With the Waqf Bill, the state brings a legal bulldozer to minority rights

For generations, waqf properties have defined the broad contours of Muslim public life – supporting education, healthcare, burial grounds and modest religious establishments in both rural and urban India. These were never just “assets”: they are a form of collective autonomy and faith-based care.

By centralising control, removing recognition of long-term customary usage, and making registration and documentation the litmus test of legality, the state is creating the perfect conditions for dispossession without appearing coercive.

While the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, introduced in Lok Sabha on Wednesday, itself was signalled by Bharatiya Janata Party supporters and leaders as a tool of land-grab and an intention to humiliate Muslims, the Joint Committee report assessing the proposed legislation did little to reassure the community when it submitted its report in January.

Its enthusiastic endorsement of the Bill, in spite of the concerns expressed by State Waqf Boards, civil society groups and legal experts, reads less like a balanced assessment and more like a green light for undermining community control over its faith-based welfare practices.

Fiction of consultation

The report boasts of receiving over 92 lakh memoranda and conducting numerous study visits. Yet, its findings systematically override the most serious objections brought to its attention. Nearly all major Waqf Boards opposed the renaming of the Act and the encroachment of executive power into religious affairs. They also criticised the proposed removal of the “waqf by user” doctrine, which recognises properties as charitable endowments if they have been used continuously for community good, even if formal documentation is not available.

These objections are acknowledged by the committee – only to be dismissed in bureaucratic language. The report thus untakes a form of consultation without its substance – a classic case of manufactured consensus. Dissent is included as spectacle but excluded from outcome.

The report presents itself as a comprehensive, consultative and rational response to longstanding challenges in waqf administration. On closer reading, however, it reveals itself as a document of political obfuscation – one that hides a sweeping reconfiguration of religious governance.

Far from being a neutral assessment of the Bill, the report reads like a meticulously crafted defence of state centralisation, one that is disturbingly comfortable eroding the constitutional and theological foundations of Muslim religious endowments.

Ideologically loaded history

As with all agenda driven by the BJP, several features of the historical framing of waqf in the report suggest a subtle but clear ideological positioning behind the facade of neutrality.

It emphasises centralised control during the period of so-called Muslim rule, with the monarch as the supreme authority. This sets up the narrative that strong, centralised governance of waqf is not only administratively desirable but historically authentic, paving the way to legitimise state overreach today.

Sanitising the portrayal of colonial interference, the report portrays the British era largely as a phase of decentralisation and reform, with legal frameworks introduced to manage religious endowments. However, the report avoids critically acknowledging how colonial courts often deliberately distorted or misunderstood Islamic law.

This erasure allows the report to frame colonial legislation as a neutral administrative step, not as a disruption of indigenous religious governance.

Worst, perhaps, is the report characterising the post-Independence era of waqf administration as negligence. The report repeatedly uses language such as “poor record-keeping”, “mismanagement” and “corruption” to declare waqf primarily as a failed welfare institution. This sets the stage for the current regime to claim that it must step in as the rational, modernising actor.

The report repeatedly describes waqf properties as “underutilised assets” that could be developed for housing, shopping complexes and markets. While the Waqf Act, 1995, already allowed for development under certain conditions, the report leans heavily on this framing. It aligns waqf property with mere economic utility rather than its religious or communal value.

Technocratic and communal capture

This clever trick of the report attempts to shift how waqf is understood – from a religious institution rooted in faith and community, to a bureaucratic system managed like real estate – without ever admitting that such a major change is taking place.

Waqf, as a religious endowment, has a specific legal and theological architecture rooted in Islamic jurisprudence. The report’s defence of renaming the Waqf Act with the vacuous acronym UMEED (Unified Waqf Management, Empowerment, Efficiency and Development) is more than a symbolic erasure. In Hindi and Urdu, umeed means hope.

The report signals that the government’s intention is only to approach waqf as a problem of logistics, property management and bureaucratic efficiency. This strips it of its distinct religious logic and converts it into a state-supervised real-estate portfolio.

In doing so, the report aligns with a majoritarian-technocratic ideology through which this regime has been instrumentalising administrative reasoning to undermine moral and theological authority of a community. This is not mere “reform” – it is a paradigmatic shift that subordinates a religious institution to the operational codes of neoliberal governance.

