The Union Government on April 25 gave a forceful rebuttal to petitions challenging the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 in the Supreme Court. The preliminary response made several interesting and persuasive arguments. Waqfs or charitable endowments are regulated by law. While part of Islamic law, they involve properties that are managed in a normal fashion with caretakers, accountants and managers as any other properties. They were regulated by a law passed by Parliament in 1995. That law was amended in 2013. Earlier this year, Parliament passed an extensive amendment to that law.
The first challenge to the amendment was made even before Parliament passed the Bill in early April. The response pointed out this anomaly: how can one challenge a law in a court before it even becomes a “law”? Usually, courts hear appeals against laws after some time, when some negative or undesirable feature of the law becomes apparent. In this case, not even a week elapsed before various parties landed in the court. The Union Government’s response mentioned this fact and said there was, “presumption of constitutionality, intrinsic value behind democratic processes and high threshold to be met before passing any interim orders…”
In simple language, the government said one cannot rush to the court and ask for a stay on a law. The response pointed out another interesting fact. The 1995 law and the 2013 amendment have also been challenged in courts. Judgments in these cases are yet to be delivered even as petitions against the 2025 amendment are, allegedly, being “speeded up.” The government said that, “judicial consistency requires the constitutional Courts to bestow the same treatment to both sets of petitions as far as interim relief is concerned.” In plain English: The government wants all petitions to be given the same treatment instead of prioritising one set of petitions over the other.
Huge Increase In Waqf Properties
The government’s response includes very interesting data that lists the increase in the number of Waqf properties since 2013 (that is between 2013 and 2025). In percentage terms, the number of Waqf properties has gone up by 320% across India. The largest increases have been reported from Jammu and Kashmir where the number of Waqf properties went up from 1 in 2013 to 32,532. In Delhi, this number went up from 9 to 1038. In percentage terms, these increases are gigantic. In terms of area, the percentage increase across the country is 113% over this period.Again, this is a very large increase. The 2013 amendment was controversial in many ways. Its net effect was to “loosen” the manner in which these properties could be acquired or re-labelled as Waqf properties. That was one of the motivating factors for the 2025 amendment after a large number of complaints piled up in the last one decade from virtually all states in India.
By Siddharth Singh, OPEN Magazine
