The return of Donald Trump to the White House shows how demagogues the world over are successfully convincing large swathes of voters that their continuing post-pandemic distress will vanish magically if they get rid of that one evil enemy. Trump identified this enemy as illegal immigrants and others whom he ominously called “the enemy within”, which seems to be the American equivalent of the “urban naxal”.

If Israel and India have both created models of virulent masculinity, as Martha Nussbaum wrote, this is derived from the sense of eternal victimhood that Zionist and Hindutva fundamentalists share, and both direct their aggression at Muslims, whom the Christian colonial project had already conveniently vilified.

Since 2014, a series of measures has sought to demonise India’s Muslim community—the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, the criminalisation of triple talaq, and the various jehads from COVID and love jehad to land jehad and vote jehad. Even for the Jharkhand Assembly election campaign, the BJP has aggressively raised the bogey of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants robbing tribal lands and tribal women.

That the spotlight would soon turn on the Waqf Board was never in doubt. Hindutva warriors have always spread the jealous narrative of waqf being the largest property owner after the Railways and Army, a carefully cultivated piece of disinformation. If one considers that the Hindu religious boards in the three States of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana alone control more than 10 lakh acres of land, then the 9.4 lakh acres estimated to be under waqf falls into better perspective; even more so when you consider, as the Congress party’s Rajya Sabha MP Syed Naseer Hussain explains in his interview to Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed in this issue, that even the smallest cemetery and mosque in the country is technically waqf land.

The returns from waqf properties have always been low and not used adequately for the benefit of disadvantaged Muslims. That there is inefficiency and corruption in the management of waqf property is a fact: the 2006 Sachar Committee report had already pointed to it, as it had to the educational, social, and economic backwardness of the Muslim community.

The community has largely been shut out of India’s post-Independence social churn and mobility not only because of historical discriminations, but also because large sections turned inwards and became insular and retrogressive. As the veteran journalist Saeed Naqvi wrote in Being the Other, the average Muslim remains disadvantaged because of “his clerical leadership, which strikes bargains with the political class and keeps the community mired in religion” and “distant from modernity”.

Unfortunately, the community’s overall backwardness becomes fertile ground for the right wing to piously claim that projects such as the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024, are meant to “improve” their living conditions. In reality, there is reason to believe that the Bill’s motivation stems from the baser instinct to “put Muslims in their place”, an objective that has never been a secret since 2014. Just one example will suffice: The Bill wants to appoint non-Muslims to the Central Waqf Council, an inexplicable demand given that no Hindu religious endowment body allows non-Hindus in its governing councils.

There is much that real reform can achieve, but it must be consultative and come with clean hands. Unfortunately, even Jagdambika Pal, the Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee set up to examine the Bill, is accused of riding roughshod over the real stakeholders.

The Muslim response to such “reforms” is captured rather well in this couplet quoted in Naqvi’s book:

Turfatar yeh hai ki apna bhi na jaana

Aur yun hee apna apna kehke humko sabse beygana kiya.

(The irony is that you never considered me your own

But you claimed me as yours until I became a stranger to everyone else.)

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Parliament Nishikant Dubey has stirred controversy with his ‘ISI and China link’ remarks about those who have sent suggestions to the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on the Waqf (Amendment) Bill.

Dubey has been accused of trying to tarnish the image of Muslims in the name of people making suggestions to the JCP. A Muslim body – the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz (AIPMM) has raised objections and written to the JPC seeking a probe against the BJP leader’s comments.

“There has been an attempt to tarnish the image of Muslims in the name of people making suggestions to the JCP. The conduct of the member must be probed. We understand Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set up the panel on the Waqf Bill with noble intentions to consider views from various sections,” AIPMM chief Ali Anwar Ansari was quoted as saying in a report by the Indian Express.

Ansari has also been a member of Rajya Sabha has shot off a letter to JPC chairperson and BJP leader Jagdambika Pal.

‘Zakir Naik or foreign powers like the ISI’

In August, Modi government faced opposition while it tried to pass the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2024 in the Parliament. The government finally decided to form a JPC with as many as 21 members to scrutinise the proposed law. Dubey is also one of the members of JPC.

Dubey, in a letter to Pal, had in September sought an investigation by the Union home ministry into the origin of the feedback to the parliamentary panel, according to news agency PTI.

Dubey, a four-time MP, said the number of submissions was “unprecedented” and had set a global record for legislative submissions.

“Fundamentalist groups, individuals like Zakir Naik or foreign powers like the ISI (Pakistan) or China or their proxies may be involved given that 1.25 crore submissions have been received. If such forces are involved, it would be an attempt to manipulate our legislative process, an attack on the very foundations of our parliamentary system and must be treated as a national security issue,” Dubey, the Godda constituency in Jharkhand, had said last week.

We want to know on what grounds the member made such a statement.

The amended bill provides for a broad-based composition of the Central Waqf Council and the state Waqf boards and ensures the representation of Muslim women and non-Muslims in such bodies. The Wakf (Amendment) Act, 2013 provided that “at least two of the members appointed under sub-clauses (i) to (viii) shall be women.”

“We saw a statement by a committee member (Dubey) that the JCP had received about 1.25 crore suggestions … There was a demand for an investigation of the origin of suggestions as some of them came from those suspected to have a ‘radical Islamic image and alleged links to the ISI’. We want to know on what grounds the member made such a statement,” read the October 3 letter, as per the Indian Express report.

Earlier, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB), the apex body of Muslim clerics in India, had said the volume of response was on expected lines. The AIMPLB junked Dubey’s conspiracy claims, citing an earlier instance when 4.85 crore suggestions were sent to the government after its appeal, according to a report in India Today.