Hope SC soon passes final order on waqf law itself: Owaisi

Hyderabad, Sep 15 (PTI) AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi on Monday said the Supreme Court's interim order would not protect waqf properties from the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 made by the NDA government and that he hopes the apex court would soon pronounce final verdict on the whole legislation itself.

Observing that the arguments of the petitioners who are opposing the Act are still "very strong", he said they would be brought before the court when it hears the "validity or the unconstitutionality" of the legislation.

The order delivered by the Supreme Court on Monday was only an interim order, he said.

"In my view and my party's view, the interim order will not protect waqf properties from the law the Modi government has made... encroachers will be rewarded, there will be no development in waqf properties. That's why we hope the Supreme Court will make efforts to make a final decision as early as possible," he told reporters here.

He alleged that the real purpose of the BJP in making the Act was to ensure that the waqf mechanism gets weakened.

"Their whole idea is that no one should give their property as waqf," he said.

Without naming anyone, he claimed an amendment to the waqf bill that a trust would not be a waqf, was brought in "to reward a person who had built his palatial palace on an orphanage".

Asked about PM Narendra Modi's visit to the Seemanchal in Bihar on Monday, Owaisi alleged that the region is kept backward by the BJP, while Modi says demographic change is taking place there.

He wondered why the government is "not completing" development projects, including strengthening Aligarh Muslim University centre in Kishanganj (in Seemanchal).

"We want to ask the BJP. In the 65 lakh (deletions) of SIR, how many are outsiders? What is BJP's action plan to stop migration from Seemanchal region? On the India-Pakistan cricket in Asia Cup, he said India should win everywhere, but sports cannot take place when terror attacks such as Pahalgam take place.

The Supreme Court on Monday put on hold a few key provisions of the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, including a clause that only those practising Islam for the last five years could create Waqf, but refused to stay the entire law outlining the presumption of constitutionality in its favour.

"Presumption is always in favour of constitutionality of a statute and intervention (can be done) only in the rarest of rare cases," a bench of Chief Justice B R Gavai and Justice Augustine George Masih said in its 128-page interim order on the contentious issue. PTI SJR VVK GDK SJR KH