New Delhi. The Modi government at the Center, while cutting down on the autocratic conditions of the Waqf Board, on 2 August 2024, the cabinet approved a total of 40 amendments in the Act. Amid the uproar of the opposition, the Modi government had sent the Waqf Amendment Bill to the JPC. The report shows a total of 45 such incidents in which the Waqf Board had occupied overnight. According to the report, the Waqf Board has also occupied 1 hotel, 12 temples, 18 agricultural/residential land, three railway lands, 9 residential buildings and 2 heritage sites. The report says that currently there are about 866 thousand acres of Waqf properties across India. At the same time, the maximum properties are in BJP-ruled states. If the bill becomes a law, then the power to take decisions in the matter will go from the Waqf Tribunal to the District Magistrates.
There is a Central Waqf Board and 32 boards along with Shia and Sunni Waqf Boards in almost every state of the country. The condition of the Waqf Board in the country is such that it has the largest amount of land after the Army and the Railways. According to the report of Waqf Management System India, all the Waqf Boards of the country today have a total of 8 lakh 54 thousand 509 properties, which are spread over more than 8 lakh acres of land.
In the year 2024, the Hyderabad-based Waqf Board had declared the 5-star Marriott Hotel as its property. In this case, the Waqf Board had filed a petition in the High Court on 27 April 2024. In this way, last month in July, a signboard of Waqf property was arbitrarily installed at the Mukta Devi temple. In this way, the famous Meetha Baba Math in Aligarh was taken over with fake documents. Hindus protested against the Waqf Board’s occupation of the land around the Mahadev temple in Wadanage village of Kolhapur, Maharashtra. In the same way, lands were taken over at places across the country including Jaunpur, Varanasi, Mathura, Lucknow, Bengaluru, Bet Dwarka, Udupi, Ayodhya, Dungarpur, Vellore Ernakulam, Jalandhar, Ranipet.