Every few months, a familiar script returns to India’s political theatre: a leader from the Congress–PDP ecosystem rises dramatically, points a trembling finger at the BJP, and declares that “minorities are under attack.” The latest performer is PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti, who has taken to X to accuse the Centre of “erasing” Waqf properties. According to her, “over 3.55 lakh Waqf assets nationwide are missing,” and Jammu & Kashmir alone has “lost 7,240 entries” in the new UMEED database. It is a thunderous accusation. It is also a spectacular inversion of reality. To understand the hum behind this sudden alarm, one must step back to the very reason the Waqf Amendment Bill exists. The BJP-led NDA government has, since 2014, been engaged in a long, steady, legally robust clean-up of a system that had been allowed to metastasize under successive Congress regimes. For decades, the Waqf Boards—state and central—operated with almost no oversight, claiming land on the basis of unverifiable entries, clerical notings, or oral assertions. The scale of Waqf land today is staggering. Government records themselves list over 8 lakh properties spread across nearly 6 lakh acres—making Waqf, on paper, one of the largest landowners in India after the Railways and Defence. Yet this gigantic estate has historically enjoyed minimal statutory scrutiny. It is precisely this unregulated sprawl that emboldened some clerics to make outrageous, almost comical assertions: that the Parliament complex sits on Waqf land, that the Supreme Court stands on Waqf land, even that several cities in their entirety were once “donated” for Islamic charity. This culture of unchecked claim-making did not emerge in a vacuum. It flourished because the Congress spent decades feeding it—not out of conviction, but out of calculation. The Manmohan Singh government was the most brazen. Between 2004 and 2014, the UPA dispensed 23–25 prime properties to Waqf Boards in national capital alone, bypassing both procedure and propriety. Many of these gifts were pushed through even when state governments raised objections or when revenue records contradicted Waqf claims. The UPA’s own Minority Affairs Ministry repeatedly flagged the opacity surrounding Waqf claims, but its warnings were buried under political expediency.
It is this legacy—this mountain of irregularities, missing records, disputed titles, and inflated claims—that the present government is attempting to put an end to. The new Waqf Amendment Bill, whether or not one agrees with every clause, does one crucial thing: it introduces checks and balances in a domain that has historically had none. It demands audits. It demands mapped boundaries. It demands proof. It demands that Waqf Boards be accountable to the Indian state, not operate as private fiefdoms with divine immunity. This is exactly why the bill has triggered such panic—not because Waqf properties are being “erased,” but because irregularities are being exposed. Mehbooba Mufti’s claim that 7,240 J&K Waqf entries are “missing” in the new UMEED database is not evidence of sabotage. It is evidence of digitisation correcting decades of manipulation, duplication, and ghost entries. When Aadhaar was introduced, lakhs of fake ration cards disappeared. When GST rolled in, shell companies evaporated. When land records were digitised, fictitious pattas vanished. UMEED is simply performing the same function: separating legitimate Waqf assets from questionable or entirely fabricated ones. The PDP chief’s outrage would carry weight if it came from a party that stood on a record of transparency. Instead, this is the same political ecosystem that opposed the abrogation of Article 370, defended radical clerics, and consistently played a double game—preaching pluralism in Delhi while pandering to sectarian anxieties in Srinagar. The real question is simple: Who benefited from the chaos in the Waqf records all these years? Certainly not ordinary Muslims, who have repeatedly complained about mismanagement by Waqf Boards. Certainly not the state exchequer, which lost vast swathes of public land to dubious encroachments. The only beneficiaries were those who thrived in the fog—political brokers, land mafias, and clerical power centres. That fog is now lifting. And whenever darkness recedes, the wolves howl. Mehbooba Mufti’s claims fall squarely into that pattern: a desperate attempt to preserve a system whose days of impunity are numbered. Her wolf cry may make headlines. But facts—digitised, audited, and verified—will stand taller than political theatre.
