Who Owns the Past?

IN THE BUSTLING heart of New Delhi, a narrow lane leads to another world—the Ugrasen ki Baoli, a stone step­well said to date back to 600CE. Past visiting hours on a warm summer evening, a few tourists sit on top looking down into the darkness of the water of the baoli, 108 steps into the depth of the earth. Though the official visiting hour is till 5.30PM, at the site a board says the baoli is open “from sunrise to sunset”. Around 7PM, the guard asks everyone to vacate the place, leaving the monument to its secrets and legends.

Hidden amid the high rises of central Delhi, several myster­ies—its origin, folklore, the ghost stories, water level—haunt the Baoli, 60m long and 15m in width, flanked by arched stone corridors. A plaque placed near the entrance describes it as an underground structure for the stor­age of water, mainly constructed to cope with seasonal fluctuations in water availability. It says the step­well is said to have been built by Raja Ugrasen, also spelt Agrasen, the forefather of the Agrawal com­munity, and that the architectural features of the baoli resemble those of the Tughlaq or Lodhi period. Al­though there is no historical record, it is believed that it was built by the Agarwal community in the name of their legendary king of Agroha, which is in Haryana’s Hisar district. On the west side of the baoli is a small mosque, half-broken, built in stone and sandstone pillars, with chaitya motifs, used in temples and stupas in Buddhist, Hindu and Jain structures. Alongside the plaque, a board from the Archaeologi­cal Survey of India (ASI) says the monument has been declared to be of national importance under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958. Adding another dimension to its various enigmas is the fact that the Ugrasen ki Baoli, a protected monument, is listed as a Waqf property.

An internal survey carried out by ASI in December last year listed 250 protected monuments in India registered currently as Waqf properties, including several in Delhi like the Jama Masjid at Feroz Shah Kotla, Chhotu Gumti Mukbara in RK Puram, and the Hauz Khas masjid and Idgah.

About five kilometres from the baoli, inside the Lodhi Gar­dens, the iconic city park, is another Waqf property—the octago­nal tomb of Muhammad Shah Sayyid, dating back to the 15th century. Outside it, there is only an ASI board saying it is a pro­tected monument under the 1958 Act. The guard on duty at the tomb tells visitors that it is Muhammad Shah’s tomb. The plaque outside the monument broke and it has not been restored, he says, showing the stone on which it had been placed. One of the oldest structures in the park, the tomb, which has eight graves including that of Muhammad Shah, does not belong to the Lodhis, who succeeded the Sayyids, unlike the other monuments in the park.

“Historical monuments are the pride of the country. Even the Jama Masjid is with ASI. These are lega­cies belonging to the nation. The 9.4 lakh acres of land under control of Waqf boards in the country should be used to benefit poor Muslims and others, with projects like education­al institutions and hospitals,” says Uttarakhand Waqf Board chairper­son Shadab Shams.

In the Delhi Gazette, in 1970, 123 properties, including mosques, grave­yards and madrassas, mostly located in the city’s prime locations, were notified as Waqf. Among them was also the Karbala of Delhi, a Shiite burial ground, which is part of the Shah-e-Mardan, believed to be a 700-year-old shrine. In a colony of an upscale locality, an iron gate opens into a large open space. The silence inside is resounding, broken by the chirping of birds. A young woman sits on the steps of a small white dome-shaped tomb a woman called Mah Khanum, dating back to 1762. A young boy cycles through the ground, lined with trees, shrubs and seasonal flowers. During the month of Muharram, taziyas, paper mâché replicas of the tomb of Imam Hussain, grandson of Prophet Muhammad, are carried by mourning Shias and buried in the sprawling Karbala grounds.

Farther in is a nursery with more graves. We learn later that there are over a hundred graves in the complex. Gardeners water the plants kept under the shade of green nets to save them from the Delhi heat. Someone sitting at a counter in the nursery asks what plants I was looking for. When told that we were from the media, he ensures we are seated in an enclosure with a fan. We are soon served tea and biscuits. There is a steady stream of buyers. A woman asks for jasmine and money plants. We are told after a while that the person who was to meet us was stuck in court and would not be reaching before evening.

