Hyderabad, June 22: The responsibility of protecting the religious properties of Muslims in the state lies with the Andhra Pradesh State Wakf Board. It is for all intents and purposes, the guardian of religious properties entrusted to its safekeeping by generations of devout Muslims.
As guardian of this properties, the onus of protecting them from encroachments, lie with its employees.
The fact of the matter is that, apart from a very few employees of the Wakf Board, the majority have not carried out their duties responsibilities. On the contrary, many of the employees have been accused of working against the very principle on which the Wakf Board was constituted.
If the Wakf Board employees are not busy in indulging in widespread corruption, including the selling off of lands under their protection, as suspected by various sections of concerned Muslim, then they are busy in games of one-upmanship against each others.
These days, the Wakf Board is in the limelight after its Chief Executive Officer BS Farooq Ahmed was nabbed red-handed for accepting a bribe.
Two days after the shocking incident, an FIR was registered against Farooq and six others, on the direction of a Court, for harassing an Accounts Officer at the Wakf Board, P Khaja Shafi.
According to the FIR, Farooq had barged inside his home on a Sunday at around 11 pm on April 25, 2010, and made him sign on a voluntary retirement form.
It is very curious indeed that what made the CEO barge into the house of his junior at that unearthly time, that too on a Sunday. What sense of duty did the CEO possess which made him get Mr Khaja Shafi, who is himself facing allegations of impropriety, to get the latter’s signatures on his retirement papers.
Another question to be answered by the CEO is whether it was his sense of responsibility or some external pressure which had forced him to act the way he did on that fateful Sunday night, April 25, 2010.
Another surprising aspect of Farooq’s action is that he is the Chief Executive Officer of a Board, which has active members. These members have powers of their own. Then how could Farooq bypass these members and personally carry out action against Khaja Shafi.
Another question which remains unanswered is, how could the members maintain silence over the CEO’s action.
If Farooq acted on his own, the Wakf Board members stand guilty of keeping silent, and if they were aware of what was going on beforehand, they stand guilty of complicity.
Another question which remains unanswered is that the Wakf Board has passed orders for Khaja Shafi’s retirement, but no probe, internal or external was conducted against the allegations raised against him by the Board.
The silence by the Wakf Board members in this entire sordid episode is too deafening to ignore.
It is time that the public stands up and questions the goings on in the Wakf Board, the guardian of its religious properties.
—INN–