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.)