Not Just Murshidabad: Why Bengal’s Muslim Community Has Quietly Been Protesting Against the Waqf Law

Kolkata: The man on the loudspeaker was talking about Indian secularism, which protected the rights of minorities, which ensured Hindus and Muslims lived side by side, which had no room for a law like the Waqf (Amendment) Act 2025. Why, when Hindus had no one to cremate them, their Muslim neighbours would help out. “Hindu-Muslim bhai bhai,” he said, trying to rouse the crowd that stood around the street corner. A few people echoed him, “Hindu-Muslim bhai bhai.”

Hindus and Muslims are brothers.

When the meeting broke for evening prayers, the speaker warned his audience against “indiscipline” as they made their way to the mosque. The protests must be kept peaceful even though a “certain class” of people would like to see trouble, he said. Still, as darkness fell, rapid action forces marched down village roads near Barasat town in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district.

It was the evening of April 11. The arterial road running through North 24 Parganas was dotted with protests against the Waqf Amendment Act. Groups of protesters were clustered on the road, quiet but tense. They held banners and Indian flags as they listened to speeches made at mosques and street corners.

Over 200 km away, in Bengal’s Murshidabad district, there had been trouble that evening. Two men, father and son, had been killed by a violent mob. A third man was shot dead – his family says it was the police who opened fire on protesters. Two days later, protests led by the Indian Secular Front, a party largely representing Muslims in Bengal, turned violent in Bhangar, on the outskirts of Kolkata, with reports of arson and vandalism as crowds clashed with the police.

After Murshidabad, discussions about the Waqf protests in Bengal have been shaped by headlines about violent groups and the alleged role of Bangladesh immigrants in the border districts, or about “chokranto” – sinister conspiracies that are often invoked by the ruling and opposition parties. The ruling Trinamool Congress, and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main opposition, have blamed each other for polarising voters ahead of assembly polls next year. In its latest spin on Murshidabad, the BJP has compared the violence to the terrorist attack on tourists in Pahalgam.

BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari with others as the party observes 'Hindu Shahid Diwas' for those killed in the violence at Murshidabad over the Waqf (Amendment) Act, in Kolkata, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Photo: PTI

Lost in the din are the anxieties of a minority that sees the Waqf amendments as a legal means to further disempower them.

For Sabir Ahamed, convenor of Know Your Neighbour, a Kolkata-based community organisation, the Waqf Amendment Act has brought back memories of 2019. That year, the Union government had proposed a National Register of Citizens that would require all Indians to produce documents to prove citizenship. This was accompanied by the government’s move to bring the now-implemented Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which introduced, for the first time, a religious qualifier for Indian citizenship. Taken together, the two laws were seen as a legal pathway to stripping Indian Muslims of citizenship.

Bengal saw months of sustained protest against the laws, especially among Muslims, who took to the streets because “we quickly realised that we would lose citizenship”, says Ahamed. The Waqf legislation, with its rejection of the orality that is embedded in Islamic laws, and with its insistence on documents to prove rights of use and ownership, has raised existential fears once again.

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Countrywide figures suggest Waqf properties are concentrated in graveyards, agricultural land and mosques. In other words, land tied up with death, food and faith, whose nature and uses may be revisited by the new law. Bengal has 80,480 immovable properties listed in the Waqf Assets Management System of India, second only to Uttar Pradesh. There are no updated records but agricultural land accounts for about 75% of Waqf properties in Bengal, according to Syed Irfan Sher, president of the All India Mutawalli Association, which represents Waqf caretakers, and a lawyer based in Kolkata.

Muslims form about a third of Bengal’s population – 27%, going by the 2011 census. A report published in 2016 found 80% of rural Muslims lived in abject poverty; close to half worked in agriculture or as daily wage labourers. Little seems to have changed since then.

No wonder that on April 11, while all eyes were trained on Murshidabad, there were quiet protests across several districts. But meetings on the Waqf amendment did not begin or end on April 11. They started months before the Bill was passed in parliament. They continue as a worried minority grapples with the consequences of the new law. Apart from a few marquee rallies, many of these mobilisations have taken place outside the party ambit, driven by civil society organisations, local mosque committees and religious bodies.

