a resolution opposing the amendments.
“The Waqf Bill tells every Indian Muslim: ‘You are not an equal citizen of India, know your place, your rights are not the same as ours,’” Mahua Moitra, a legislator from the opposition All India Trinamool Congress, posted on X. “Never felt so sad, so ashamed.”
The legislation has drawn strong condemnation from Muslim groups.
The All India Muslim Personal Law Board said Home Minister Shah’s comments were against the fundamentals of Islamic endowments as such bodies necessarily need to be governed by Muslims only.
The board said the bill was “a blatant infringement on the constitutional rights of Muslim citizens” and called on them to rise in protest against it.
Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, another prominent community organisation, called it “a direct assault on religious freedom and constitutional rights”.
“The passage is highly condemnable,” the group’s president, Syed Sadatullah Husaini, said in a statement, accusing the government of undermining the rights of minority communities.
While many Muslims agree that waqf properties suffer from corruption, encroachments and poor management, they also fear that the new law could give India’s Hindu nationalist government far greater control over Muslim properties, particularly at a time when attacks against minority communities have become more aggressive under Modi, with Muslims often targeted for everything from their food and clothing styles to inter-religious marriages.
Last month, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom said in its annual report that religious freedom conditions in India continued to deteriorate while Modi and his party “propagated hateful rhetoric and disinformation against Muslims and other religious minorities”. Modi’s government says India is run on democratic principles of equality and no discrimination exists in the country.
Muslims, who are 14 percent of India’s 1.4 billion population, are the largest minority group in the Hindu-majority nation but they are also the poorest, a 2013 government survey found.
