In a nation that proclaims itself a secular democracy, the reality of land-ownership reveals deep fractures-fractures aligned not simply with class, but with faith. For India’s Muslims, the story of land is one of systematic dispossession, legal marginalisation, and historic neglect. The numbers alone speak volumes: between 1949 and 1970 the government of Uttar Pradesh seized approximately 5,377,800 acres (21,763 km²) of land owned by Muslims and redistributed vast portions to Hindus.
Today, this legacy is mirrored in institutional assaults on Muslim communal-land-endowments (waqfs) and in the stark fact that roughly 48 % of Muslim households possess less than one acre of land (versus less than 26 % of Hindu households). Muslims are not simply poor-they are structurally land-poor. At the same time, the Indian state holds some 15,531 km² (~1.55 lakh km²) and private Hindu ownership dominates. What emerges is a land-architecture in which minority communities-especially Muslims-are relegated to the margins.
The decades immediately after independence were marked by land-reform and redistribution. In Uttar Pradesh alone, some 5.37 million acres of Muslim-owned land were expropriated and handed to Hindu claimants. This was not an aberration but one of many across India that suggest a deliberate mechanism of dispossession. In effect: land reform became a tool not only of agrarian justice but of communal restructuring. The old Muslim landed classes were stripped, new owners installed, and the normative architecture of land-holding shifted.
Today, nearly half of Muslim households have holdings under one acre; fewer than one-quarter of Hindus are in that bracket. This gap perpetuates poverty, limits access to credit and collateral, and deepens socio-economic exclusion.
If India is to live up to its founders’ promise of equality, it must confront the land-dimension of communal injustice.
For Muslims, land is not just personal property – it is also communal glue. The waqf system holds roughly 39 lakh acres (~15,780 km², nearly 5 % of India’s land area) across 8.72 lakh properties, with 2.17 lakh in Uttar Pradesh alone. On top of that, an estimated 13,200 waqf-properties are tied in active litigation, while many thousands more lie encroached or legally ambiguous.
The recent passing of the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 gives the state sweeping powers over these endowments – including placing non-Muslims on waqf boards and enabling the government to determine disputed ownership.
What once were communal assets-mosques, madrassas, community schools, orphanages-are increasingly vulnerable to legal reinterpretation, state intervention and outright appropriation.
Under the regime of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the exclusion hasn’t merely remained structural-it has taken a more active, coercive form. Human Rights Watch reports that in BJP-ruled states, Muslim homes and properties have been demolished without due process.
In northern India, Muslim citizens have been criminalised for chants and protest, while government rhetoric frames Muslims as an existential “threat.”
Crucially: record-clear demolition and “bulldozer justice” are being used as communal tools in which property justice becomes religious justice.
When a minority community is structurally land-poor, institutionally dispossessed and in legal limbo over communal endowments, the consequences ripple outwards.
In rural India, land is the foundation of livelihood, access to credit, status, and security. When individuals are excluded from land, they are essentially denied opportunities. Additionally, the distribution of land often correlates with religion, which compromises the principle of equality before the law. Moreover, waqf assets have historically supported Muslim communal institutions, and their weakening undermines community autonomy. Looking back at the seizures during the 1950s and 60s, the redistribution of Muslim land, and the evolving legal framework surrounding waqf, we can see a long-term pattern of religious dispossession.From 1949 to 2025 the record is clear: land has been a frontier of religious inequality in India. The expropriation of millions of acres from Muslim owners in Uttar Pradesh, the land-poverty of Muslim households today, the legal assault on waqf endowments, and the political climate of coercion under the BJP-all point to a systematic dispossession of religious minority communities.
If India is to live up to its founders’ promise of equality, it must confront the land-dimension of communal injustice. Because when you lose the land, you lose the future.
The writer is a freelance columnist.