This Isn’t About Waqf—It’s About Reducing Muslim citizenship in India to a Conditional Privilege

The debate over Waqf properties is not just another political controversy. It represents the latest front in a decades-long campaign to reduce Muslim citizenship in India to a conditional privilege – something to be perpetually proven, defended, and begged for, but never taken for granted. Since 1947, Indian Muslims have struggled for belonging, only to watch the terms of equality constantly shift.

The Waqf – once a symbol of community autonomy and spiritual stewardship – has now become a battleground. But this conflict transcends land disputes. It reveals how the law itself is being weaponised to humiliate, marginalise, and erase.

Far from being mere administrative reform, the Waqf debate serves as a litmus test for Indian democracy. It demonstrates how willingly the state undermines constitutional guarantees to recast citizenship as conditional – particularly for Muslims.

A deliberate strategy to dismantle minority agency under legal pretexts

The targeting of Waqf properties is not incidental; it reflects a deliberate strategy to dismantle minority agency under legal pretexts, while political and corporate actors quietly divide the spoils.

We recognise this pattern. Five years ago, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) followed a similar trajectory, as did recent hijab bans. The BJP, empowered by a pliant media ecosystem, has polarised public discourse, advancing such measures through both legal and extralegal means.

Initial protests spark brief outrage, but public attention inevitably wanes. There is no sustained social media campaign, no consistent prime-time coverage, and no lasting street mobilisation. Yet these policies continue their quiet, devastating work – reshaping lives in ways that escape national attention.

The everyday lives of Muslims in India are increasingly governed by an architecture of surveillance, restriction, and erasure – legitimised through state policy and legal instruments. A clear parallel lies in the operation of the Gujarat Disturbed Areas Act, which has long been used to deny Muslims the right to buy property without prior approval from a district collector.

The law allows authorities to declare any Hindu-majority neighborhood a “disturbed area” if any property is transferred to a Muslim, citing a potential law and order situation. The result is an institutionalised form of ghettoisation – where segregation and invisibilisation are not only sustained but deepened by law.

Even when judicial relief is granted, there is no guarantee that Muslim buyers will not face protests from neighbours or organised social backlash.

Similar patterns unfold elsewhere. In Assam, the Cattle Preservation Act bans the slaughter or sale of cattle in areas dominated by Hindus, Sikhs, or Jains, or within a five-kilometer radius of a temple or satra. Under the guise of religious sensitivity, such laws effectively criminalise Muslim livelihoods in regions where beef consumption has historically been part of local culture.

It is just as effortless for a state administration to restrict Muslim religious processions of Eid Milad-un-Nabi or Muharram, as it is to accommodate majoritarian mobilisations. During the Kanwar Yatra, entire stretches of public infrastructure are placed at the disposal of Shiva devotees; roads are cleared, law enforcement is instructed to assist, and any disruption is normalised as devotion.

Also Read: The Waqf Amendments Aren’t About Transparency – They’re About Tyranny

In stark contrast, Muslim religious expression is monitored, curtailed, and occasionally criminalised. Even Muslim-owned eateries are coerced through bureaucratic orders into displaying religious identifiers during such periods, rendering them vulnerable to targeted economic boycotts or attacks under the pretense of religious sentiment.

The current manipulation of Waqf law follows the established blueprint of other such laws: a fleeting moment of public outcry gives way to silence and reluctant acceptance. Within weeks, independent reports surface – bulldozers leveling mosques and madrasas, eviction notices served arbitrarily, implicit threats made under the guise of Waqf regulations.

The law, in its current form, provides unconstitutional cover for what amounts to legalised land grabs and targeted dispossession.

The invisible violence of paperwork

The Waqf Act purports to be a governance tool but functions as an instrument of dispossession. Politicians stoke communal tensions. Corporations circle Waqf land under the banner of development. Bureaucrats – shielded by ambiguity and impunity – act as judge, jury, and executioner. Due process is ignored. Accountability is nonexistent.

This is not an anomaly – it is intentional. We are witnessing the legal disenfranchisement of Muslims, disguised as bureaucratic routine.