The mutawalli or caretaker of the complex, spread over eight acres, including two acres of the Rajdhani nursery, is the Anjuman-e-Haideri, a 277-member committee of which the chief patron is Maulana Syed Kalbe Jawad Naqvi. “The nursery was started in 1954 and is run by the committee,” Bahadur Abbas Naqvi, general secretary of the Anjuman-e-Haideri, says later on phone. According to the committee members, only around 400 square yards near the Dargah gate is under dispute.

The story of the 123 Waqf properties goes back to 1911 when the British shifted the capital from Calcutta to Delhi and acquired property around Raisina Hill, where the villages had mosques, graveyards, madrassas and mausoleums. When the Muslims agitated, the government allowed the management of the reli­gious properties to be given to the Sunni Majlis Auqaf, which later became the Delhi Waqf Board (DWB), while retaining its ownership. After the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) and Land and Development Office (L&DO) challenged the 1970 noti­fication, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi set up the Muzaffar Hussain Burney committee in 1974 to identify Waqf properties in Delhi. The panel identified 274 Waqf properties in Delhi but recommended handing over 123 properties to the DWB. The gov­ernment decided to transfer these to their mutawallis through a perpetual lease for a nominal rent of one rupee per acre.

In 2014, the Congress-led UPA government denotified the properties and approved their transfer to DWB. Nine years later, the Modi government said the DWB can at best be custodian of the properties, not the owner, following the Board’s plea against its inspection after the L&DO decided to take over the properties.

“With the Waqf Act, 2025, government is saying that if you have any Waqf property, register it. As far as historical sites under ASI are concerned, unless they are used for any religious purpose or there is any document showing it is Waqf, the Waqf has no jurisdiction. Half of Delhi’s Nizamuddin is under litigation,” says Shalini Ali, convenor, Muslim Rashtriya Manch, an RSS-backed organisation.

In Karnataka’s historic town of Srirangapatna, V Shoba finds government schools, temples, museums and old farms listed as Waqf properties, sparking protests and legal confusion

R RANGANNA, A 60-SOMETHING farmer from Srirangapatna, had never imagined that he would have to fight to prove that his four-and-a-half-acre patch of land was his alone. For the past several months, he has been struggling to understand how the land his grandfather had tilled—red loam near the ca­nal, planted with sugarcane, paddy and a few scraggly coconut trees—had suddenly become property of the Waqf Board. “We have always been here,” he says. “Through the floods and the droughts. Even when paddy prices dropped.”

He is not alone. Over the past few months, farmers, shopkeep­ers, and even the staff at the town’s government museum have all discovered something curious in their Record of Rights, Tenancy and Crops (RTC) documents—the name of the Karnataka State Waqf Board quietly inserted into Column No 11, the section nor­mally reserved for encumbrances, loans, or legal disputes. The Tipu Armoury, the Sri Chamarajendra Government Museum, and swathes of fertile land along the Cauvery—tracts that had always been considered government or private property—were now suddenly appearing as Waqf assets.

Dozens of affected buildings, like the relocated Tipu Armoury, which had been shifted 98 metres by engineers to make way for the Mysuru-Bengaluru railway line, are national heritage sites. Others include a temple, a government school, and ancestral farm land.

The old town of Srirangapatna, steeped in layers of conquest, rebellion and stone, has long been a place where the past presses up against the present. But lately, history isn’t just knocking— it is claiming ownership. At first, no one quite knew what to make of it. How could government buildings and temples—the Chikkamma temple in Mahadevapura, the government school in Chandagalu—be claimed by a religious trust meant to administer mosques and dargahs? But as the records trickled in, each one revised under the irrevocable authority of a 2014-15 mutation entry, it became clear that something larger was underway. Lands in Kasaba Hobli. Fields in Kirangur. Hillsides in Dodda Harohalli. Survey numbers once belonging to farmers, some dead, some still digging with bent backs, were now legally tethered to a religious board many of them had never interacted with.

Few received notices. Fewer still understood what they were looking at when they did. In many cases, the only clue was a single line in Column 11: “Karnataka State Waqf Board”. The implication: whatever else the record said, this land now fell under divine trusteeship—and not the kind you could negotiate with at the local tehsildar’s office. As villagers and Hindu outfits organised a total bandh on January 20, tehsildar Parashuram Sattigeri implored farmers to remain calm, em­phasising that his office issued no recent notifications validat­ing the Waqf Board’s claims. He asked those in possession of property documents to present them for verification.

