By Sushil Kutty
It’s happening and happening at a hare’s pace — Gazwa-e-Hind Vs. Baghwa-e-Hind. The battle is for India’s real-estate. The protagonists are the Waqf Board and the BJP-led Government of India, the battle spurred to significant pace by the hurry with which the Waqf Board (Amendment) Bill, 2024 is being pushed through in Parliament and the panic with which the Waqf Board is laying claim to as many Waqf property as it is possible in the time given.
This as a Joint Parliamentary Committee is scrutinizing the Waqf Amendment Bill with members of both sides fighting to get their points across at the expense of the other party. And because neither side wants to get the short end of the stick, there is a clear division of political parties for and against the Waqf Board (Amendment) Bill, 2024, which is suspect in the eyes of the “Muslim party” and quite the orderly thing to happen in the eyes of the “Hindu party”, pick your side!
Caught perhaps by a little surprise, when the Waqf Amendment Bill, 2024 was introduced in the Lok Sabha, the Waqf Board party doesn’t want to be upstaged and is in a hurry to put its stamp on as many properties deemed Waqf as can be possible declared as Waqf owned. Fact is, the Waqf side is on a stronger wicket because the Waqf Board Act is at its beck and call while those opposed are without a legal leg to stand on.
But Parliament is powerful and even if the Waqf Board claims to own the land on which the new Parliament building stands, Parliament can still put a spoke in the Waqf wheel, which is what the government of the day is doing.
So the JPC is a handmaiden of the government of the day, according to people who oppose the Waqf Amendment Bill, 2024. JPC meetings have been taking place at various venues in various states and the meetings are stormy and bitterly fought with ‘give’ in neither party, no quarter given or sought.
Meanwhile, ordinary folk, property-owning folk, land-owning folk, home-owning folk, property bought with the sweat of the brow folk, are facing the brunt of the Waqf rampage visited on them in the name of God Almighty. Is there a remedy for their woes, their lands and homes slipping out of their hands, grabbed from right under their nose, by a law which says my way or the highway!
Ordinary folks, tillers of land, have no recourse as the Waqf keep posting notices six feet above doorsteps on the doors to their dwellings, the notices putting them on notice and the message is stark and plain, easy to read but hard to digest.
The farmer can trace his ownership of the farmland to the time of his great-great-great grandfather but the notice says “forget the great-great-great grandpa, this is Waqf property, and you’d better pack up and move!”
It happened to scores of farmers of Karnataka, who hadn’t thought this was what awaited them when they voted the Congress to power in Karnataka and left the BJP in tears. Now, they’re the ones who are crying, asking the Modi government to come save them from the Siddaramaiah government’s depredations.
Finally, three weeks after the farmers’ SOS, the Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, Jagdambika Pal, met the farmers in distress. He flew to Karnataka and listened to their woes and looked at their documents, before the BJP labelled the depredations ‘Land Jihad’.
Jagdambika Pal said he was on a “fact-finding visit”. At hand was BJP MP Tejasvi Surya who was the one who helped send the SOS listing out the farmers’ grievances. Jagdambika Pal visited Hubballi, Vijayapura, and Belagavi to talk to the affected farmers and others in the same sinking boat.
Pal says the farmers of north Karnataka handed in a memorandum which said land belonging to them was being claimed by the Waqf Board, land which has been held by their families for “more than 50-70 years.”
Of course, the Government of Karnataka dismissed the claim, calling it a “political drama”, possibly enacted by theatre artists brought from Bengaluru. Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar led the state government’s charge of the Light Brigade.
“The BJP themselves started this in 2019, my government is committed, we will not change any record… They are trying to put the blame on us,” Shivakumar questioned the locus standi of the JPC. This “JPC doesn’t have any powers to enter; they might have come for their political purposes.”
Guess, the farmers will have to petition the Hindu-loving President Donald Trump to grant them asylum and land to earn their living. Trump is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s friend, but is Modi a friend of the Karnataka farmers?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Waqf Board (Amendment) Bill, 2024 is an eyewash; if he had wanted a lasting solution, the Waqf Board Act should have been struck off the statute book, but Prime Minister Modi chose “least resistance” over lasting solution. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for all his tough-guy reputation and easily-earned kudos, always plays it safe.
The Prime Minister cannot sit on this problem or imagine it will go away on its own from right under his nose. Nobody envisaged at the dawn of Independence, when India was reborn after being cut into three, that folks will be fighting to carve up India all over again.
Jagdambika Pal’s visit to Karnataka is being dismissed as a flight of fancy, and lacking legitimacy because he set out on his own, the lone ranger! The BJP, however, is rock solid behind Jagdambika Pal, saying the “land terrorism” unleashed in Karnataka and elsewhere must end. The JPC is scheduled to visit several cities from November 9 to November 14 before it comes out with its report on the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024.
Political parties on both sides of the aisle should understand the issue isn’t something to brush under the carpet. The fight for and against Waqf has all the signs of descending into chaos, even civil war, particularly when religion and control over land are at its core. Pal has charged the Congress government of Karnataka with “naming the properties of farmers and others as belonging to the Waqf Board.”
All this is happening in the midst of a Hindu vote consolidation, and the Waqf claim that all land ruled by Muslim rulers, before the British Raj took over, belongs to the Waqf Board and that whoever occupies them now must vacate and leave the country for Waqf.
The Congress is in wholesale agreement with the Waqf Board even if the Dawoodi Bohra Muslims have sought to be exempted from the JPC, claiming they don’t “belong” to the larger Muslim community and want to have a Waqf board of their own. Meanwhile, with every additional Waqf claim, Yogi Adityanath’s ‘Batenge toh katenge’ call for Hindu unity is finding resonance . It is like the ‘azaan’ heard five times a day. Jagdambika Pal says he will be preparing and presenting a report to the JPC on the Waqf Board’s actions. (IPA Service)