On 8th August 2024, The Waqf Amendment Bill was introduced in Lok Sabha. In less than a month, the Parliament panel had received more than 1 crore responses on the bill. A WhatsApp message linked to a website named “Reject Waqf Amendment Bill 2024” was extensively circulated. The website claims that more than 2.5 crore email responses were sent to the Joint Parliamentary Committee. The website reads, “We reject the amendments in their entirety.”
In the midst of heated discussions, I will briefly highlight some of the main changes proposed in the Bill that fundamentally change the management and governance of Waqf property.
To briefly put things into perspective, Waqf is movable or immovable property endowed by Muslims generally for charitable or religious purposes. Currently, the Waqf Act of 1995 governs the administration of Waqf property. The proposed Bill seeks to reform this act in several ways focusing on its structure, membership, and governance.
First, similar to the Waqf Act, the Bill requires states to establish Tribunals which would address disputes arising over waqf. The members of the Tribunal are: 1) The Chairman, who is required to be a Judge of the rank equal to a Class-1, District, Sessions, or Civil Judge. 2) A state officer equivalent to an Additional District Magistrate. However, the bill removes the third member: a person knowledgeable in Muslim law (sharia) and jurisprudence (fiqh). Instead, it constitutes 1) a current or former District Court judge serving as the chairman 2) a current or former officer of the rank of joint secretary to the state government. The Bill removes the only representative and expert of religious law. What is odd about the composition of the new Tribunal is it aims to resolve disputes over waqf property but does not have a single member to highlight the religious laws and perspective that serves as the foundation for waqf as an institution to exist. As waqf property covers spheres of inheritance and endowments, it is hard to understand how the tribunal would provide a solution without considering rulings of Islamic jurisprudence. If this is challenged on the basis of increasing representation within the Tribunal, it is important to notice that only the third member was supposed to be a person connected to Muslim jurisprudence. No other member was supposed to be mandatorily a Muslim.
Second, the Act permits electing up to two members from the Muslim electoral groups to the Waqf Board: MPs, MLAs and MLCs, and Bar Council Members. The Bill empowers the state government to nominate one person from each regardless of their religion. Moreover, the Bill mandates that at least two members of the Board must be non-Muslims. The Bill might lead to dilution of Muslim representation on the board which is significant considering that this could potentially lead to undermining not just the board members but the larger Muslim community’s voice in their own religious endowments. Contrarily, the Act only mandated that two members of the Board must be women, but the Bill makes it mandatory that the two women must be Muslims. It also requires that one member each from Bohra and Aghakhani if they have waqf in that state. Both are minority religious sects that come under the Shia branch of Islam.
It is within the composition of the Waqf Board that the Central government’s two main token groups for the appeasement of the Muslim community appear at the forefront: Women and Minority Sects. Bohra Muslims, largely hailing from the PM’s home state of Gujarat, have traditionally supported the BJP. The party has for a long time maintained close relations with the Bohras in the business and political sphere. The BJP has also tried to attract Muslim women voters by promising reforms in personal laws. While the content of these laws remains in public discourse, marriage and inheritance have been the subject of heated discussion for a long time. It is within this context a part of the larger strategy of the party to seek political support from the Muslim community, members of which have called out the BJP for its religious discrimination. BJP-led government has adopted laws and policies that systematically discriminate against the community, the Citizenship Amendment Act and the Anti-Conversion Law remain the two evident examples. Before the 2024 elections, more than 25,000 Muslims from minorities unit were volunteering to help with the party’s vote bank of Muslims.
So, the Bill, when contextualized through the larger politics of the ruling party brings to the front two significant and contradictory points: 1) The bill can potentially dilute and reduce both governance of and representation in the Waqf of the Muslim Community, however 2) It also can be read as a move towards inclusivity with the addition of both minority sects and women.
It remains to be seen how much of the Bill’s proposal is directed towards on-ground change of the management and regulation of the Waqf. However, as no Bill comes into existence in an apolitical vacuum, it is hard to overlook the political environment and the ruling party’s larger agenda in the implementation of the bill that affects the largest minority religious group and the third largest landowner institution.