A provision in the Bill that requires a Muslim who wishes to dedicate their property as waqf to prove they have been practising Islam for five years. There is nothing in Islam, either in theology, jurisprudence (fiqh) or ritual practice, that mandates a five-year requirement of being a Muslim before a person can access religious duties, rights, or legal capacities.

The introduction of such a test is arbitrary. It is an innovation that reeks of stale majoritarian anxieties about conversion.

Data extractivism

One of the most insidious aspects of the Bill, applauded without critique in the report, is the provision for a centralised portal and database managed by the Central government. This digital centralisation of all waqf properties – complete with registration, accounts, and audits – is presented as a tool for transparency. But in practice, it creates the infrastructure for massive data harvesting and surveillance of Muslim institutional life.

There is no corresponding provision for such a database for Hindu religious endowments or Christian charitable trusts. The discriminatory singling out of Muslim properties for this kind of datafication betrays the majoritarian anxieties that animate the Bill.

The report makes no effort to address the constitutional implications of this asymmetry – namely, the unequal treatment of religious denominations under the pretext of reform.

Moreover, once data is centrally stored and managed, the community loses even the residual control it has over the information ecology of its religious properties. In a time of escalating Islamophobia, it is dishonest to frame this as a neutral act. It is nothing but a form of digital disenfranchisement and dispossession.

Legal contortions

The report endorses provisions that directly contravene constitutional guarantees under Article 26 of the Constitution, which guarantees religious denominations the right to manage their own affairs in matters of religion. The inclusion of non-Muslims on Waqf Boards and the transfer of core responsibilities from waqf institutions to district collectors reflects a legal imagination in which the state reserves the right to define and reconfigure the religious affairs of minorities.

This logic inverts the foundational principle of the Constitution – that the state should maintain a principled distance from religious affairs. Instead, it installs the state as arbiter and executor, displacing community-based legal reasoning and erasing the possibility of internal self-regulation. The philosophical consequence is the domestication of religion under state sovereignty. A deeply colonial idea is now dressed in the garb of digital governance and managerial expertise.

It will be important to remember that this process is occurring at a time when it is impossible to convincingly defend Indian bureaucracy for being ideologically neutral. Its record in recent years – particularly the spate of punitive demolitions targeting Muslim homes and businesses, often following communal targeting of Muslims – makes it clear that administrative authority is being used in selective and partisan ways. Despite clear violations of due process, these actions have not been effectively restrained by any court of law.

In this context, the reassignment of critical waqf-related decisions – such as property survey, mutation, and encroachment – to district officials is not just an administrative move; it is a shift in power toward a machinery that has repeatedly and aggressively demonstrated its unwillingness to treat Muslim citizens with fairness.

Political project

Perhaps most telling is the way the report deals with the clause on “waqf by user”. This long-standing recognition of religious usage over time, even without formal documentation, is a core feature of Islamic charitable tradition. Its removal, the report argued, is to prevent abuse and misclassification.

What it actually does is open the floodgates for the appropriation of religious spaces held in the hands of poor and marginalised communities with limited documentation.

The state argues and the report endorses the claim that that ownership must be proven through deeds, legal title and state processes, even though the institution and tradition of waqf pre-dates these mechanisms by centuries. To enforce such rigid property norms is to forcibly fold waqf properties into a narrow capitalist property regime that is quite its very opposite.

Innumerable Waqf properties have actually been lost to the community through political interference and some of the biggest encroachers of waqf land are government departments. The earlier legislations contained responses to some of those concerns which have been voiced from within the Muslim community itself, demanding more transparency and better oversight. The Waqf (Amendment) Bill instrumentalises these concerns to justify a sweeping transfer of power from the community to the state.

The removal of “waqf by user”, the expanded authority of district collectors and the centralised database all point not to a strengthening of accountability mechanisms but to a consolidation of state power over Muslim endowments. In doing so, the state conflates dysfunction with illegitimacy and treats administrative shortcomings as a reason to deny the community its right to manage its own religious property.

The proposed amendments to the Waqf Act represent in reality a systematic weakening of a community’s right to manage, defend, and retain its own religious and charitable properties.

The Waqf Bill reflects the ideology of a state that no longer conceives of minorities as autonomous communities with the right to govern their religious institutions. It reflects a shift in state-religion relations: replacing constitutional secular accommodation of minority institutions to a regime of disenfranchisement and communal impoverishment, unhoming and land grab.

Ghazala Jamil is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University.