The Kerala High Court, on Friday, held that the 1950 endowment deed executed by Mohammed Siddique Sait in favour of the Farooq College Managing Committee was not a waqf deed but a simple gift deed.
A Division Bench of Justices SA Dharmadhikari and Justice Syam Kumar VM said that the 1950 endowment deed did not fulfil the essential requirement of “permanent dedication” under the Wakf Act of 1923, the Wakf Act, 1954, or the Central Waqf Act, 1995, while allowing two writ appeals filed by the state government against a Single Bench order that had quashed a government notification constituting a Commission of Inquiry to resolve the Munambam land dispute between residents and the Waqf Board.
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“The endowment deed of 1950 never intended to create any ‘permanent dedication in favour of the Almighty God’, but was simpliciter a gift deed in favour of R5 Farooq Management and therefore could have never qualified as a ‘waqf deed’ under any of the enactments of the Wakf Act 1954, 1984, or 1995,” the court said
The Court noted that the ‘permanent dedication’ implied creation of an absolute, inalienable interest in the property.
The court, however, did not go to the extent of quashing the KWB orders as it was only concerned with the state’s appeal against the quashing of its decision to set up an Inquiry Commission.
“The action of the KWB of declaring/ registering the subject property as a waqf property through its declarations and orders issued in September and October 2019 are bad in law on the grounds of being unreasonably delayed and having been issued in palpable violation of the provisions of the Waqf Acts 1954, 1984, and 1995 and resultantly non-enforceable. However, we restrain ourselves from issuing a formal order of quashing them, since the purpose of returning all the above findings is just to hold that the state Government is not bound by such a highly belatedly issued declaration by the KWB after 7 decades (69 years),” the court said.
The court observed that the Kerala Wakf Board’s 2019 decision to declare disputed property in Munambam as a wakf was bad in law.
“We shall be holding that the notification dated 25.09.2019 notifying the subject property as waqf is ultra vires the provisions of The Wakf Act, 1954, as also The Central Waqf Act, 1995 and nothing less than a land grabbing tactics of KWB which has affected the bread and butter, livelihood of hundreds of families and bonafide occupants who had purchased tranches of land decades prior to the notification of the waqf property”, the court further said in the judgment.
