How India’s $14bn Muslim endowments are being plundered, even by the gov’t

Bhopal, India – In January this yr in Ujjain, a metropolis in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, authorities bulldozed practically 250 properties, together with properties, retailers and a century-old mosque, to clear a sprawling 2.1 hectares (5.27 acres) of land.

The land belonged to the Madhya Pradesh Waqf Board. Derived from Arabic, “waqf” refers to moveable or immoveable properties – mosques, faculties, graveyards, orphanages, hospitals and even vacant plots – donated by Muslims for spiritual or charitable functions to God, thereby making such property transfers irrevocable and prohibiting sale and different makes use of.

However the Ujjain waqf land was cleared for a so-called Mahakal Hall, a $1bn authorities challenge surrounding the metropolis’s well-known Mahakaleshwar Temple.

India, residence to greater than 200 million Muslims, has the largest variety of waqf belongings in the world – greater than 872,000 properties, spanning practically 405,000 hectares (1 million acres), with an estimated worth of about $14.22bn. They are managed by waqf boards in each state and federally-run territory.

Collectively, waqf boards are the nation’s largest city landowners and the third-largest general, after the military and the railways respectively.

The Indian parliament is anticipated to debate – probably this week – amendments to the decades-old Waqf Act that has ruled these waqf boards, and which has, over the years, entrenched increasingly more energy of their palms. The modification invoice, proposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Occasion (BJP), may give the authorities unprecedented management over what occurs with waqf properties.

Muslim teams allege that the Modi administration is utilizing its parliamentary energy to additional marginalise the minority neighborhood.

However even as the debate dominates tv studio conversations, some activists and legal professionals cite the Ujjain case for instance of a deeper set of issues which have lengthy plagued waqf properties: years of mismanagement resulting in encroachments, which the amended legislation may make worse.

‘A direct violation’

Madhya Pradesh, India’s second-largest state by measurement, has been ruled by the BJP for many of the previous 22 years, apart from a short interval from December 2018 to March 2020 when the centrist Congress occasion was in energy earlier than it misplaced a majority in the state meeting.

Since being appointed the state’s chief minister in December 2023, Mohan Yadav, a BJP politician from Ujjain, has been making ready for Kumbh 2028, a Hindu pilgrimage held each 12 years on the banks of the metropolis’s Shipra River. The demolition of waqf properties round the Mahakaleshwar Temple is broadly seen as a part of the authorities’s acquisition of lands for the Kumbh pilgrimage, anticipated to attract hundreds of thousands of devotees.

Critics allege that state officers neglected a 1985 authorities doc that established that the Ujjain website was a Muslim graveyard the place a historic mosque – giant sufficient to accommodate 2,000 devotees – additionally stood. Over the years, influential builders with political connections illegally bought plots for a residential colony there, leading to greater than 250 everlasting constructions that have been razed in January.

The federal government’s acquisition doc, obtained by Al Jazeera, reveals that in June 2023, a income division officer in Ujjain objected to the state administration’s plan to take over the waqf land. In his be aware, the officer wrote that residents had proven him a 1985 gazette notification, proving that it was a waqf land.

The officer steered {that a} “No Objection Certificates” needs to be obtained from the state waqf board to amass the land. A month later, nevertheless, the Ujjain district administration issued an order, saying there was “no permission required when [land is] acquired for social trigger”.

“The acquisition is a direct violation of the Waqf Act,” stated lawyer Sohail Khan, who has challenged the Ujjain takeover in courtroom.

Although the authorities paid 330 million rupees ($3.8m) as compensation to individuals whose homes or retailers have been demolished in January, many in the metropolis requested why the Waqf Board had not claimed that quantity – versus individuals who had purportedly occupied the plot illegally to arrange properties and retailers there.

When Al Jazeera requested Sanawar Patel, chairman of the Madhya Pradesh Waqf Board and a BJP chief in Ujjain, why he didn’t oppose the acquisition or declare compensation, he stated: “I’d do what the occasion orders as a result of I’m right here due to the occasion.”

He stated that the Waqf Board wrote a letter to the Ujjain district administration asking it to not disburse the compensation to the residents of unlawful properties on the land, however didn’t clarify why he didn’t problem the administration in courtroom. Patel additionally conceded that greater than 90 % of waqf properties in the state have both been encroached upon or are beneath litigation in courts.

Ashish Agarwal, a BJP spokesman in Madhya Pradesh, in the meantime, claimed that the state authorities acquired the Ujjain land “primarily based on its requirement and following the laid down legal guidelines”. He refused to talk additional.

‘Historical past won’t forgive us’

India’s waqf boards are arrange beneath the 1954 Waqf Act, and since then, Muslims have been operating the our bodies with the assist of the authorities. Extra legal guidelines handed in subsequent years – 1995 and 2013 – gave extra powers to the waqf boards and even arrange waqf tribunals, which are alternate courts meant to settle disputes associated to waqf properties.

However late final month, Modi’s cupboard cleared the draft Waqf (Modification) Invoice, 2024, which proposes 14 amendments to the outdated legislation.

A few of the controversial proposed amendments embody the appointment of non-Muslims as waqf board members and necessary registration of properties deemed to be “waqf” with the district administration.

“That is the starting of capturing land of mosques and dargahs [shrines]. Historical past won’t forgive us,” stated Sanjay Singh, a parliamentarian from the opposition Aam Aadmi Occasion (AAP), who’s certainly one of the 31 members of a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) shaped to debate opposition objections to the proposed amendments earlier than the full parliament debates the modifications this week.

