The Waqf (Amendment) Act 2025 is an exercise in premeditated bad faith. Its main provisions are designed to denotify historical and hitherto recognised but undocumented Muslim charitable endowments to give government officials sweeping powers to derecognise and reclassify waqf property and to pack Waqf Boards and the Central Waqf Council with non-Muslims. On April 16, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court was poised to issue an interim order against these three features of the Act. It agreed to postpone the order to hear the government’s case on May 5 on the assurance that no waqf would have its status changed till that hearing.
We must hope that the apex court stands by its position that the Act infringes on the constitutional right of Muslims to practise their faith and maintain and run their religious and cultural institutions. The court’s record, both as a constitutional watchdog and as the ultimate guarantor of a citizen’s civil liberties, has been less than robust over the past decade. But even as we wait for the constitutionality of this Act to be tested, it’s worth reflecting on the way in which a systematically majoritarian state tests the very idea of representative democracy.
There are no direct democracies in the real world. Even the smallest state is too large to be run by an assembly of all its citizens. Every democracy finds ways of delegating the will of its citizens through elections to executives, legislators, sometimes even judges, who then represent them. Nearly every democracy is based on the conceit that aggregating the votes of individual citizens will produce political majorities that will, inturn, produce legitimate governments. The constitutional arrangements through which this legitimacy is produced vary. There are first-past-the-post systems like India’s andsystems of proportional representation like Germany’s but electorally assembling a coalition of voters larger than your rival’s is the defining characteristic that differentiates democracies from other forms of government.
By this definition, Pakistan and Myanmar are authoritarian because their generals can suppress, gerrymander or disregard their elections whereas India, which holds regular, mainly free elections, is a democracy. For the last eleven years, the Indian electorate has voted to power a party that has done its best (or worst) to take the principle of majority rule to what it sees as its logical conclusion: the hegemony of a permanent majority of Hindus. And the way in which the Bharatiya Janata Party has tried to consolidate this majority is by leading a continuous counter-revolution against India’s largest religious minority, its Muslims.
The rigour and ruthlessness of this majoritarian project are apparent. The distinguishing characteristic of the sangh parivar is its willingness to work towards majoritarian supremacy in the long term. The destabilisation of Muslim citizenship via the pincer action of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens is perhaps its most formidable achievement. The attack on the civil liberties of minority citizens through the lopsided use of quasi-preventive detention laws like the UAPA, the threat to life and livelihood through lawfare and violent campaigns against the cattle trade, the attack on inter-religious love and marriage, and the systematic ghettoisation of Muslims are the siege engines of this unrelenting assault. And now the Waqf (Amendment) Act is a platform for the concerted expropriation of Muslim property as well as an attack on the religious and cultural autonomy of Muslim institutions. Taken together, these hostile initiatives show how a democratically-elected government can reduce members of minority communities to second-class citizenship.
This is not a new story in South Asia. We have seen feral majoritarianism metastasise earlier and more terminally in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. These majoritarian counter-revolutions have left three semi-failed states behind them; basket cases that are economically and politically bankrupt. Muslim majoritarianism in Pakistan and Buddhist majoritarianism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar destroyed the early promise of postcolonial nationhood. It is remarkable that despite these cautionary tales, Hindu majoritarians in India imagine that the reduction of Indian minorities to helotry is a shortcut to virile nationhood.
Still, India is remarkable in that its electoral machinery is resiliently democratic even as its State is viciously majoritarian. Narendra Modi led the BJP to two absolute majorities in Parliament over two general elections, an undeniable popular mandate. He also leads a ruling party that doesn’t have a single Muslim member of Parliament in either House in its ranks. In fact, the BJP doesn’t have a single Muslim MLA in any Indian state assembly.
This total exclusion of a significant minority from the ranks of a major party is not normal. Even the Conservative Party in Britain, generally seen as prejudiced against Muslims, has had high-profile Muslim politicians in cabinets and shadow cabinets in recent years. Nadhim Zahawi, Sajid Javid, Saqib Bhatti, Imran Ahmad Khan and Rehman Chishti are Muslims who have been elected on the Tory ticket over the last two general elections. This is quite apart from the remarkable representation of non-White politicians in the front rank of the party. The Tories are currently led by Kemi Badenoch who is Black and of Nigerian descent.
Trump’s Republican Party, historically seen as unsympathetic to African-Americans, has Black senators and Congressmen in its ranks, quite apart from high-profile politicians of Indian descent like Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal.
The BJP’s success in winning majorities and forming governments at the Centre and in the states is, in its perverse way, an extraordinary achievement. It has politically marginalised Muslim voters and succeeded in forcing other mainstream parties like the Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress into distancing themselves from their Muslim supporters for fear of alienating the Hindu majority. By pushing other political parties into believing that there is a consolidated Hindu majority out there, waiting to be harnessed, the BJP has shifted the political common sense of the republic.
The only other formally democratic country of this sort is Israel. Just over 20% of Israel’s population is Muslim. The Knesset is dominated by Zionist parties that seldom have any non-Jewish members of Parliament. Muslims are represented by Arab parties. Setting aside the genocide in Gaza and the helotry imposed on Palestinians in the occupied territories, Arabs in Israel proper are second-class citizens of a formally Jewish nation state, systematically discriminated against in matters of policing, funding, housing, and schooling.
It isn’t a coincidence that Yogi Adityanath’s bulldozer ‘justice’ is learnt from Israel’s longstanding policy of collectively punishing Arab populations by destroying their homes and neighbourhoods without due process. The Gujarat Model which the BJP has tried to extrapolate across India over the last decade is Israeli majoritarianism scaled up to fit a subcontinent.
The sangh parivar’s majoritarianism offers a tasting menu. Love jihad, vigilantism, lynching, public beatings, riots, the NRC, the CAA, the Ram mandir, the taming of Kashmir are appetisers that help feed the beast. The BJP believes that this carnival of contained but exemplary violence and discrimination can sustain, over the long term, an election-winning majority. The Waqf (Amendment) Act is the latest offering in its malignant buffet.
It is also a sign of desperation. The last general election wasn’t the barnstorming romp to an absolute majority that Modi thought it would be. The mere fact that the Supreme Court has made it clear that it is willing to stay crucial parts of the Act suggests that the judicial deference that Modi’s government commanded as its due is not so readily available. India, in this Modi interregnum, is the world’s largest experiment in illiberal democracy. The fate of the Waqf law might be a straw in the wind.