This was not an isolated storm. October 2024 had brought Waqf Adalats across Karnataka, and with them, a wave of fear. In Honawad, in Vijayapura district, word spread that 1,500 acres of farmland were being claimed as Waqf. Protests followed, some violent. In Savanur, rumours sparked stone-pelting, injuries, and the familiar churn of communal anxiety. Across the state, from Haveri to Kalaburagi, farmers began checking their RTCs with the urgency of a medical diagnosis.

Beneath the surface lay old law. In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that property once declared Waqf would remain so, regardless of later grants or reforms. And in Karnataka, where successive governments had redistrib­uted land through the Inam Abolition Acts and Land Reforms legislation with the slogan “land to the tiller”, that posed a problem. What happens when land, lawfully redistributed to cultivators half-a-century ago, is declared retrospectively sacred?

The government knew of the dilemma as early as 2017. The Law Department, quoting the Supreme Court, argued that even if land had been granted through reform laws, it remained Waqf in essence. That same year, the Minori­ties Welfare Department instructed the Waqf Board to begin the process of reclaiming such land—starting with identification, then muta­tion. The orders were clear: recover Waqf land, even if it had passed into private hands through government-sanctioned processes. The Bharati­ya Janata Party (BJP) has been quick to point out that this effort to recover lost religious property could mutate into something else entirely—a quiet, creeping form of dispossession, carried out in legalese, buried in the margins of a docu­ment most people do not read until it is too late.

In 2012, the Karnataka State Minorities Commission unveiled a report that cast a long shadow over the Waqf Board’s operations. The findings were staggering: approximately 29,000 acres of Waqf land had been illicitly repurposed for commercial endeavours, a misappropria­tion that implicated a cadre of influential fig­ures. The report did not shy away from naming names; among those accused were senior politi­cians and former ministers, individuals whose public service now stood tainted by allegations of self-serving transactions.

The ramifications of these revelations reached the halls of Lok Sabha where Union Minority Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju, while introducing the Waqf (Amendment) Bill 2024, underscored the gravity of the situation. He referenced the Anwar Manippady com­mittee report, highlighting that out of 54,000 acres registered with the Waqf Board, 27,000 acres remained unregistered and, alarm­ingly, 29,000 acres of the registered land had been embezzled by prominent in­dividuals, including senior politicians.

Karnataka has taken a firm stand against the Centre’s Waqf Bill, passing a resolution in the Assembly rejecting the proposed legislation. The resolu­tion, moved by the ruling Congress government, argues that the Bill un­dermines the federal structure by cen­tralising powers that rightly belong to state Waqf Boards. Karnataka Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister HK Patil, while introducing the reso­lution, emphasised that the Bill en­croaches on the state’s constitutional authority to manage Waqf properties. The move has been framed as a defence of state rights and minority institutions, with the government asserting that existing mechanisms within the Karnataka Waqf Board are sufficient for oversight and reform. The resolution sig­nals growing friction between the state and the Centre over con­trol of religious endowments, especially in a politically charged environment where Waqf land claims are already stirring local protests and legal scrutiny.

By any measure, the Karnataka Waqf Board is one of the state’s largest landholders—at least on paper. It currently has 1,07,651 acres of land in its control, managed by around 40,840 religious and charitable institutions, including dargahs, mosques, grave­yards, and orphanages. Of this, 90,000 acres are under litigation and nearly 85,000 acres have allegedly been encroached upon, according to Syed Muhammad Ali Al-Hussaini, who was recently elect­ed as the new chairperson of the Kar­nataka State Waqf Board. Over time, the Board has also had to surrender thousands of acres due to the Inams Abolition Act, the Land Reforms Act, and largescale infrastructure proj­ects such as the Almatti Dam.

In Srirangapatna, what resi­dents see as a quiet expropriation, the Board sees as a long-overdue restoration. Whether through compensation, court rulings, or simple bureaucratic rectification, Waqf authorities believe they are only reclaiming what was always meant to be held in perpetual trust. The problem is that the past is not always a stable foundation. In a state where land reform once stood for liberation and docu­ments were supposed to bring clarity, the Waqf Board’s claims have brought neither. Instead, they have opened a different kind of dispute—one where history is no longer something to preserve but something to possess.

Indian MuslimsKarbalaNew DelhiPublic propertyreligious rightsSri Chamarajendra Government MuseumSrirangapatnaUgrasen ki BaoliWaqf Act