Kashmir Scholars Slam Waqf Board's Uniform Sermon Plan — SkimNews
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- Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board, headed by BJP leader Darakshan Andrabi, proposed uniform Friday sermons across the region's mosques, summoning roughly 1,500 scholars and preachers to a meeting that some from remote districts like Rajouri attended virtually.
- Kashmiri Muslim scholars condemned the proposal as "irresponsible interference into the religious affairs of Kashmiri Muslims," with one attendee saying Andrabi "brushed aside" their objections and insisted the plan — described as "four years in the making" — was final.
- Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the region's top Muslim religious leader, called the move "direct interference," while the Mutahida Majlis-e-Ulema declared that determining sermon content was the responsibility of Islamic scholars, not an administrative body.
- Omar Abdullah, the region's elected chief minister from the National Conference party, joined the condemnation against the directive issued by a BJP-associated board head.
- After the backlash, Andrabi partially retracted, saying the discretion to address social issues like substance abuse and suicides was left to "independent scholars, preachers (and) sermonists."
- The sermon push follows a January 2025 police "profiling of mosques" form seeking biometric data on imams and muezzins, and repeated shutdowns of Srinagar's 600-year-old Jamia Masjid for major Islamic events, which religious leaders call a "systematic assault" on Kashmiri Muslim identity.
- Since India's 2019 revocation of Kashmir's semi-autonomous status, federally controlled bureaucrats have replaced indigenous arrangements for managing waqf endowments, giving New Delhi-aligned officials broad oversight of Muslim religious institutions.
Why it matters: The uniform-sermon push is the latest test of whether India's federally aligned Waqf Board can dictate practice inside Kashmir's mosques, and the board's own claim that the plan was "four years in the making" suggests institutional momentum that will outlast the partial retraction. With Kashmir's elected government re-installed in 2024 but still subordinate to a New Delhi-appointed administrator, the only effective check on the Waqf Board now is public backlash from scholars — not the ballot.
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