April 17, 2025

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Waqf Amendment Act 2025: A Strategic Move in the Hindu Nationalist Playbook

AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A.

The Lok Sabha (Lower House) of the Parliament of India recently passed the controversial federal Waqf Amendment Act 2025 earlier this month. The amendments seek to increase government oversight of properties held by Muslim trusts and place waqf properties – endowed by Muslims – under government control. Waqf – a specific legal and theological mechanism rooted in Islamic jurisprudence – provides Muslims with religious and cultural autonomy to retain control over historical Islamic institutions. Waqf properties include mosques, graveyards, and other religious sites.

The passage of the Waqf Act follows the contentious  and “Love Jihad” laws – anti-conversion laws that target interfaith marriages. Both have been implemented by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since it came to power in 2014. This marks the latest move by the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to further institutionalize religious discrimination against minorities ostensibly to address corruption and reduce inequality.

Due to the passage of the amendment, a wave of protests has swept across the country, with the most intense unrest occurring in West Bengal. The Indian state has a Muslim population of approximately 25 million. Demonstrations across the state have resulted in communal clashes between Muslims and Hindus, with individuals involved in the violence setting fire to police vehicles, attacking government offices, and blocking major roads. On April 14, at least three people were confirmed dead in the city of Murshidabad, leading to the deployment of 300 Border Security Force personnel in the district.

West Bengal’s Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and leader of the regional Trinamool Congress (TMC) party has condemned the violence, calling it “pre-planned,” and accused the BJP of instigating riots. Hindu nationalist “vigilante groups,” such as the Bajrang Dal and Vishva Hindu Parishad, are often implicated in fomenting violence as part of broader polarization strategies. The BJP has been accused of exacerbating local community tensions and unrest for political gain, such as the deadly violence in Manipur in 2023. However, communal tensions are being inflamed by both sides, with political actors exploiting the situation, in part, due to the fierce competition between the BJP and TMC.

In response to growing unrest and the filing of over 70 petitions from prominent political and religious leaders challenging the constitutional validity of the act, the Supreme Court has scheduled a hearing for today. The hearing could see some of the key provisions of the act stayed.

The amendments to the Waqf Act relate to 44 sections of the 1995 Waqf Act – a law to regulate and manage waqf assets – and could increase central government oversight of properties held by Muslim trusts. Waqf properties are currently managed by state-level “Waqf Boards,” to ensure their non-transferability and preservation for their designated purposes. According to the Indian government, there are at least 872,351 waqf properties in India, spanning more than 940,000 acres, with an estimated value of $14.22 billion.

The act could seek to fundamentally alter this governance by allowing non-Muslims to administer waqfs and enabling state officials to adjudicate disputes. Its passage holds the potential to further strip Muslim communities of their religious and cultural autonomy under the pretext of transparency and reform. Moreover, the bill seeks to establish a centralized digital portal to streamline the monitoring and transparency of the uses of these properties across India. However, there are concerns that this component of the amended bill could establish the infrastructure for mass data harvesting and surveillance of Muslim institutional life. Rather than simply enabling administrative efficiency, the bill lays the groundwork for both the systematic dispossession of Muslims and expanded state monitoring of Muslim communities across India.

While many Muslims recognize the need for reform due to corruption within waqf boards and widespread mismanagement, the BJP has leveraged aggressive anti-Muslim rhetoric to justify the proposed reforms. For example, some claimed – despite little evidence – that the community holds a disproportionate share of the country’s wealth. Members of the BJP, including Prime Minister Modi, have made several unsubstantiated public statements to both stir public support for the proposed changes – including statements which suggest that the Muslim demographic disproportionately benefit from the historical land laws – ostensibly suggesting that the bills overhaul would reduce corruption and improve equity.

This bill, along with the related propaganda, is an extension of conspiracies leveraged by the BJP that portray historical Hindu victimhood, with Indian Muslims cast as the main perpetrators. BJP politicians and Hindu nationalist groups have propagated the “land jihad” conspiracy theory, a narrative that Muslims are organizing to seize Hindu religious properties via institutional mechanisms. BJP MP Anurag Thakur, during a parliamentary debate on the issue, recently stated: “We will not allow a second partition in the name of land jihad. India needs freedom from the fear of the Waqf Board.”

Moreover, the recent Waqf Amendment is part of the BJP’s ongoing campaign to undermine the rights and autonomy of India’s Muslim population. The Indian state apparatus has systematically facilitated the expropriation and demolition of mosques and Muslim communities. In February 2024, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) demolished the 600-year-old Akhoondji Mosque and announced plans to demolish twenty more properties in Delhi, 16 of which are Muslim shrines.

The Indian state has also routinely and indiscriminately used bulldozers to demolish structures – primarily those owned by Muslims – under the label of “illegal” construction. According to Amnesty International, authorities in BJP-ruled states carried out 128 demolitions targeting Muslim villages in the aftermath of religious clashes or Muslim-led protests in 2022 alone. This pattern is part of a broader strategy referred to as “bulldozer justice,” where Muslim homes, businesses, and places of worship are systematically razed under the pretext of removing unauthorized encroachments. These demolitions often rely on selectively enforcing municipal bylaws that are otherwise widely ignored. The result has been the forced ghettoization of Muslim communities and a concerted effort to erase their presence and history from public life in India.

The potential implications of the amendment are far-reaching and are widely seen as a significant setback to minority rights and religious autonomy in India. Its passage could also have cascading effects on the rights of other minority religious groups, including Christians, Jains, and Sikhs, who have been systematically targeted by the state and militant Hindu organizations that span the country.

Although the BJP lost its single-party majority in the 2024 elections, support from the BJP’s coalition partners Janata Dal (United) and  Telugu Desam Party in central governance for the Waqf Act has dispelled hopes that this new balance of power would restrain the BJP’s agenda of establishing a Hindu majoritarian state. This reflects a broader transformation in Indian politics, including the normalization and entrenchment of Hindu nationalism, even among parties once considered secular. Under Modi’s 11-year rule, the politics of Hindu nationalism have been so successfully instrumentalized that it now serves as a potent vehicle for political legitimacy and power across the political ideological spectrum.