Minorities
A proposal to amend a decades-old law that governs properties worth millions of dollars donated by Indian Muslims over centuries has triggered protests in the country. Waqf bill: Why many Muslims in India are opposing an amendment in a property law
The properties, which include mosques, madrassas, shelter homes and thousands of acres of land, are called waqf and are managed by a board.
The new bill - which introduces more than 40 amendments to the existing law - was introduced in August but was later sent to a joint committee of MPs for discussion.
On 13 February, the committee's report on the bill was tabled in both houses of parliament amid protests by opposition leaders.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government says that the changes they have proposed to the bill are necessary to root out corruption in the management of these properties and address demands for reform from the Muslim community.
But several Muslim groups and opposition parties have called the changes politically motivated and an attempt by Modi's Hindu nationalist party to weaken the rights of minorities.
by Meryl Sebastian & Neyaz Farooquee
BBC News
14/02/2025
In Tanweer Fazal’s book, 'Practices of the State: Muslims, Law and Violence in India', he explains how this state-sponsored identity flattens the Muslims into a homogenous community. https://thewire.in/books/how-the-indian-state-constructs-muslimness-through-law-and-violence
Tanweer Fazal’s book, Practices of the State: Muslims, Law and Violence in India, is an investigation of how a singular discourse of ‘Muslimness’ has been produced in India in defiance of the fact that the Muslims are a heterogenous and internally variegated community with divergent religious practices and beliefs. This book asks what binds a Bengali Muslim in Assam, with a Qureshi meat-seller in Uttar Pradesh and a Muslim villager in Bhagalpur Bihar, to a Muslim worshipper in Ayodhya or an Arzal Muslim seeking to be recognised as a scheduled caste person, notwithstanding their varied lived contexts? According to Fazal, it is their experience of ‘state’, not only in times of crisis but at an everyday level. This experience, Fazal argues, is not internally generated but produced externally, as a result of state practices, law-making and law-enforcement.
03/09/2024
It is still unclear whether the joint committee will only consider the content of the Bill or also address broader issues, such as encroachments on Waqf properties and their management. https://thewire.in/government/waqf-bill-row-joint-parliamentary-committees-terms-of-reference-priorities-remain-unclear
Parliament has announced a 31-member joint committee to examine the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, but its terms of reference remain unclear. The committee, consisting of 21 members from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha, was established on August 9, the last day of the Budget session. This joint committee is tasked with studying the amendment bill and is expected to submit its report during the first week of the winter session of Parliament. Among the significant changes, the Bill seeks to substantially alter the existing framework of Waqf law. The proposed amendment would shift the governance of Waqfs from the Boards and Tribunals—currently overseen primarily by the Muslim community – to the state governments.
12/08/2024
On June 10, more than 30 residents of a housing complex in Vadodara protested against the allocation of a flat to a 44-year-old Muslim government employee under the Mukhyamantri Awas Yojana. They claimed that the presence of a Muslim woman and her teenage son in the complex posed a “threat and nuisance”.
Even though these instances have been widely reported and criticised, the widespread displacement that Muslims face gets normalised as a byproduct of sectarian tensions rather than the human rights crisis that it actually is.
Perhaps, what is needed is a shift in perspective and to view the crisis through the lens of displacement and forced migration.
28/06/2024
Fertility rates of the poorest sections of the population of any state are impacted by the quality of educational and health services, and gender differences in regard to health and educational outcome indicators, not religion. https://thewire.in/economy/pm-eac-muslim-population-increase-research
Historically, the role of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council has been to conduct research and advice the government of India on economic matters of national import. The current government decided to create an EAC-PM in late 2017, almost as an afterthought, over three years after it came to power. Its role, since then, has been to write sundry research papers on miscellaneous topics, regardless of whether they have much to do with economic issues of national import.
This month, a sensational claim is made in a EAC-PM paper – that the Hindu share of India’s population has fallen between 1950 and 2015 by 7.8%, while that of Muslims has increased by 43% over the same period.
he claim is based on the paper authored by Shamika Ravi, et al, which is fraught with many logical and methodological fatal errors. It has used survey data published by the Association of Religion Data Archive (ARDA) consisting of 2,34,520 observations only. There is no mention of the estimated population size of religion-wise communities (The observations provide data on the population and percentages of surveyed people belonging to different religious categories in each country).
An informed reader looks for the coverage, authenticity and accuracy of the data source that has been used to make a claim.
by Santosh Mehrotra and Bir Singh
15/05/2024
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