The Minority Report

The challenge to waqf reform is how to build consensus on State oversight of waqf properties without violating minority rights

- Tanvir Aeijaz

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”.