The passage of the contentious Waqf Amendment Bill 2025 in the two Houses of Parliament after two days of marathon debates in both chambers has created a lot of noise and arguments over the legislation. The BJP, its supporters and the TV media have hailed the Waqf Bill, now an Act, as a much-needed reform of the Waqf system that will ensure transparency and better management of Waqf properties. But the Opposition, Muslim organisations, religious scholars, legal experts, and ordinary Muslims call it a violation of the minority community’s constitutional rights. The conflicting public discourse also reflects the Waqf Bill debate in Parliament, which was divided on ideological lines.

A clutch of petitions in the Supreme Court challenging the constitutional validity of the Waqf Act, which the court will hear on April 16, argue that the new law violates the Court’s own pronouncements of “once a Waqf, always a Waqf” to deprive the Muslim community of age-old tracts of Waqf lands and facilitate their conversion to private or government property. Pleas by some organisations point out that at the heart of the controversial law is an attempt to stamp control over huge tracts of Waqf properties, which have belonged to the minority community for centuries. They contend that the Act, by expanding state control over Waqf assets, breaches the SC’s 1954 judgement, which held that “transferring control of religious property to secular authorities is an infringement of religious and property rights”.

Parliament’s law-making authority with respect to Waqf, or any other matter, is beyond doubt. But what is problematic is the........

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