Like the CAA, the Waqf Act sanitises exclusion through procedural language. Similar to the Citizenship Amendment Act, which presented the appearance of benevolence by fast-tracking citizenship for persecuted minorities while deliberately excluding Muslims and selecting only countries where Muslims are the majority, the Waqf Act claims to promote transparency and accountability, but embeds provisions that effectively erode Muslim control over religious assets.

Measures that appear merely “procedural” are, in substance, intrusive interventions into religious autonomy.

Framed as a reform, the Waqf Act functions as a legally sanctioned mechanism to undermine the constitutional right of Muslims to manage their own religious institutions.

Much like how the CAA’s exclusions were tailored through selective national and religious criteria, the Waqf Act targets Muslim charitable institutions alone, leaving other religious endowments untouched by similar reforms.

Through this orchestrated legal structure of communal asymmetry and its selective procedural scrutiny, properties are seized, histories erased, ownership quietly transferred – all cloaked in the sterile jargon of administrative process.

Victims disappear into the footnotes of policy documents, buried beneath forms, notices, and opaque legal clauses. What emerges is not just a pattern of neglect, but a conscious reordering of the public and legal landscape, one where community is rendered perpetually suspect, and the mechanisms of justice are repurposed to dispossess rather than to protect.

The true violence lies in its banality. There are no viral videos when:

• A family is evicted from their ancestral home because a local strongman declares it "disputed Waqf land.”
• A mosque or madrasa is demolished or unauthorised overnight without warning or legal recourse.
• Entire neighborhoods live under constant threat of being labeled "encroachers" by a bureaucrat's penstroke.

This is modern communalism – executed not through mob violence but through file notings, zoning orders, and the quiet cruelty of paperwork. It is slow. It is invisible. And it is devastating.

The bigger picture

Zoom out, and the architecture becomes clear. From the CAA to hijab bans, from "Love Jihad" to "Land Jihad," we see a systematic, legalised apparatus of exclusion. These are not isolated incidents but interconnected nodes in a broader design, build to rip apart the social fabric and the existence of an entire community.

This is not governance – it is communal engineering through legal means. What is stolen is not just land but memory, belonging, and the right to exist with dignity. The past is rewritten. The future is auctioned for profit.

This is Communalism 2.0 – no longer relying on the spectacle of violence but sustained by the clinical precision of state power. The scars it leaves may not trend online, but they are permanent, etched into the lives it quietly destroys through selective and sanctioned harm.

Also Read: Why the Waqf Bill Passage Is Not a 'Muslim' Issue, It Affects all of India

Across towns and villages, homes vanish into official ledgers. Petty bureaucrats become arbiters of identity. Neighbours turn informants. This is how communalism is monetised: votes secured, contracts awarded, lives dismantled.

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is its normalization. The endless demands placed on Muslims – to prove citizenship, justify madrasas, defend shrines, demonstrate loyalty – have become background noise in India's political discourse. Each new regulation, each quiet eviction, reinforces the idea that Muslim rights are negotiable rather than inalienable.

And when rights become conditional, democracy does not collapse in revolution – it expires in silence.

Who will remember the victims?

Protests surge and fade. Media attention shifts to the next spectacle. But what becomes of the Muslim families and communities left broken in the aftermath?

For most, there will be no viral videos. No trending hashtags. No candlelight vigils.

Only the slow, crushing weight of a system designed to erase them – first from their homes, then from official records, and finally from national memory.

The Waqf debate is not really about property. It is about the soul of Indian democracy.

Will this nation uphold equal rights for all citizens? Or will it fully embrace a majoritarian order where Muslim belonging always carries an asterisk?

Land disputes are merely the visible symptom. Beneath them lies the true crisis: the gradual extinction of equal citizenship.

This is not governance. This is erasure by policy.

And if we fail to resist—not just in courts or streets, but in our collective conscience—then we are not mere witnesses to injustice.

We become accomplices to the silence.

Istikhar Ali, PhD (JNU) and DAAD Fellow, is a public health scientist focused on marginalisation and mental health.

Madeeha Fatima is an independent journalist based in New Delhi.

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