‘Minority communities must take care of each other’: Mamata urges people to maintain peace after Murshidabad violence
Urging people not to trust the BJP and its allies, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee alleged that they want to incite riots. Kolkata: Alleging that the BJP and the RSS initiated a “vicious false campaign” in West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Saturday urged the people to maintain peace, and stated that the majority and the minority communities must take care of each other. Referring to the violence in Murshidabad, Banerjee said “these forces” were using the backdrop of “an unfortunate incident” that happened “on provocation” to play divisive politics. “BJP and its allies have suddenly become very aggressive in West Bengal. These allies include RSS. I have not taken the RSS’s name earlier, but I am being forced now to identify them. Together, they all have initiated a vicious false campaign in the State,” she alleged in the open letter, which was made public late in the night. “These forces are using the backdrop of an unfortunate incident that happened on provocation. They are using the backdrop to play divisive politics. They are planning to play the ‘divide and rule’ game. This is sinister,” she added. Asserting that the “criminals” behind the riots are being strongly dealt with, Banerjee said that at the same time “mutual mistrust and distrust” must be avoided. “The majority and the minority communities must work together and take care of each other,” she said. “They had originally planned to use the Ram Navami day for playing with fire, but the Ram Navami celebrations in West Bengal have been most peaceful. Then they tried to use some subsequent matters relating to the agitations against the Waqf (Amendment) Act,” she alleged. Urging people not to trust the BJP and its allies, she alleged that they want to incite riots. “…riots can affect everyone. We love all. We want to stay together. We condemn riots. We are against riots. They want to divide us for some narrow electoral politics,” she said. The CM said she has taken “strong actions” for maintaining law and order and saving human lives and dignity. “Two police officers-in-charge have been removed. Police is investigating. Further actions are being taken. Please remember that riots are created neither by Hindus, nor by Muslims, riots are engineered by criminals. Strict actions will be taken against all criminals. No one will be spared,” she said. Banerjee claimed that protest rallies are not allowed in the BJP-ruled UP, Bihar, MP and Rajasthan, but no such anti-Constitutional dispensation is there in West Bengal. “When they use bulldozers in UP, agony comes. In contrast, in West Bengal, when someone suffers, we help. That is our approach in West Bengal. No community will be disturbed or adversely affected in West Bengal. We strongly condemn such disturbances,” she said. “Those who create riots always come from outside and then go away. We from inside have to now fight against their bad deeds. We shall together survive and win,” she said. Banerjee said her “detractors”, the BJP, want to divert people’s attention from the burning problem of price rise, and hence they have taken recourse to “inflammatory propaganda”. “Jealousy has no cure. The jealous cannot go beyond their narrow vision. Our detractors do not want employment, development, creativity – their only interest is to ensure price rise, to enhance costs of medicines, hospital charges and insurance premium, to increase the price of petrol, diesel and even domestic cooking gas,” she said. “Finally, my appeal to everyone again is: stay calm, stay united. Do not give in to mistrust and distrust. Do not be diverted by their false communal rhetoric,” she said. Three people were killed, several others injured, and numerous properties were vandalised during protests over the Waqf (Amendment) Act in Murshidabad last week. Courtesy : News Nine Note: This news is originally published on https://newsnine.com/bha and is used purely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes, especially human rights.
