A proposed move by the Waqf Board in Indian-administered Kashmir to introduce uniform Friday sermons at mosques across the region has drawn backlash from politicians and religious leaders, who have accused the government of trying to assert control over Muslim religious spaces. The Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board is headed by Darakshan Andrabi, a local leader associated with the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose government stripped the region of its previous semi-autonomous status in 2019. Jammu and Kashmir was also partitioned into two federally governed territories, instead of functioning as a full-fledged state as it used to.
The board, which oversees Muslim religious endowments as mandated by Islamic laws, announced the controversial move last weekend, prompting a political controversy as the region’s top Muslim scholars slammed the proposal as “irresponsible interference into the religious affairs of Kashmiri Muslims”. While defending the imposition of the uniform sermons, Andrabi told a leading Indian newspaper that a proposed committee formed under the board’s auspices “will be solely responsible for identifying the issue regarding the uniform sermon … [This step] is necessary to deal with issues in the [region], especially social evils, including drug abuse.” Andrabi told the media that religious scholars will approve Friday sermons with no role for any government official in the decision. On Sunday, the Waqf Board had summoned about 1500 top scholars and preachers from the Kashmir region.
While some leaders were present at the venue, others from remote areas attended the meeting virtually. A scholar from the mountainous Rajouri district, some 180km (110 miles) from the region’s biggest city of Srinagar, who had attended the meeting online, told Al Jazeera that Andrabi had passed instructions stating that only a pre-approved sermon drafted by a committee of senior-most scholars would be uniformly recited at the mosque pulpits on Fridays. He said they were not told exactly who would be part of this committee.
Years of peaceful demands for a referendum, to determine which country the Kashmiris would choose, transformed into an armed uprising against Indian rule in 1989 in response to allegations of election fixing. In 2019, India scrapped the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir, imposing direct federal rule. The elections did not happen until 2024, when the local government was re-elected, albeit with a restricted mandate.
De facto authority still rests with the New Delhi-appointed administrator. The special conditions afforded under the erstwhile status had protected land and residency-related privileges while allowing Kashmiris to make their own laws. One consequence of the 2019 decision was that Indigenous legal arrangements that governed the management of waqf, the charitable bequests that Muslims commit for the larger communal welfare, were replaced by those prevailing across India.
The new system gave broad powers to the federally controlled bureaucracy in the management of local religious boards such as waqf. Since then, the Waqf Board has been accused multiple times by the local Kashmiri leaders of trying to undermine their religious freedoms or interfering with how the traditional religious practices have continued for generations. But that had sanctity because Kashmir was [then] an Islamic state.
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