The waqf dilemma: On record or off the record

How well a government manages ‘records’ is a contentious issue, but the Madhya Pradesh government concedes that there is a mismatch between ‘revenue records’ and records maintained by the state waqf board.

Both the board and the revenue department are administered by personnel appointed by the state government. Yet, revenue records have not been updated over the past 20 years. What is even more startling is that in the revenue records of Madhya Pradesh, there is no mention of waqf.

The department, while digitising records, provided for only two columns — government and private. The confusion has led to 90 per cent of waqf properties in the state being under litigation or shown as encroachments, concedes Sanawar Patel, chairman of the MP Waqf Board.

A public interest litigation (PIL) filed before the Indore bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court in December 2024 also claimed that while the waqf board has a record of 1,064 properties in Ujjain, none of them are listed as waqf in the revenue records.

Yet this massive mismatch remained a ‘secret’ until January 2025, when the state government ‘acquired’ 5.27 acres of land — described as waqf property in the board’s records — to expand the Mahakal Lok Corridor, a Rs 8,600-crore project around the Mahakaleshwar temple. One of the 12 jyotirlingas according to Hindu beliefs, Ujjain is scheduled to host a Kumbh mela in 2028, necessitating quick completion of this mega project.

In the process of acquiring the land, the government demolished over 250 properties — including the century-old Takia mosque — on 12 January.

The government overruled objections raised by a bureaucrat, who referred to a 1985 document that established the existence of a Muslim graveyard and a mosque with a capacity to accommodate 2,000 devotees on the plot.

Over the years, influential builders with political connections illegally sold some of the acquired plots for a residential colony, resulting in more than 250 permanent structures being razed in January 2025.

An official suggested that an ‘NOC’ (no-objection certificate) should be secured from the waqf board — but the suggestion was ignored. The board, packed with nominees of the state government, looked the other way.

Neither did the board protest, nor did it appeal against the demolitions.

The issue was not referred to a tribunal, either, as envisaged in the Waqf Act as amended in 2013. The board did not even complain when the government bought the silence of shopkeepers and flat owners by paying compensation directly to the beneficiaries of the waqf and not to the board. 

Patel, a BJP leader known to be close to the chief minister (who hails from Ujjain) said, “I do what the party orders me to do, because I am here because of the party.”

He did admit that the board had written to the Ujjain district administration, asking it not to disburse compensation to the beneficiaries (who had leased the land from the board).

Supreme Court lawyer Anas Tanwir says the Ujjain case “reflects a broader national concern of political interference in waqf properties”.

“The acquisition is a direct violation of the Waqf Act, 1995,” said lawyer Sohail Khan, who has challenged the Ujjain demolitions in the Madhya Pradesh High Court.

Most waqf land and properties have been declared ‘non-waqf’ by the revenue department, confirm lawyers in Bhopal dealing with disputes related to waqf.

“Imagine a government which failed to update its revenue records for 20 years in the state arguing in Parliament that waqf boards are mismanaged,” exclaimed one of the lawyers.

Significantly, the Madhya Pradesh Waqf Board has conducted two surveys of its properties so far, first in the late 1960s and thereafter in the 1980s, to arrive at the figure of 23,000 waqf properties in the state. In subsequent years, it also digitised its records and geotagged them for better identification.

Lawyers, however, allege that revenue records are outdated — often based on surveys conducted before 1947!

Despite the 1954 Waqf Act making it mandatory for the department to make relevant changes in its land records based on the waqf board’s surveys, revenue records were never updated. The lawyers say that Ujjain alone had 1,014 waqf properties as per the 1985 gazette, but none of them is listed as waqf in revenue records.

In fact, of these 1,014 properties, 368 are now listed as government-owned, 454 as private and records for the remaining 192 properties are either incomplete or missing entirely, stated a PIL filed in December 2024 by Ujjain-based lawyer Aashar Warsi.

Digitisation of land records by the government, which started in the late 2000s, has compounded the confusion instead of streamlining and regularising the data. Since the software offered just two columns — ‘government’ and ‘private’ — properties mentioned as being waqf-owned in old (and even existing) revenue records were moved to the ‘government’ column!

Despite multiple reminders from the state waqf board and the Union ministry of minority welfare between 2001 to 2023, advising the Madhya Pradesh government to make corrections in its revenue records, it “turned a deaf ear”, allowing the “plundering of waqf properties to continue unabated”, alleges Warsi’s petition. If the government had cared to sync both the data sets, the plundering of waqf properties could have been averted, feels Warsi.

Bhopal’s historic Moti Mosque, built in 1857, is also registered as a government property — which is absurd, exclaims Masood Khan, member of a community group campaigning for the restoration of waqf properties.

Several such examples are cited by lawyers and activists in Bhopal.

In January 2021, the Madhya Pradesh government authorised an NGO — which had BJP leaders as its trustees — to acquire 1.2 hectares (2.88 acres) of waqf land in Bhopal. The site, in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood, was designated as a graveyard in the revenue records and had half a dozen graves on it.

Before the waqf board’s tribunal or any court could intervene and stay the acquisition, the NGO had built a wall around it and then announced plans to construct a community hall there. The authorities imposed prohibitory orders under section 144 of the CrPC and deployed a large contingent of policemen to prevent any protest.

In March 2025, media outlet Al Jazeera was told by a waqf board member, “The Madhya Pradesh Police headquarters, a Bhopal Police control room, a traffic police station and many other government offices are constructed on prime land owned by the waqf board.”

More than 100 graveyards have disappeared from the state capital, which once had nearly 140 of them, he added.

Supreme Court lawyer Mehmood Pracha concurred — but noted it was hardly a state-specific phenomenon, or exceptional.

“The mismatch of waqf land records with revenue records is a common phenomenon across the country,” said Pracha.