Supreme Court docket lawyer Anas Tanwir informed Al Jazeera that the Ujjain case “displays a broader nationwide concern of political interference and degradation of waqf lands”.

“The administration of waqf properties in India has lengthy been plagued by mismanagement and encroachment,” he stated. “The proposed Waqf (Modification) Invoice, 2024 probably exacerbates the issues.”

However Madhya Pradesh Waqf Board Chairman Patel claimed the amendments have been introduced by the authorities “to root out the current issues and repair the anomalies”.

Deliberate dispossession

Whereas the deliberate amendments have sparked issues about how they could give the authorities better management over waqf properties, many Muslim neighborhood leaders and legal professionals say these lands have been broadly encroached upon even beneath the present legislation.

Consultants cite a decades-old sample of deliberate dispossession, mismanagement and corruption in the authorities’s dealing with of waqf properties. They complain of a scientific diversion of waqf properties by district income officers and different authorities, and the widespread unlawful occupation and conversion of waqf land to non-public possession.

Most waqf lands or properties, they are saying, have been declared non-waqf by the authorities’s income division, the state physique that maintains land data and collects taxes on them.

The Madhya Pradesh Waqf Board has carried out two surveys of its properties thus far, in the late Nineteen Sixties and the Eighties, and located that it had management over greater than 23,000 properties. In subsequent years, it digitised its data and geotagged them for higher identification.

Consultants, nevertheless, additionally allege that the authorities’s income division has outdated land data, typically primarily based on pre-independence surveys. Regardless of the 1954 Waqf Act making it necessary for the division to make related modifications in its land data primarily based on the waqf board surveys, income data weren’t up to date. For instance, Ujjain had 1,014 waqf properties as per the 1985 gazette, however none of them are listed as waqf belongings in income data.

“Out of these 1,014 belongings, 368 are listed as government-owned, 454 as non-public, and data for 192 properties are both incomplete or lacking totally,” says a public curiosity litigation filed in December by Ujjain-based lawyer Aashar Warsi in the Madhya Pradesh excessive courtroom.

Digitisation of land data, which began in the late 2000s, compounded the downside. Since the software program solely had two columns – authorities and personal – lands talked about as waqf-owned in income data have been typically moved to the authorities column.

“Due to this, Bhopal’s historic Moti Mosque that was in-built 1857, is registered as a authorities property, which is absurd,” says Masood Khan, a member of a neighborhood group campaigning for the restoration of waqf lands. Khan has filed a grievance with the waqf tribunal, requesting it to direct the income division to make corrections relating to the mosque in its data.

Al Jazeera requested Madhya Pradesh’s Income Minister Karan Singh Verma why income data weren’t up to date in authorities data. “Because it’s a chronic difficulty, the minister doesn’t know a lot about it. We’ll look into the matter,” his workplace replied.

Mismanagement and corruption

Muslims say the Ujjain takeover isn’t an remoted incident, however a part of a sample seen throughout Madhya Pradesh and different elements of India.

Warsi’s petition says there’s a “systematic and deliberate loot of waqf properties beneath the watchful eyes of the governments and its officers”. It provides that regardless of a number of letters from the Madhya Pradesh Waqf Board and the federal Ministry of Minority Welfare between 2001 to 2023, advising the Madhya Pradesh authorities to make corrections in its income data, it “turned a deaf ear” to the difficulty, permitting the “plundering of waqf properties to proceed unabated”.

“The mismatch of waqf land data with income data is a standard phenomenon throughout the nation that’s feeding the encroachers,” Supreme Court docket lawyer and waqf legislation professional Mehmood Pracha informed Al Jazeera.

In January 2021, the Madhya Pradesh authorities authorised an NGO that had BJP leaders as its trustees to amass 1.2 hectares (2.88 acres) of waqf land in Bhopal. The location in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood was designated as a graveyard in state data and had half a dozen graves on it.

Earlier than the waqf board’s tribunal or a courtroom may order a keep on the acquisition, the NGO constructed a wall round it in 2021, after which introduced plans to assemble a neighborhood corridor there. Authorities imposed a curfew in the space and deployed a big contingent of policemen to preempt any protest.

“The Waqf Act obligates the district administration or the authorities to take away unauthorised constructions, however when the authorities itself indulges in encroachment, who’s going to uphold the legislation?” requested activist Khan.

Waqf Board members say tons of of waqf properties in Bhopal, Indore and different cities of Madhya Pradesh have both been encroached upon by the state authorities or are held by influential non-public people.

“The Madhya Pradesh Police headquarters, Bhopal Police management room, visitors police station and plenty of different authorities workplaces are constructed on prime land owned by waqf,” a Waqf Board member, talking on situation of anonymity, informed Al Jazeera, including that greater than 100 graveyards have disappeared from the state capital, which as soon as had practically 140.

Typically, the “mutawallis”, caretakers of a property appointed by the waqf board, have been discovered to be concerned in the fraudulent sale of waqf land or unauthorised development at a waqf property.

In December 2024, Madhya Pradesh Police arrested a person known as Nasir Khan, a former caretaker of a waqf property in Indore, for allegedly forging waqf paperwork for private achieve and promoting a multimillion waqf property in the metropolis. Police discovered faux letterheads and official waqf board stamps in his home.

Consultants say years of presidency and personal encroachment, corruption and mismanagement have made waqf properties weak. With the new amendments, they are saying, the authorities needs to legally take them over.

“With rising inhabitants, the values of lands are skyrocketing. Since waqf boards personal large properties on prime locations throughout India, the authorities, by utilizing the newest modification, needs to get management over these lands in a single go,” lawyer Pracha informed Al Jazeera.