After 12 hours of heated debate in the Lok Sabha, and 17 more in the Rajya Sabha that went on past midnight, the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2025, was passed바카라first in the lower house on April 3, and then in the upper house on April 4. Within days, it became a law.
The new law has given rise to street protests and communal conflagration. Its critics call it unconstitutional. One uncomfortable question refuses to go away: if waqf institutions must face reform, why isn바카라t the government introducing a similar law for Hindu religious trusts?
In such a milieu, the real issue of inefficiencies, lack of transparency and mismanagement of waqf properties is relegated to the background. The real challenge is how to ensure accountability in the system without going against the constitutional rights of minorities.
Waqf, in Islamic tradition, is a gesture of permanence바카라a property taken out of private hands and devoted, forever, to public good. India has more than 8.72 lakh waqf properties, including mosques, graveyards, maqbaras, idgahs, dargahs, khanqahs, anjumans, imambaras, and ashoorkhanas.
Outlook바카라s next issue Username Waqf looks at what the new law really means. Is it about fixing a broken system? Or is it deepening the divide?
Tanvir Aeijaz, who teaches Public Policy and Polity at the University of Delhi, writes that the Waqf Act de-institutionalises the minority rights as enshrined in the Indian Constitution, violates several provisions of fundamental rights, including the principles of secularism, threatens the moral consciousness to fraternity and tolerance in India, and panders to the 바카라majoritarianism바카라 of the Hindutva project in the name of 바카라바카라one country, one people, and one nation바카라바카라.
Mohammad Sajjad, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Indian History at Aligarh Muslim University, writes that protecting the Waqf and realising its basic objective of charity and welfare remains as elusive as ever. He argues that better implementation of the 2013 Waqf Amendment would have been more effective than introducing a new law. Sajjad suggests that the BJP could have followed the example of Turkey, where laws from 1868 and 1924 helped build strong waqf institutions for education, health care, public services, and disaster relief.
Political consultant Shubhrastha Shikha focuses on a key provision in the new law: every Waqf Board must now include at least two Muslim women. She writes that the new law, at least formally, acknowledges that gender parity in sacred administration is no longer a matter of progressive optics but of legal obligation. While historical records suggest that in the Ottoman Empire, women바카라s waqfiyyas - legal documents establishing waqf바카라do exist and they number in hundreds across Istanbul, Aleppo, Cairo, and Jerusalem. South Asia has rarely foregrounded women as active waqf-makers. Waqf records swell with names of Nawabs and Khans but identities of Bibis, Bais, and Khatoons blur behind patriarchal genealogies 바카라 husbands, patrons, caretakers.
From Uttar Pradesh to Maharashtra to Kashmir and beyond, Outlook바카라s reporters bring stories from the ground to understand how the Act is being felt, resisted, or accepted by people in different states.
Read these stories and more in the latest issue of Outlook.
