The communal content in the ongoing controversy over the proposed legislation to regulate the Waqf properties is obvious. The Narendra Modi government is seemingly adamant to bulldoze the passage of the Waqf (Amendment) Bill no matter what logic the opposition may present to challenge it on legal and historical grounds. In an election rally in Maharashtra on November 15, Union home minister Amit Shah taunted the opposition by saying that no matter how the latter tries to stall the legislation, “Modiji will amend the Waqf Act”.
Sha’s statement came two days after members of the opposition in the joint parliamentary committee (JPC) on the bill met Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to register their protest against the “unilateral” decisions being taken by the panel chairman Jagdambika Pal of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
This essay adds a footnote to the debate on the fate of Waqf properties in Delhi during the Partition days. The period saw large-scale rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of Hindu and Sikh refugees who had crowded the sparsely populated and predominantly Muslim city. It is alleged that many Waqf lands were forcibly occupied by the state to shelter these refugees in violation of the law. The argument that it could not have been avoided, given the massive challenge of rehabilitation, is a debate for another occasion.
While writing my book Migrants, Refugees and the Stateless in South Asia, I did some research on the subject which may be relevant to recall here. Unlike West Bengal, where the refugees from East Bengal had indulged in illegal occupation of government lands, in Delhi the government itself was conduit in illegally occupying some Waqf lands. Partly because of the Partition-related violence and partly because of migration to Pakistan, Delhi lost much of its Muslim population. From being a city with nearly 50-50 Hindu-Muslim population, the number of Muslims dwindled to about 10%. In contrast, the population of Hindu and Sikh migrants swelled.
According to historian Gyanendra Pandey, “Delhi was a city of perhaps 9.5 lakh people in 1947 (9.18 lakhs at the census of 1941). Of these, 3.3 lakh Muslims left the city [during] Partition, leaving about 6 lakh people (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and others) behind. Nearly 5 lakh of non-Muslim refugees arrived in the city at the same time, making the balance of the new (refugee) inhabitants and the older inhabitants of the city pretty much on par. Even in 1951, by which time the city had expanded considerably (to a population of 17.44 lakhs, a 90% increase from the 1941 figure) partition refugees accounted for 28.4% of the total population of the city.”
The Partition also reduced a large number of Delhi Muslims into an internally displaced community. To escape the communal violence, many of them took shelter in safe places like mosques and the bungalows of the rich and powerful Muslims. When that did not help, they moved to refugee camps in areas such as Purana Qila (Old Fort) or Humayun’s Tomb. Almost 1,74,000 such displaced Muslims took shelter here. While government aid at the beginning was cosmetic, state interventions improved after Mahatma Gandhi’s visit to these refugee camps following his arrival in Delhi on September 9, 1947.
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The decline in Muslim population, coupled with the growth of non-Muslim population, against the backdrop of violence and anti-Muslim sentiment, vitiated the politics of rehabilitation. Not only scant regard was shown to Muslim graves which were scattered all over the city, even Waqf lands were not spared. The illegalities associated with these policies were so extensive that concerned government departments are reluctant to make their record available for scholarly research even today.
American professor Anand Taneja, who had managed to access Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) record after herculean efforts, said, “Two weeks after I started accessing the archives, I was told that my use of the archives was strictly unofficial, merely a favour, and had led to some displeasure among senior officials, and that I had to stop visiting the record room. It seemed that the ASI’s archive was not an archive of authorised memory, but of authorised forgetting, where what was once consigned to dust and darkness was never meant to reappear in public, not even as diminutive flickers from academic footnotes.”
During the early days of Partition, both refugee rehabilitation and the reconstruction of Delhi were prioritised by the Indian government. In the process, many Muslim graves, including those of venerated saints, were forcibly occupied. Even Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had to feign ignorance on many such matters. Ata-ur-Rahman Qasimi in his book Dilli Ki Tarikhi Masjid (The Historical Mosques of Delhi), published by the Maulana Azad Academy in 2001, wrote about an exchange between then education minister Maulana Azad and Nehru. At the time, the education ministry oversaw ASI. Azad was the only Muslim member of the Union cabinet and was sweet-talked by Nehru to relent when he objected to these occupations: “Maulana, half of Delhi is graveyards and mosques. Our schemes will fail if we don’t have room to build.” he was told.
One of the most interesting accounts Qasimi narrates is of a buried, Tughlaq-era mosque on the grounds of the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi. Azad was in a car with some other Maulanas. As they approached the former location of the 14th century mosque that he had heard so much about, Azad asked one of his older colleagues in the vehicle if he knew where the mosque stood. The latter pointed to a mound in the enclosure of the Sahitya Akademi and the Lalit Kala Akademi (both inaugurated in 1954) and said that the Tughlaq mosque was buried inside it. When the building plans of the Lalit Kala Akademi were being drawn, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) wanted to eliminate it. Azad objected. Eventually, after long discussions, it was decided that the walls and domes of the mosque would be covered with rubble and a platform would be built there.
Some Delhi Waqf Board lands were also occupied by the state on the grounds that they would fall into unsafe hands. The Custodian (of Enemy Property) took over many tomb sites and graveyards and sold them to the Hindu and Sikh refugees at measly prices. In the Lado Sarai area, such lands were massively usurped. In 1980-81, while Jagmohan was lieutenant. governor, wherever there was an old Muslim graveyard or an empty Waqf land, signboards were put up declaring them as a DDA property. You would not be wrong to see similarities between this and the plot of the 2006 Anupam Kher starrer Khosla ka Ghosla.
The underlying political message that one deciphers from the above is how Nehru’s statesmanship helped him negotiate through the most difficult challenge of nation building in the early years of the Indian state. Given the obsession of the BJP to malign Nehru as an apologist to the Muslim community, to the extent of questioning his Hindu pedigree, it must be underlined that it was a committed secularist like Nehru who could earn the confidence of minorities in the face of dire challenges. Statesmanship is the most sophisticated form of politics.
Partha S. Ghosh is a retired JNU professor.