A Fractured Timeline

The competitive communal politics and perpetual casualty of the Waqf assets

- Mohammad Sajjad

IN a menacingly bipolar polity and society, and in an era of easy-labelling and stereotyping, telling truth and holding a mirror before the two poles is a much more difficult task. Accusations and counter-accusations of opportunism against independent-minded interventions on a contentious issue come rather hastily. Thus, commenting upon a deeply flawed, ill-intended and partisan law on Waqf (Muslim charitable endowments) becomes as much difficult as it is to point out the flaws within certain aspects of the institutional creation and bad management of the Waqf.

As of now, pertaining to the Waqf, a lot of communication gap exist even among the non-partisan. That needs to be steered clear. Every society and religion has provisions and practices of charity and public welfare. In India, in an era of majoritarian ascendancy and minority-bashing, weaponising such a noble, welfarist institutional practice seems to have become an easy populist politics of minority persecution. On the other hand, huge Waqf assets and its proceeds controlled and siphoned off by the self-serving religious and secular elites of Muslims in connivance with the state and state regulated Waqf Boards, since ages, is a double whammy for the common Muslim citizens of the country. This is regardless of whether the dispensation is overtly anti-Muslim or ostensibly pluralist.

The Story of my Ancestral Village