In a landmark decision, the Kerala High Court has held that the disputed land at Munambam is not a Waqf property but a gift presented by Mohammed Siddique Sait in favour of Farooq College management.
A Division Bench of the court consisting of Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari and Justice V.M. Syam Kumar criticised the entire exercise of the Kerala Waqf Board (KWB) in the Munambam case as a “sham” and noted that the board “acted as a sheer land grabber eyeing on the subject property, which had assumed high value due to commercial developments in the last few decades.”
Incidentally, the dispute over the Munambam land had snowballed into a socio-political issue. It had also attained communal undertones and threatened to destroy the communal amity in the State.
The court criticised the KWB for not acting on the property from 1950 to 2019 and skipping the statutory requirement of carrying out a proper survey and conducting quasi-judicial inquiry with the participation of all interested and persons concerned before the declaration and registration of Waqf.
“If the judicial seal of approval is placed on such an arbitrary declaration of Waqf, tomorrow any random building or structure, including Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Niyama Sabha Mandiram (State Legislature Complex), or even this Court’s building would be vulnerable of being painted with the brush of a Waqf property by the Waqf board on the basis of any random document at any point of time,” it said.
The Court is obligated to act under the Constitution, especially in a secular country like India and cannot permit such a belated and fanciful exercise of power, the Bench held.
The court held that the “KWB acted contrary to the procedure and provisions of the Waqf Act, 1954, as well as 1995, after an inordinate delay of around 70 years, which itself makes the whole exercise unreasonable in nature and not binding on the State Government.”
However, the court stopped short of quashing the decision of the Board.
The Bench passed the order while allowing the appeal of the State government challenging the decision of the single Judge, which quashed the Kerala government notification appointing C. N. Ramachandran Nair Commission on the Munambam issue.
The court also criticised the recommendations of the M.A. Nissar Commission, which was appointed by the Kerala government a few decades ago, to look into the complaints of corruption and misdeeds in Waqf properties in the State. Incidentally, the KWB had initiated the proceedings in the Munambam case after the recommendations of the M.A. Nissar Commission.
The Nissar commission “clearly transgressed its Terms of Reference. The findings of the commission cannot have any binding value; they were without any survey or any quasi-judicial inquiry. The resultant action carried out by KWB of declaring subject property (Munambam) as Waqf property is also a completely unilateral, one without being preceded by any survey, field study or proper quasi-judicial inquiry about the actual status of the property,” the court held.
Published – October 10, 2025 08:01 pm IST