Also read: Murshidabad Violence Not Just a Communal Clash but 'Deeply Organised': Fact-Finding Report

Rafay Siddiqui, Kolkata secretary of the All India Milli Council, says they started holding meetings in August last year, after the Waqf (Amendment) Bill was introduced in parliament and sent to a joint parliamentary committee for consideration. After urging chief minister Mamata Banerjee to pass a resolution in the state assembly against the bill, which finally happened in December 2024, the Council turned its attention to educating the community about its clauses. Meetings in Kolkata drew attendance from several surrounding districts. Still, these were low-key indoor affairs. Siddiqui says that they felt it was best to avoid the ruckus of street protests.

Other organisations have been careful to lay down guidelines for public protests. Sarfraz Adil and Mohammad Qamaruzzaman, both community leaders, said that, at meetings to raise awareness about the law, audiences were also instructed on how to protest – do not block roads, do not hold up traffic, keep to democratic methods of agitation. In April, Friday prayers at neighbourhood mosques in Kolkata were reportedly followed by discussions about the law. But these only lasted 15 minutes and took place with police permission, says Shafqat Raheem, a government school teacher.

The Union government has tried to create the impression that protests against the law are directed against Hindus, says Qamaruzzaman, who is part of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board in Bengal. In the wake of the Pahalgam attack, the organisation suspended protests for three days in solidarity with the victims. “These protests are not against our Hindu brothers, they are to protect our own rights,” he explains.

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If anxieties were brewing when the bill was introduced, they increased after the joint parliamentary committee’s visit to Kolkata in January. The committee has claimed exhaustive consultation went into the amendments – 36 meetings with experts and stakeholders, detailed study visits to 10 cities, including Kolkata, the receipt of over 97 lakh memoranda. In Kolkata, stakeholders who met the committee paint a different picture. It was meant to “hoodwink” people that there had been consultation over the bill, says Ahamed. “A waste of taxpayers’ money,” says Adil.

According to Ahamed, the meeting was slated for January 12, at a hotel near the Kolkata airport. Delegates from Jharkhand and various parts of Bengal were to attend. “Then it was cancelled just before that date, but they didn’t tell us,” says Ahamed. When the meeting was rescheduled for January 20, he was informed at the last minute once again. This time, it was to be held at ITC Sonar, a five-star business hotel in Kolkata. There were elaborate arrangements – the premises teeming with central security forces, and food for all the invitees. But many of those who had planned to travel for the consultation were not able to make it, given the short notice.

Ahamed went, having prepared a detailed presentation. Those appearing before the committee were told to bring 40 copies of their depositions. “Poor illiterate people were expected to make copies and distribute depositions to people sitting in five-star hotels,” says Ahamed. He waited four hours to get two minutes to put forward his arguments. Others, such as illiterate mutawallis from rural areas who were already emotionally charged, just could not make their point, Ahamed recalls.

What stung the most was that people who had no stake in the matter were given a proper hearing. “They [the committee]  invited people who know nothing about waqf, who can’t even pronounce ‘waqf’,” says Ahamed. “They were just there to support [the Bill].”

These misgivings are echoed by Adil and Siddiqui, who had also gone for the meeting. Neither can shake off the suspicion that the meeting was fixed to project support for the Bill and sweep dissenting views under the carpet. Adil, a homoeopathic doctor who runs an organisation called the Socio-Economic Reform Foundation, which works on health and social welfare projects, had felt it was important to go. The Waqf amendments would affect community welfare, after all. Adil got just five minutes to speak. “It seemed even the BJP legislators on the committee agreed with the logic of my arguments,” he says. This was rare.

Adil says he was invited to Delhi for further discussions with Jagadambika Pal, the chairman of the committee. He was told this was only possible after Pal returned from Kolkata to Delhi, on January 21. On January 22, he opened the papers to find committee members had until 4 pm that day to submit their suggestions. There would be no time to hear objections and suggestions.

