Kamal Ghorui
New Delhi: Supreme Court has said offering of prayers by Muslims at premises not included on the list of auqaf cannot give it the character of a mosque and ruled unless the mosque stood over waqf land, waqf tribunal could not entertain a suit to declare the place a mosque.The ground floor of an apartment on prime land in Banjara Hills, Hyderabad, was claimed to be a mosque since 2008 but the owner of the land and the builder of the apartments stopped access to it in 2021.One Mohammed Ahmed filed a suit before the waqf tribunal seeking to restrain Habib Alladin and others from causing hindrance to those visiting the Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Centre. The owner of the plot moved Telangana HC, claiming the building plan made no mention of the area in dispute as a mosque and, hence, the tribunal could not have entertained the suit. The HC had rejected the plea.After analysing judgments on the issue, a bench of Justices Sanjay Kumar and K Vinod Chandran said, “A reading of Section 6 and 7 (of Waqf Act, 1995) makes it clear that the jurisdiction, to determine whether or not a property is a waqf property, or whether a waqf is a Shia waqf or a Sunni waqf, inheres in the tribunal only if the particular property is specified as waqf property in the ‘list of auqaf’.”The bench said, “A bare reading of the plaint would indicate that neither is the property specified in the ‘list of auqaf’ as published in Chapter II nor registered under Chapter V and hence the decision as to whether the property is a waqf property or not cannot be decided by the tribunal since the property is not one specified in the ‘list of auqaf’, which is the mandatory requirement… to approach the tribunal.”SC said, “We will not consider the issue as to whether the property can be deemed to be a ‘waqf by user’ since the question is still at large.” It set aside the tribunal order assuming jurisdiction and the HC order affirming it.
