The fact that the Supreme Court is willing to stay crucial parts of the Waqf (Amendment) Act suggests that the judicial deference that Modi government commanded as its due is not readily available
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….
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