The Waqf debate taught me something less about religious endowments than about the opposition’s communications machinery. Give it a complicated property-governance law containing registries, tribunals, surveys and appeals, and within minutes the complication disappears. What remains is an emergency siren. Every amendment becomes an attack on the Constitution; every administrative change becomes proof of a hidden civilisational plot. Television panels then reward the loudest version, and social media performs its usual miracle of converting unread clauses into absolute certainty.
I do not expect citizens to read legislation for recreation. I do expect MPs, lawyers and commentators who claim authority to distinguish between a disputed provision and the entire idea of reform. The PRS legislative analysis set out both the changes and serious questions: board composition, the role of government officers, the treatment of waqf by user, tribunal expertise and appeals to High Courts. That is what a real debate looks like. Some provisions can improve accountability; others can be narrowed or clarified. The INDIA alliance instead acted as though asking for reliable records of endowed property were inherently communal.
Opacity is not religious freedom
A waqf is a permanent dedication of property for purposes recognised as religious, pious or charitable under Muslim law. That makes the property socially important, not immune from governance. Endowments may support mosques, graveyards, education, health care and assistance to vulnerable people. If records are poor, encroachments persist or disputes take decades, the people harmed are often the intended beneficiaries. The romantic claim that every demand for documentation is hostile to the community protects institutions more readily than it protects ordinary Muslims.
I support the government’s central premise: property with a public or charitable purpose should be mapped, registered and administered through rules that citizens can inspect. Digitisation is not sacrilege. Audited accounts are not majoritarianism. A route of appeal is not persecution. PRS noted that the amendment removed the earlier finality attached to tribunal decisions and provided an appeal to the High Court. Whatever one thinks of other clauses, allowing judicial review through a regular constitutional court is hardly evidence of a state abolishing remedies.
The opposition’s problem is that administrative normality weakens its preferred theatre. It wants every dispute to be staged as the secular republic’s final battle. That posture may mobilise a committed audience, but it makes compromise embarrassing. Once Rahul Gandhi, assorted regional leaders and their sympathetic commentators have described a proposal as existential, accepting a technical correction looks like surrender. The result is politics that cannot recognise an amended clause, a committee recommendation or a safeguard because the original outrage must remain eternally valid.
Where the government needed more care
Being broadly sympathetic to reform does not require me to applaud every draft. The original five-year requirement for a person creating a waqf was difficult to justify and invited obvious questions about proof, conversion and equal treatment. The proposed composition of boards also deserved close examination. PRS’s summary of the Joint Committee report recorded concerns and recommendations on waqf by user, the officer deciding government-property disputes, delayed registration and tribunal expertise. Those are not footnotes invented by hostile activists; they are substantive design issues.
The government would have strengthened its case by speaking less triumphantly and more precisely. It should have led with beneficiaries, records and dispute resolution, then explained each safeguard. Instead, some BJP voices appeared to enjoy the polarisation. That is politically tempting and administratively foolish. If the stated aim is to rescue charitable assets from opacity and litigation, ministers should welcome narrow drafting that survives judicial review and commands confidence beyond their core voters.
One opposition point was genuinely well taken: an officer representing the state should not appear to be judge in a title dispute where the state itself claims ownership. Even when a later court appeal is possible, initial procedure matters. Assigning determinations to a suitably senior officer, defining evidentiary standards and ensuring a prompt independent appeal would reduce the appearance of institutional bias. A government committed to reform should prefer a durable law over a provocative one.
The Lutyens script is stale
Yet the commentariat’s framing remained absurdly one-sided. Many discussions began from the assumption that existing administration represented a natural, neutral order and only amendment required justification. Existing law is also a political choice. Existing board structures can fail. Existing tribunal arrangements can delay justice. Existing records can be incomplete. The status quo does not acquire constitutional holiness merely because Congress presided over much of it.
This is where the nostalgia becomes exhausting. The Congress ecosystem frequently presents laws associated with its years in office as the final expression of secular wisdom. Any BJP attempt to revise them is treated as contamination. But democratic government includes the authority to reconsider administrative structures, particularly when technology, property records and expectations of transparency have changed. “Congress made it” is not an argument for preservation. Sometimes it is a reason to look harder.
The wider implication extends beyond waqf. India has many religious and charitable institutions governed by different statutes and historical settlements. Reform should ultimately move toward consistent principles: clear title, accountable management, protection of religious purpose, representation of stakeholders, audited finances and ordinary judicial remedies. Uniformity need not mean identical boards for every faith. It should mean that no institution uses identity as a shield against scrutiny and no government uses scrutiny as an excuse for control.
The INDIA alliance could have occupied that responsible ground. It could have supported registration and appeals while opposing overbroad executive power. It could have demanded better representation without pretending that boards must remain frozen. It could have centred poor beneficiaries and local congregations rather than political intermediaries. That would have forced the government to improve the law. Instead, maximalist rhetoric let the BJP present itself as the only adult interested in administration.
I am not naïve about the political charge surrounding Muslim institutions in India. Trust must be earned, and the ruling party carries a special obligation to show that reform will be applied fairly. Implementation should be transparent; disputed properties should not be altered through administrative ambush; court orders must be obeyed; community expertise should remain meaningful. Those safeguards make reform stronger. They do not validate the claim that reform itself is forbidden.
What strikes me most is how badly the opposition underestimates voters when it manufactures outrage. Indians can hold two ideas at once: religious autonomy matters, and valuable charitable property needs accountable administration. They can criticise a clause without believing Parliament has declared war on a faith. The people most trapped by apocalyptic language are not voters but professional commentators who have spent a decade predicting the last day of Indian democracy every fortnight.
My position is therefore unambiguous. The government was right to open the waqf system to reform and to insist on records, accountability and wider judicial recourse. It was also right to accept that scrutiny could improve the draft. The opposition was entitled to challenge specific powers; it was not entitled to replace legislative analysis with panic and call the performance constitutional courage. India needs fewer guardians of permanent alarm and more lawmakers willing to read the clause they are shouting about.
