How India’s $14bn Muslim endowments are being plundered, even by authorities | Religion News | USAEMALL.com

Bhopal, India – In January this year in Ujjain, a city in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, authorities bulldozed nearly 250 properties, including homes, shops 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, schools, graveyards, orphanages, hospitals and even vacant plots – donated by Muslims for religious or charitable purposes to God, thereby making such property transfers irrevocable and prohibiting sale and other uses.

But the Ujjain waqf land was cleared for a so-called Mahakal Corridor, a $1bn government project surrounding the city’s famous Mahakaleshwar Temple.

India, home to more than 200 million Muslims, has the largest number of waqf assets in the world – more than 872,000 properties, spanning nearly 405,000 hectares (1 million acres), with an estimated value of about $14.22bn. They are managed by waqf boards in every state and federally-run territory.

Together, waqf boards are the country’s largest urban landowners and the third-largest overall, after the army and the railways respectively.

The Indian parliament is expected to discuss – possibly this week – amendments to the decades-old Waqf Act that has governed these waqf boards, and which has, over the years, entrenched more and more power in their hands. The amendment bill, proposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), could give the government unprecedented control over what happens with waqf properties.

Muslim groups allege that the Modi administration is using its parliamentary strength to further marginalise the minority community.

But even as the debate dominates television studio conversations, some activists and lawyers cite the Ujjain case as an example of a deeper set of problems that have long plagued waqf properties: years of mismanagement leading to encroachments, which the amended law might make worse.

‘A direct violation’

Madhya Pradesh, India’s second-largest state by size, has been governed by the BJP for most of the past 22 years, except for a brief period from December 2018 to March 2020 when the centrist Congress party was in power before it lost a majority in the state assembly.

Since being appointed the state’s chief minister in December 2023, Mohan Yadav, a BJP politician from Ujjain, has been preparing for Kumbh 2028, a Hindu pilgrimage held every 12 years on the banks of the city’s Shipra River. The demolition of waqf properties around the Mahakaleshwar Temple is widely viewed as part of the government’s acquisition of lands for the Kumbh pilgrimage, expected to draw millions of devotees.

Critics allege that state officials overlooked a 1985 government document that established that the Ujjain site was a Muslim graveyard where a historic mosque – large enough to accommodate 2,000 devotees – also stood. Over the years, influential builders with political connections illegally sold plots for a residential colony there, resulting in more than 250 permanent structures that were razed in January.

The government’s acquisition document, obtained by Al Jazeera, reveals that in June 2023, a revenue department officer in Ujjain objected to the state administration’s plan to take over the waqf land. In his note, the officer wrote that residents had shown him a 1985 gazette notification, proving that it was a waqf land.

The officer suggested that a “No Objection Certificate” should be obtained from the state waqf board to acquire the land. A month later, however, the Ujjain district administration issued an order, saying there was “no permission required when [land is] acquired for social cause”.

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

Though the government paid 330 million rupees ($3.8m) as compensation to people whose houses or shops were demolished in January, many in the city asked why the Waqf Board had not claimed that amount – as opposed to people who had purportedly occupied the plot illegally to set up homes and shops there.

When Al Jazeera asked Sanawar Patel, chairman of the Madhya Pradesh Waqf Board and a BJP leader in Ujjain, why he did not oppose the acquisition or claim compensation, he said: “I would do what the party orders because I am here because of the party.”

He said that the Waqf Board wrote a letter to the Ujjain district administration asking it not to disburse the compensation to the residents of illegal homes on the land, but did not explain why he did not challenge the administration in court. Patel also conceded that more than 90 percent of waqf properties in the state have either been encroached upon or are under litigation in courts.

Ashish Agarwal, a BJP spokesman in Madhya Pradesh, meanwhile, claimed that the state government acquired the Ujjain land “based on its requirement and following the laid down laws”. He refused to speak further.

‘History will not forgive us’

India’s waqf boards are set up under the 1954 Waqf Act, and since then, Muslims have been running the bodies with the help of the government. More laws passed in subsequent years – 1995 and 2013 – gave more powers to the waqf boards and even set up waqf tribunals, which are alternate courts meant to settle disputes related to waqf properties.

But late last month, Modi’s cabinet cleared the draft Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024, which proposes 14 amendments to the old law.

Some of the controversial proposed amendments include the appointment of non-Muslims as waqf board members and mandatory registration of properties deemed to be “waqf” with the district administration.

“This is the beginning of capturing land of mosques and dargahs [shrines]. History will not forgive us,” said Sanjay Singh, a parliamentarian from the opposition Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), who is one of the 31 members of a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) formed to discuss opposition objections to the proposed amendments before the full parliament debates the changes this week.

Supreme Court lawyer Anas Tanwir told Al Jazeera that the Ujjain case “reflects a broader national concern of political interference and degradation of waqf lands”.

