'Villagers told to get NoC from Waqf': Sitharaman blasts claim on land near 1800-year-old temple in Tamil Nadu

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday raised a case from Tamil Nadu in the Rajya Sabha, questioning how villagers and an ancient temple were caught in a land dispute due to Waqf Board records. "There's an 1800-year-old Sri Chandrasekhara Swamy Temple in Tamil Nadu. SCs and OBCs are predominantly the people living in this village. 408 acres of land is disputed there. And how has this become disputed?" she asked during the discussion on the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2025.

Sitharaman explained that villagers buying and selling land among themselves were told to obtain a No Objection Certificate (NoC) from the Waqf Board. “Even if the District Collector entered the details wrongly during the digitisation process, the entire village has been put into the wrong entry. So, for every villager who has to do any transaction on his land, should an NoC come from the Waqf Board? What is this?” she said.

“Even if the element is true that the revenue official entered it wrongly, couldn’t the Waqf Board say why the villagers were coming to it, and that they have nothing to do with it? But it never happened,” Sitharaman said, highlighting the plight of villagers who had “kept running from pillar to post”.

“Poor people kept running from pillar to pillar saying when did the land become someone else’s when they have been living there for generations. What happens to the temple. Was the temple built by the Waqf Board?” she asked.

The finance minister's remarks came a day after the Lok Sabha passed the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2025, with 288 MPs voting in favour and 232 against after an overnight debate. Minority Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju introduced the bill in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday, stating that it seeks to protect the rights of all Muslim sects and empower Muslim women.

On Wednesday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah also spoke in Lok Sabha on the bill, criticising the 2013 amendments to the Waqf Act and citing multiple examples of temple, railway and government lands being handed over to the Waqf Board. Among them, Shah said, were 400 acres from the 1500-year-old Tiruchendur temple in Tamil Nadu and land in Himachal Pradesh used to build unauthorised mosques.

Shah added that between 2001 and 2012, Waqf properties worth ₹2 lakh crore were leased to private institutions, and in Karnataka alone, a five-star hotel was leased 1,500 acres for ₹ 12,000 a month.