Waqf Amendment Act: State Oversight Vs Minority Rights
The challenge to waqf reform is how to build consensus on State oversight of waqf properties without violating minority rights Way back in 1929, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi wrote in Young India that “numerical strength savours of violence when it acts in total disregard of any strongly felt opinion of minority”. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar stated resolutely in the Constituent Assembly debates that “rights of minorities should be absolute rights. They should not be subject to consideration as to what another party (read nation) may like to do to minorities within its jurisdiction”. In the West, John Stuart Mill warned that representative democracy, with all its political and moral trappings, is susceptible to the ‘‘tyranny of the majority’’, and so in the interest of democratic principles, nations must determine the limits of collective interference in the life of the individual. The rights of the minority can be hollowed out by the acts of transgressions committed by governments and by those of the social majority, engendering both social and political tyranny. The three political philosophers; Gandhi, Ambedkar and Mill, quoted above, find themselves on common ground arguing for institutionalisation of minority rights as sinews of democratic equality and a good republic. The Waqf Act, 2025, de-institutionalises the minority rights as enshrined in the Indian Constitution, violates several provisions of fundamental rights, including the principles of secularism, threatens the moral consciousness to fraternity and tolerance in India, and panders to the “majoritarianism” of the Hindutva project in the name of ‘‘one country, one people, and one nation’’. Through the Waqf Act, the government intends to bring in a strong State-regulatory-regime to control and manage the Waqf properties owned by Muslims and to settle the disputes of such properties. Waqf, an Arabic-Urdu word, literally meaning ‘‘detention’’, but in common parlance is the religious-cum-charitable endowments, held in God’s (Allah’s) name, which is donated particularly by Muslims as part of religious rite. The waqf properties in India, currently exceeding 8.72 lakh, includes all kinds of property such as mosques, kabristans (graveyards), maqbaras, idgahs, dargahs, khanqahs, anjumans, imambaras and ashoorkhanas. The law empowers the government, through the district collector, to determine the legitimacy of waqf property. Earlier the determination, in cases of disputes, was done by the Waqf Tribunal, a quasi-judicial process. But with the new law, it is left to the vagaries and arbitrariness of the district collector, whose impartiality and integrity seem to be in short supply of late. Interestingly, the disputes will mean an immediate handover of the waqf properties to the government until the cases are solved, which may take many years. Those opposing the law say that it is the classic suborn-case of waqf property grab by the government. The Constitution guarantees right to freedom of religion to every citizen, to the extent that one can freely profess, practise and propagate religion, of course, subject to public order, morality and health. It also gives the religious communities the right to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes and to manage their ‘‘own affairs’’ in religious matters. Further, the Constitution protects the interests of minorities by giving them the right to conserve their culture. As arranged in the Constitution, the architecture of fundamental rights, particularly of the religious/linguistic minorities, explicates a certain degree of autonomy that the minorities must claim when conjoined with their right to freedom and equality in the larger framework of deepening of democracy. Muslims in India, as a religious minority, are numerically smaller when compared to Hindus in general. They remain a non-dominant group with its symbols and values inadequately, or perhaps not, represented in the mainstream civil society; and have a distinct culture, which they want to preserve. Waqf is a part of this distinct religious and cultural ethos in Islam, not only in India but across continents, and Muslims believe that its practice is an essential religious obligation to stave off inequality, pain and suffering, prevalent in their community. The acceptance of “legal pluralism” in the legal system in India allows the prevalence of personal laws of different religions based on the definition of law in the Constitution—Article 13 (3)(a)—which explicitly explains that law includes, among others, the customs or usage having (non)legislative sources. Legal pluralism in the backdrop, waqf disputes require to be settled, not by the district collector, but by the provisions of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, which in no way subsumes the overriding effect of the State laws. It has been observed that the Parliament, since independence, has remained keen to enact a comprehensive law for the regulation of waqf properties. However, no such effort is made for the majority community’s religious or charitable endowments. In the present Act, the State intervenes in the Muslim personal laws through disproportionally empowering the local administrative and revenue officials to oversee the management of the waqf properties. Certainly, the intent of the new law is the State’s control and management of waqf properties at the peril of minority rights, especially the constitutional right to property, of Muslims. The removal of the concept of ‘‘waqf by use’’, which essentially means that a property can be considered as waqf through its use as waqf, is also decried as an effort by the government to de-notify large swathes of land on the basis of suspicion of the original declaration called waqfnama. Most of the waqf properties are verbally donated, much before the documentation system became the standard norm. In such circumstances and as under the present law, Muslims are bound to lose a large number of waqf properties. In the federal scheme of the Constitution, waqf as charitable and religious endowments is present in the concurrent list (entry 28) and burials and burial grounds in the State list (entry 10). The central Act, laying down the framework of Waqf Council and Waqf Boards, is seen as yet another act of centralisation by the incumbent government. It is interesting to note that some of the non-Bharatiya Janata Party State governments, particularly West Bengal, have