“The management of waqf properties in India has long been plagued by mismanagement and encroachment,” he said. “The proposed Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024 potentially exacerbates the problems.”

But Madhya Pradesh Waqf Board Chairman Patel claimed the amendments have been brought by the government “to root out the existing problems and fix the anomalies”.

Deliberate dispossession

While the planned amendments have sparked concerns about how they might give the government greater control over waqf properties, many Muslim community leaders and lawyers say these lands have been widely encroached upon even under the current law.

Experts cite a decades-old pattern of deliberate dispossession, mismanagement and corruption in the government’s handling of waqf properties. They complain of a systematic diversion of waqf properties by district revenue officials and other authorities, and the widespread illegal occupation and conversion of waqf land to private ownership.

Most waqf lands or properties, they say, have been declared non-waqf by the government’s revenue department, the state body that maintains land records and collects taxes on them.

The Madhya Pradesh Waqf Board has conducted two surveys of its properties so far, in the late 1960s and the 1980s, and found that it had control over more than 23,000 properties. In subsequent years, it digitised its records and geotagged them for better identification.

Experts, however, also allege that the government’s revenue department has outdated land records, often based on pre-independence surveys. Despite the 1954 Waqf Act making it mandatory for the department to make relevant changes in its land records based on the waqf board surveys, revenue records were not updated. For example, Ujjain had 1,014 waqf properties as per the 1985 gazette, but none of them are listed as waqf assets in revenue records.

“Out of those 1,014 assets, 368 are listed as government-owned, 454 as private, and records for 192 properties are either incomplete or missing entirely,” says a public interest litigation filed in December by Ujjain-based lawyer Aashar Warsi in the Madhya Pradesh high court.

Digitisation of land records, which started in the late 2000s, compounded the problem. Since the software only had two columns – government and private – lands mentioned as waqf-owned in revenue records were often moved to the government column.

“Because of this, Bhopal’s historic Moti Mosque that was built in 1857, is registered as a government property, which is absurd,” says Masood Khan, a member of a community group campaigning for the restoration of waqf lands. Khan has filed a complaint with the waqf tribunal, requesting it to direct the revenue department to make corrections regarding the mosque in its records.

Al Jazeera asked Madhya Pradesh’s Revenue Minister Karan Singh Verma why revenue records were not updated in government records. “Since it’s a prolonged issue, the minister doesn’t know much about it. We will look into the matter,” his office replied.

Mismanagement and corruption

Muslims say the Ujjain takeover is not an isolated incident, but part of a pattern seen across Madhya Pradesh and other parts of India.

Warsi’s petition says there is a “systematic and deliberate loot of waqf properties under the watchful eyes of the governments and its officials”. It adds that despite multiple letters from the Madhya Pradesh Waqf Board and the federal Ministry of Minority Welfare between 2001 to 2023, advising the Madhya Pradesh government to make corrections in its revenue records, it “turned a deaf ear” to the issue, allowing the “plundering of waqf properties to continue unabated”.

“The mismatch of waqf land records with revenue records is a common phenomenon across the country that is feeding the encroachers,” Supreme Court lawyer and waqf law expert Mehmood Pracha told Al Jazeera.

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

Before the waqf board’s tribunal or a court could order a stay on the acquisition, the NGO built a wall around it in 2021, and then announced plans to construct a community hall there. Authorities imposed a curfew in the area and deployed a large contingent of policemen to preempt any protest.

“The Waqf Act obligates the district administration or the government to remove unauthorised constructions, but when the government itself indulges in encroachment, who is going to uphold the law?” asked activist Khan.

Waqf Board members say hundreds of waqf properties in Bhopal, Indore and other cities of Madhya Pradesh have either been encroached upon by the state government or are held by influential private individuals.

“The Madhya Pradesh Police headquarters, Bhopal Police control room, traffic police station and many other government offices are constructed on prime land owned by waqf,” a Waqf Board member, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera, adding that more than 100 graveyards have disappeared from the state capital, which once had nearly 140.

Often, the “mutawallis”, caretakers of a property appointed by the waqf board, have been found to be involved in the fraudulent sale of waqf land or unauthorised construction at a waqf property.

In December 2024, Madhya Pradesh Police arrested a man called Nasir Khan, a former caretaker of a waqf property in Indore, for allegedly forging waqf documents for personal gain and selling a multimillion waqf property in the city. Police found fake letterheads and official waqf board stamps in his house.

Experts say years of government and private encroachment, corruption and mismanagement have made waqf properties vulnerable. With the new amendments, they say, the government wants to legally take them over.

“With growing population, the values of lands are skyrocketing. Since waqf boards own massive properties on prime places across India, the government, by using the latest amendment, wants to get control over these lands in one go,” lawyer Pracha told Al Jazeera.