By – Ananya Rana
Abstract
India’s religious institutions are no longer simple places of worship, they include charitable organisations, major landholders and are custodians of immense public wealth. Even after performing similar public functions, temples, waqf properties, churches and gurdwaras continue to be governed by legal regimes shaped as much by historical evolution as by constitutional design. The larger public debate revolves around who controls these institutions which raises questions on their governance. This article argues that even though India’s constitutional commitment to religious freedom does not require uniform law governing all religious endowments, it does demand a common baseline of transparency, accountability and integrity. By examining Article 14, 15 and 26 of the Constitution alongside landmark judicial precedents, it contends that equality is better served with the help of uniform governance than through identical legislation.
Introduction
Imagine if a billion-dollar corporation could defend its poor financial management by saying “we are not just a company but a matter of faith.” Few would accept that defence. Now substitute ‘corporation’ for ‘temple’, ‘waqf’ or ‘trust’. This defence has worked really well in India for decades. Religious institutions do not just hold faith but also land, gold and cash reserves, which would strain the finances of any mid-sized company. Waqf boards alone administer roughly 8.7 lakh properties across close to a million acres, placing them among the largest landholding bodies in the country. Temple trusts in the southern states control a comparable, if not larger, footprint. If one adds gurdwara management committees and church trusts to the picture, the religious sector starts to look like a financial ecosystem dressed in devotional clothing. The problem is not that this sector answers to no one, it is that it answers to different systems of accountability depending on the faith it represents. There are no single standard of disclosure and no single test for accountability. They only need to go by whichever colonial era or state era statute happened to be drafted for that particular faith. Faith is the explanation why these institutions exist. It does not explain why its books should be any less open than a corporation. This article examines the need for common standards in terms of transparency and accountability across India’s religious endowments.
One Constitution, Many Rulebooks
Follow the paper trail and the inconsistency becomes structural. ‘Religious and Charitable Institutions’ are in the seventh schedule of the Concurrent list. This allows both the Parliament and the state legislature legislate over it. Over a century now, they mostly legislated apart, faith by faith. Hindu Endowments were formalised first through the colonial Religious Endowments Act of 1863. Then, state by state, Madras led in 1925 and Tamil Nadu’s HR&CE Act of 1959 remains a template that is still followed by the south today. These statutes let government-appointed commissioners run temple boards, appoint executive officers, and divert “surplus” temple income toward secular welfare schemes. Waqfs, meanwhile, moved through a separate lineage of central statutes. The Waqf Act of 1995 is administered by state Waqf Boards that, until recently, functioned with comparatively lighter government intrusion. The Supreme Court gave a scaffolding for this asymmetry in the 1954 Shirur Mutt Case. It held that the state cannot touch the religious practice which is protected under Article 26 of the Constitution, but it can regulate the ‘secular’ Business of running an institution including its property, finances and administration. That distinction has since carried enormous weight, and enormous inconsistency. For decades, the law has permitted state governments to exercise direct supervisory control over the administration and finances of many Hindu temples. By contrast, waqf institutions operated under a distinct governance framework centred on the Waqf Act, 1995 and State Waqf Boards, until the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025 significantly broadened state oversight. Article 14 of the Constitution promises equality before law, and Article 15 bars religion-based discrimination. At present, these articles sit uneasily next to a regime where the depth of state intrusion into ‘secular’ management turns entirely on which faith is asking.
Common Standards, Not Common Laws
The most recent attempt to close this gap was the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025. This rebranded it as the UMEED Act. This was an enthusiasm that only Indian legislative drafting could muster. It introduces a central digital registry for waqf properties, adds non-Muslim members to waqf board, abolishes the doctrine of “waqf by user” where land is treated as waqf purely through long religious use, without paperwork and hands district collectors’ power to adjudicate disputed land claims. Roughly seventy petitions challenged the Act before the Supreme Court, invoking Articles 14, 25 and 26. The court declined to stay the law comprehensive while it paused its most contested provisions. The collector’s unilateral power over disputed land and the prerequisite that the person must have practiced Islam for five years before creating a waqf. It also capped, on an interim basis, non-Muslim membership on the Boards.
UMEED tries to import audit trails and formal representation that is already carried on paper by the Hindu Endowment law into the Waqf governance. Supporters view the reforms as measures to improve transparency and accountability. Critics, however, argue that they expand state control over waqf property through mechanisms not applied uniformly to temple trusts. This absorbed a much longer history of bureaucratic control with less constitutional pushback comparatively. Both can be true, and that is the major problem. The problem was never that one faith’s institutions face ‘too much’ regulation while other do not. It is that the regulation is created community by community rather than function by function. This functional distinction is often overlooked. A temple, a waqf property, a church trust or a gurdwara committee may differ in theology, ritual and internal organisation. Yet once each begins administering public donations, employing staff, managing immovable property or operating charitable institutions, they perform remarkably similar secular functions. Constitutional scrutiny should therefore attach to the function being performed rather than the faith performing it. A Uniform Religious Endowments Code that imposes identical rules on all religious institutions may initially appear to resolve existing regulatory inconsistencies. But it will most probably just transplant one’s faith and regulatory culture into other. But equality needs an identical test not identical text. That test should mandate public audits, representative governing boards, independent property dispute tribunals, and strict limits on diverting religious income to unrelated state purposes. Several of these mechanisms already exist, albeit unevenly, within the HR&CE framework and the Waqf Act.
Conclusion
India does not need one law for every temple, mosque, church and gurdwara, it needs one yardstick held up equally against all of them. The current patchwork has survived this long precisely because each community’s grievance remained silenced. Hindus objecting to government-run temple boards, Muslims objecting to UMEED’s new incursions, each looking like an isolated dispute. Underneath, they are the same dispute played on different ground over how much of a faith’s own money and land the state may touch, and who is responsible when that power is abused. Articles 14, 15 and 26 were never intended to guarantee identical statutes. They were intended to guarantee that no faith’s endowments are held to a lower standard of transparency than another’s. A common baseline of audits, accountable boards and independent adjudication would not flatten religious difference. It would simply prevent the rulebook itself from favouring one religion over another. That is not a call for common laws. The Constitution does not ask every religion to pray alike. It should, however, expect every institution entrusted with public wealth to govern alike.
About the Author
Ananya Rana is a fourth-year B.B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) student at Jindal Global Law School. She specialises in the Public Policy cluster. Her research interests include public policy, constitutional law, human rights, and law and society.
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