Shikha Mukerjee | Chronicle of a strategic retreat: Waqf Act shift
The hitch was a gap between the letter and the spirit of promises and laws that was revealed when the Supreme Court stepped in; the Modi 3.0 government has walked back from the brink of acute embarrassment had it continued to defend the law modifying Waqf Act 1995, as it did in the Article 370 case and the sedition case
Retreat is certainly a masterly war manoeuvre if the commanding officer is a brilliant strategist. As a default choice in tight situations, created by a mismanagement of the variables in the field, it points to its use, not as a strategy but as a disorderly and embarrassing scramble to get out of trouble.
To fulfil its promise to its voters, a vote bank committed to the BJP-RSS cause of establishing a State defined by its religion, a Hindu Rashtra, of identifying, investigating and rectifying misdemeanours of Muslim-managed properties and endowments, including mosques, graveyards, madrasas, tombs, orphanages and more, the Narendra Modi 3.0 government had to push through the amendments to the Waqf Act. The pattern was set when the Modi 2.0 government abrogated Article 370 of the Constitution and cancelled the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, changed the law to make “triple talaq” illegal; it was at par with the BJP keeping its promise to build and consecrate the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya.
The hitch was a gap between the letter and the spirit of promises and laws that was revealed when the Supreme Court stepped in; the Modi 3.0 government has walked back from the brink of acute embarrassment had it continued to defend the law modifying Waqf Act 1995, as it did in the Article 370 case and the sedition case. This retreat to avoid an adverse order by the apex court is intriguing. Was it part of a strategy that the Modi 3.0 government conceived, anticipating that first, there would be a deluge of cases filed by interested parties against the Waqf Act of 2025, and second, the Supreme Court would step in and stay implementation of the law?
Was the Modi Sarkar prescient or did it have a premonition that its design for significantly changing the way waqfs are listed, registered and managed would almost immediately be tested for its validity in terms of the Constitution’s protection under Article 26 over fundamental rights? Either way, if the Modi 3.0 government had doubts, it may have been better off postponing its time line to fulfil its campaign promise. It knew well in advance that its proposals for amending the Waqf Act 1995 would be deemed a hostile move by the Opposition as well as the Muslim Personal Law Board. It knew the amendments would be perceived as proof of deepening the polarisation between the majority Hindu community represented by the BJP and the minority Muslim community represented by a rainbow of political and civil society organisations, all of who are in opposition to what they see as attacks on the basic structure of the Constitution and the independence of institutions.
Boiled down to basics, the Waqf Act amendments seem to have been designed to galvanise voters, polarised and those who could be polarised in favour of the BJP, in the poll-bound states of Bihar in 2025 and Kerala, Assam, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu in 2026. All these states have substantial Muslim minority populations and in some of them, like West Bengal, Kerala, Bihar and Assam, there are significant properties controlled/managed as Waqf properties.
The schedule of public protests against the amended Waqf Act was known; the likelihood of heightened tensions and probable confrontations in certain parts of India was not unexpected. The violence, and three deaths, of two Hindus and one Muslim, in West Bengal’s Murshidabad was the worst of it; there were angry protests in other parts of the state as well as across the country, but no deaths. It was easy to connect the violence in West Bengal to polarisation as the dominant divide to its highly competitive politics, where the Trinamul Congress has been branded as synonymous with Muslim appeasement, accused of converting areas into “Bangladesh” along the international border, and the BJP has appointed itself as the protector of the endangered Hindus likely to be reduced to a minority. By invoking the emotionally charged memory of Direct Action Day 1946 in the context of the Murshidabad violence, which in the BJP’s telling was a portent of things to come, the Waqf Act has been weaponised. It will be deployed in the next 11 months before the 2026 Assembly elections.
And then there is the “waqf by user” and management of Waqf Boards’ issues. Where there is property, there is trouble. The link between Waqf and property, especially valuable real estate, is not a canard spread by the Opposition. On the contrary, the link was made public after a series of media reports highlighted that waqfs are the third largest entity to control property in India, after the Railways and the armed forces. The Supreme Court seems to have been especially conscious of the danger, since it warned that it would stay the amended law as it applied to “waqf-by-user” and the appointment of non-Muslims for better management of the properties. Why will a government, that too a minority one that survives on the goodwill of allies, choose to engage in a fight, where retreat is a better option to save face? The politics of polarisation is propelled by a logic of its own. It is trapped in a feedback loop; to appeal to a polarised public, political actors or parties and political institutions behave in more polarised ways.
In the Waqf Act 2025 case, it began with a campaign promise to an already polarised electorate in the hope of scoring better with the support of new converts to the polarisation platform. In the Lok Sabha, an institution where politics is intensely polarised, the way in which the Joint Parliamentary Committee was set up, its conduct and its recommendations to the Modi government was a dead giveaway that polarisation would be welcomed, instead of being considered undesirable. Clearly, the outcome that was expected would be further polarisation that could then be deployed politically for increasing polarisation among the electorate.
The BJP’s unresisting slide towards deepening polarisation based on divisive identity politics of the majority threatened by the minority as a method of consolidating its voter base and increasing its appeal in states that it has failed to capture spells trouble for the Modi government. In the Waqf Act amendments instance, by retreating after the Supreme Court said it would step in, it positioned itself as a victim of the Constitution and the rule of law. It cannot credibly do it again and again, even as pressure will no doubt increase from the already polarised over mosques built on top of temples, Waqfs encroaching on “government” land and the Uniform Civil Code that hangs like a sword over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s head.
Shikha Mukerjee is a senior journalist based in Kolkata