The Wire has reached out to the committee to ask for its comments on the matter. This article will be updated once a response is received.

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At the heart of the protests in Bengal lies the fear that the new law will be used to take over the lands of minorities. “The Union government’s leaders talk about ‘land jihad’, and try to rouse the majority community,” says Qamaruzzaman, referring to the BJP’s repeated allegations that the Waqf system was used to grab land.

Sher balks at government claims that Waqf properties had increased by 116% after amendments to the Waqf law were introduced in 2013. “There has been no survey, how did you get this figure?” he demands. While the Waqf act of 1995 had mandated a survey of all Waqf lands, this remains incomplete in most states. In Bengal, Sher says, the survey never started at all, with the state Waqf board claiming it was understaffed.

According to the WAMSI portal, there are 8.72 lakh immovable properties registered with state Waqf boards across the country. Community organisations in Bengal suggest these figures are inflated, and question the counting method. They point instead to the Sachar committee report, published in 2006, which put the total number of registered Waqf properties at 4.9 lakh. However, the report also said Bengal had over 1.48 lakh registered properties – the highest in the country and ahead of Uttar Pradesh at around 1.22 lakh. It also noted that records were poorly preserved, “prone to the vagaries of weather, mutilation and loss”.

The new law effectively insists on a re-registration of all registered Waqf properties on a new central online portal, complete with details of ownership, creation and land deeds, where available. It also does away with the provision of waqf-by-user, going forward. These are properties exempt from producing formal deeds, recognised as waqf because they have been used for religious or charitable purposes for a long time. Only those properties already registered as waqf-by-user before the act commenced will retain their status as such. Even this may be challenged if the land is claimed as government property.

While the Supreme Court has stayed the abolition of waqf-by-user for now, there is panic in Bengal. The creation of Waqfs, or the dedication of property in the name of god, to be used for the benefit of the community, has largely been a matter of good faith. For instance, property was often pledged orally for mosques or graveyards, with the village as witness and no accompanying title deeds. Many of these are unregistered with the state Waqf board.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during a meeting with meeting with Muslim religious leaders and others regarding the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, in Kolkata, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Photo: PTI/Swapan Mahapatra

Poverty and low literacy are factors in rural areas, where the idea of Waqf often exists outside bureaucratic formalities. “No one thought of registering with the Waqf board,” says Siddiui. “People had donated land for Waqf out of piety, but they didn’t even know there was a Waqf board.” Others, he says, were too busy trying to eke out a living to have time to go through the arduous process of registering. The gaps are particularly large in districts like Dinajpur, Malda, Murshidabad and South 24 Parganas, where there are “huge pockets of illiteracy”, Siddiqui says.

Then there are ancient Waqf properties, some in use since the Mughal period and earlier, whose records and ownership are lost to time. Community leaders point to large swathes of Waqf property in Malda, once home to the mediaeval sultanate of Gaur, in Murshidabad, the seat of the nawabs, and in Kolkata, briefly named Alinagar by Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah – all traces of Bengal’s storied past.

Community leaders worry that madrasas, schools and hostels owned by the Waqf, providing shelter and education to the poorest in the community,  might now be endangered. But the fear most commonly expressed is the potential loss of graveyards, which have often been the focus of the BJP’s majoritarian politics.  “If they take away our graveyards, where will we be buried?” asks Siddiqui. “Do we buy land? Where is this land available?” In the congested cities of Bengal, they say, there is simply no space.

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If the Centre’s consultations left much to be desired, the state government’s assurances have also rung hollow. As tensions grew in West Bengal, CM Banerjee promised that the Waqf amendments would not be implemented in the state. Then, Murshidabad happened.

Banerjee’s statement has been taken with a rather large pinch of salt. Raheem dismisses it as a “bogus statement”. Ahamed thinks such political promises have been made with one eye on the elections next year.

Sher, for his part, questions the logistics of Banerjee’s promise. “If you don’t follow the central act, you have to pass a state act,” he says. “Are you in any position to pass a state Waqf act?”

Ipsita Chakravarty is an independent journalist.

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