In a nation that proclaims itself a secular democracy, the reality of land-ownership reveals deep fractures-fractures aligned not simply with class, but with faith. For India’s Muslims, the story of land is one of systematic dispossession, legal marginalisation, and historic neglect. The numbers alone speak volumes: between 1949 and 1970 the government of Uttar Pradesh seized approximately 5,377,800 acres (21,763 km²) of land owned by Muslims and redistributed vast portions to Hindus.

Today, this legacy is mirrored in institutional assaults on Muslim communal-land-endowments (waqfs) and in the stark fact that roughly 48 % of Muslim households possess less than one acre of land (versus less than 26 % of Hindu households). Muslims are not simply poor-they are structurally land-poor. At the same time, the Indian state holds some 15,531 km² (~1.55 lakh km²) and private Hindu ownership dominates. What emerges is a land-architecture in which minority communities-especially Muslims-are relegated to the margins.

The decades immediately after independence were marked by land-reform and redistribution. In Uttar Pradesh alone, some 5.37 million acres of........

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