New Delhi: On Monday (January 27), the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) cleared the Waqf (Amendment) Bill 2024, adopting all amendments proposed by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP-led) National Democratic Alliance (NDA) members and refuting every alteration suggested by the Opposition members.
The Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024, was referred to the joint committee of parliament on August 8 last year after it was introduced in the Lok Sabha by Union minority affairs minister Kiren Rijiju. The Bill aims to amend the Waqf Act of 1995, to address issues and challenges in regulating and managing Waqf properties.
The Bill proposed to get rid of the concept of “Waqf by User,” under which properties are sanctioned as ‘Waqf-based’ purely on the basis of religious purposes.
Now that the JPC has cleared the Bill from its end after touring several cities, this rush to assign the reigns of Waqf properties to the BJP is drawing flak.
‘Discriminatory at best’
On November 27 last year, a civil court in Ajmer issued notices to the Ajmer Dargah committee, Ministry of Minority Affairs and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), after a petition was filed, claiming that the Dargah was originally a Shiva temple. The petition, filed by Hindu Sena – a Hindu extremist organisation, sought a survey of the Ajmer Sharif Dargah – one of the most revered Islamic shrines in India and an international pilgrimage site for Muslims across the globe. Though it is an Islamic shrine, people from across several religions offer obeisance at the shrine, making it a symbol of syncretism, in an India turning increasingly violent against its minorities.
After Khwaja Ghareeb Nawaz’s shrine became a site of contestation, Syed Sarwar Chishty, one of the custodians at Dargah Ajmer Sharif, said that once passed, the Waqf Bill 2024, will open a pandora’s box of problems.
“Every now and then the BJP picks up some issue to harass Muslims. Either it is Triple Talaq, Waqf or Article 370, or they will be busy pushing people into finding temples beneath mosques or dargahs. They just don’t want Muslims to live peacefully and are only promoting communalism and their own politics,” Chishty told The Wire.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
