On January 16, the Supreme Court dismissed Hashmat Ali v. Union of India, a writ petition against the Centre’s UMEED portal, in an order that reads like routine housekeeping: technical glitches, the Court said, are grievances for the prescribed authority, not Article 32. But an exchange inside that hearing was left conspicuously unresolved. Senior Advocate Dr. Menaka Guruswamy, appearing for the petitioner, told the bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi that the portal’s registration dropdown offered no separate option for “waqf by survey,” properties recorded through the state’s gazetted list of auqaf, and that these were simply being folded into “waqf by user.” Justice Bagchi’s response is worth pausing on: when counsel pressed the point, he observed that this went to the legality of the classification itself, not to any fault in the portal’s functioning. The Court declined to examine the question further and granted the petitioner liberty to approach the prescribed authority. Six weeks after the portal’s registration window had closed, the classification itself was left exactly where counsel raised it.
That distinction is not clerical. Chapter II of the Waqf Act, 1995 (its structure untouched by the 2025 amendment) creates a route to recognition entirely different from the one Parliament abolished. Under Sections 4 and 5, a State-appointed Survey Commissioner inquires into existing auqaf, and the State Government publishes the resulting list in the Official Gazette. Section 6(4) then makes that list “final and conclusive” unless a Tribunal, moved within one year of publication, holds otherwise. Section 3(r)(i), by contrast, was a definitional shortcut: a property became waqf merely by long religious or charitable use, gazette or no gazette. The Unified Waqf Management, Empowerment, Efficiency and Development Act, 2025 deleted that shortcut prospectively; pre-existing waqf-by-user claims survive only where undisputed and not on government land. The Supreme Court upheld the deletion in September last year, reasoning that a prospective abolition could not, by itself, be used to grab existing endowments. The Centre’s own justification for the deletion, advanced before the same Court, rested on documented instances of misuse, most prominently the notification of large government tracts as waqf by user in Andhra Pradesh. That justification is precisely why the classification in Hashmat Ali matters: a property carrying the “user” label now carries, in the government’s own framing, an association with the encroachment risk the amendment targeted, regardless of whether the property’s actual pedigree lies in a decades-old Gazette entry rather than a bare claim of use.
Twelve days after Hashmat Ali, the Court gave the gazetted list its full jurisdictional weight from the other direction. In Habib Alladin v. Mohammed Ahmed, a bench of Justices Sanjay Kumar and K. Vinod Chandran held that a Waqf Tribunal has no power to decide whether a property is waqf unless it already appears in the list of auqaf published under Chapter II, or stands registered under Chapter V. A claim resting on use alone, neither listed nor registered, cannot even secure a hearing before the Tribunal built to adjudicate it. Read together, the two rulings converge on the same point from opposite ends: inclusion in the gazetted list is not incidental to a waqf’s standing; it is close to constitutive of any forum’s power to protect that standing at all.
The UMEED Rules, 2025, notified last July, appear to track exactly this structure. They separate two functions on the portal: the State Government’s own upload of the notified list of auqaf (containing each property’s boundaries, mode and date of creation, purpose and mutawalli) within ninety days of Gazette publication; and a second, independent function through which every mutawalli individually enrols and files details of “his waqf and property dedicated to the waqf.” The Rules, in other words, contemplate an institutional channel for gazetted entries and a separate, individual channel for everything else. On paper, a gazetted survey entry and a mutawalli’s individual filing were never meant to collapse into a single, unlabelled bucket.
What Dr. Guruswamy told the Court is that, on the live portal, they do. A mutawalli filing details today gets one dropdown for the nature of the waqf, and the Ministry’s own counsel confirmed that “waqf by survey” sits inside “waqf by user” for want of a separate field. The consequence is that a property whose waqf character was settled by a Gazette notification decades ago, and which Section 6(4) shields from fresh challenge, now gets entered into the Centre’s own database under the label the 2025 amendment specifically curtailed. A dropdown menu built to implement the Rules, rather than the Rules or the Act themselves, ends up deciding which of two very different legal pedigrees a property carries into the government’s central record.
The Court’s suggestion that an aggrieved mutawalli can simply object to an incorrect “user” tag assumes the mutawalli knows the tag was applied, and knows what to object to. Nothing in the Rules requires the portal to notify a mutawalli that a gazetted entry has been filed as “user” rather than “survey,” and nothing in the record before the Court suggests such notice was given here. An objection mechanism is only as good as the trigger that prompts someone to use it; where that trigger is silent, the default classification quietly does the work the objection was meant to correct.
This is not a hypothetical concern. The UMEED portal’s own record of implementation has been rocky enough that the UP State Waqf Tribunal, hearing the UP Sunni Central Waqf Board’s plea for more time, granted a six-month extension in December, citing “persistent technical glitches”: server breakdowns, login failures at the verification stage, delayed OTPs, sessions timing out, and no option to save data mid-entry. Roughly 40,000 of Uttar Pradesh’s 1.26 lakh waqf properties remained unregistered past the original deadline, a gap the Tribunal traced squarely to the portal’s own instability, invoking the extension proviso under Section 3B after the Supreme Court itself, on December 1, had directed applicants to seek that relief before Tribunals rather than courts. None of this proves that any particular property was mis-recorded because of the survey-into-user classification. It does show a system in which a mutawalli’s ability to establish the stronger legal basis of a property’s status now depends on a field the Ministry says was never built.
The result is an unusual site for a live legal question to sit: not a section of the Act, not a clause of the Rules, but a dropdown menu meant to implement both. If the Ministry’s classification stands unchallenged, mutawallis holding gazetted, Section 6(4)-final entries may need to affirmatively object, as Justice Bagchi suggested was open to them, merely to record what a Gazette notification already settled, against a position the government took orally in a courtroom rather than through any amendment placed before Parliament or notified as a Rule. A one-line clarification in the Rules, stating that a property already included in a published list of auqaf retains that status on the portal regardless of which registration category is selected for it, would cost the Ministry nothing and would settle what six weeks of litigation could not. Hashmat Ali did not decide whether the existing classification is lawful. It confirmed only that the question is still open, and that until it is answered, whether a given waqf survives the UMEED portal’s dropdown may end up mattering more than what a Gazette notification decided about it decades ago.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of FoEJ Media.
