Tribunal can’t adjudicate dispute on mosque if not on wakf land: SC

New Delhi: Supreme Court has said offering of prayers by Muslims on a premises, which is not included in the list of auqaf, cannot give it the character of a mosque and ruled that the Wakf tribunal cannot entertain a suit for declaring the place as a mosque if it is not standing on a wakf land.The order came in a case where ground floor of an apartment on prime land in Banjara Hills, Hyderabad, was claimed to be functioning as a mosque since 2008 but the owner of the land and the builder of the apartments stopped access to it in 2021. This led to the dispute.
One Mohammed Ahmed had filed a suit before the Wakf tribunal seeking to restrain Habib Alladin and others from interfering with and causing hindrance to him and other musallies visiting the Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Centre situated on ground floor of Mahmood Habib Apartments, Banjara Hills.When the tribunal entertained the suit, the owner of the plot over which the apartment stood moved the Telangana HC claiming that the building plan made no mention of the area in dispute as mosque and hence the tribunal could not have entertained the suit. The HC had rejected the plea.The issue of mosques on non-wakf land had engaged the attention of the SC in over a dozen cases for the past three decades and divergent views had been taken by the court.After analysing the spectrum of judgments, a bench of Justices Sanjay Kumar and K Vinod Chandran said, "A reading of Section 6 and 7 (of Wakf Act, 1995) makes it clear that the jurisdiction, to determine whether or not a property is a wakf property, or whether a wakf is a Shia wakf or a Sunni wakf, inheres in the tribunal only if the particular property is specified as wakf property in the ‘list of auqaf'."Considering the facts of the case in hand, 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 wakf 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 under Section 6(1) and Section 7(1) of the Wakf Act of 1995 to approach the Tribunal."Since the ‘wakf by user' provision under the Wakf (Amendment) Act, 2025 is under adjudication of the SC, the bench said, "We will not consider the issue as to whether the property can be deemed to be a ‘wakf by user' since the question is still at large." It set aside the tribunal's order assuming jurisdiction and the HC order affirming it.