The appellants said they had been denied a hearing before the Waqf Board decided the character and management of a disputed dargah, and that natural justice had been breached. The High Court held that an inquiry under Section 40 of the Waqf Act is a fact-finding exercise rather than a trial, that the appellants had participated and filed written submissions, and that no real prejudice was shown. The appeal was dismissed and the concurrent findings confirmed.
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court has dismissed a first appeal under Section 83 of the Waqf Act, 1995 and confirmed concurrent findings of the Gujarat State Waqf Board and the Gujarat State Waqf Tribunal concerning the registration, character and management of a disputed dargah in Patan district, holding that an inquiry under Section 40 of the Act is not equivalent to a full-fledged trial [Kutubuddin Fakruddin Faruqui and Others v. The Gujarat State Waqf Board and Others].
Justice J.C. Doshi declined to interfere with the impugned orders, holding that the findings of the Board and the Tribunal, arrived at on an appreciation of the evidence, were just, proper and in accordance with law.
The background
The dispute concerns a shrine and burial ground in village Anavada, Patan, registered decades ago as a public trust. The two sides describe the property differently, and that difference of description is the heart of the case. The appellants trace the shrine to a 14th-century saint and assert that it has followed the Hanafi-Sunni-Barelvi creed and been managed by their predecessors as Mujawars. The respondents dispute that account of its origin and denominational character.
The trust was registered under the Bombay Public Trusts Act, 1950 in 1953, and on the coming into force of the Waqf Act, 1995 the registration was transferred to the Gujarat State Waqf Board. In later proceedings, and after an earlier round of litigation in which findings were set aside and the matter remanded, the Board passed a resolution and the Chief Executive Officer assigned reasons to it, dealing with the name, character and management of the waqf. The Waqf Tribunal rejected the appellants’ appeal against those orders and confirmed them, which brought the matter to the High Court.
The natural justice challenge
The appellants’ principal ground was procedural. They contended that they had been denied a hearing on merits after the reconstitution of the Board, that no oral hearing had taken place on the relevant dates, that the Board’s resolution did not discuss the issues, and that the CEO had supplied reasons for the resolution without himself having heard the parties. On that footing they argued that the person who heard the matter and the person who decided it were different, that the recording of reasons after the event could not cure the defect, and that the orders were vitiated by a breach of natural justice and the rule that one who hears must decide.
They relied on well-known authorities, including the principle from Mohinder Singh Gill v. Chief Election Commissioner that the validity of an order must be judged by the reasons it states and cannot be bolstered by reasons supplied later, and on the framework for assessing prejudice in natural-justice cases laid down in State of Uttar Pradesh v. Sudhir Kumar Singh.
What the Court held on the inquiry
The Court’s answer turned on the nature of the power the Board was exercising. It set out Section 40 of the Waqf Act, which empowers the Board to decide whether a property is waqf property and whether a waqf is Sunni or Shia, after such inquiry as it thinks fit. The word “inquiry”, the Court held, is not to be equated with a trial:
“The proceedings contemplated under Section 40 of the Act cannot be equated with a full-fledged trial. The term ‘inquiry’ is not that of a trial… An inquiry is, therefore, distinct from an adversarial process. An inquiry, on the other hand, is… for the purpose of ascertaining facts.”
On that basis, the Court held that the procedure under Section 40 requires a fact-finding inquiry rather than the full trappings of a trial, and that the appellants’ demand to have the proceedings treated as a trial with a distinct oral hearing on every occasion misconceived the nature of the exercise.
Prejudice, and the conduct of the appellants
The Court then applied the settled position that a breach of natural justice must cause real prejudice before it will vitiate an order. It found no such prejudice on the facts.
It recorded that in the first round of litigation, which had travelled up to the High Court, the appellants had never raised any objection to the jurisdiction or maintainability of the proceedings, and that it was only in the second round, after participating, that they filed a preliminary objection, which was neither signed by the parties nor supported by an affidavit. The circumstances, the Court observed, indicated that the objection was intended to delay the time-bound completion of the second round of litigation that the High Court had directed. The mere non-adjudication of an application that was itself not maintainable could not amount to prejudice. On the fair-hearing point, the Court noted that the appellants had in fact filed written submissions before the Tribunal, including on the merits.
Drawing on the Supreme Court’s exposition of natural justice as a flexible concept whose content depends on the statutory framework and the facts, the Court held that the rule had not been breached in a manner that caused a miscarriage of justice.
The Board’s power to determine character
On the substantive dispute, the Court proceeded on the basis that Sections 40 and 41 of the Waqf Act empower the Board, where a question arises whether a waqf is Sunni or Shia, to inquire into it and, where warranted, to amend the register. It recorded that the determination of whether a particular institution is a Sunni or a Shia waqf is a question of fact to be decided on the evidence relating to that waqf, a proposition it drew from the Supreme Court’s decision in A.P. State Wakf Board v. All-India Shia Conference, which holds that institutions of a given description are not invariably of one denomination and that each must be assessed on its own record.
On the material before it, the Court found no reason to disturb the Board’s and the Tribunal’s appreciation of the evidence. It emphasised the limited scope of a first appeal against concurrent findings of fact reached by the statutory authorities, and confined itself to examining the legality of the decision-making process rather than reappreciating the evidence afresh.
Why it matters
Stripped of its particular and sensitive facts, the judgment is about the standard of procedure a Waqf Board must follow when it decides the character of a waqf, and the limits of judicial interference with that decision.
The central holding, that a Section 40 inquiry is a fact-finding process and not a trial, matters because it sets the procedural bar for a very large category of Board decisions. If every such inquiry had to replicate the full apparatus of a civil trial, the registration and classification machinery of the Act would slow to a halt. At the same time the Court did not dispense with fairness; it applied the now-standard requirement that a natural-justice complaint must be tied to demonstrable prejudice, and found the complaint here to be, on the record, a device to delay rather than a genuine grievance. The two propositions together define a middle path: an inquiry must be fair and evidence-based, but a party who participated, filed submissions and raised objections only belatedly cannot convert the absence of a separate oral hearing into a ground for setting the decision aside.
The second point of interest is the reaffirmation that the denominational character of a waqf is a question of fact, decided waqf by waqf on its own evidence, and not by any general assumption from the name or type of the institution. That keeps such disputes anchored to the record of the particular shrine rather than to broader claims about a community or creed, which is both the legally correct approach and the one least likely to inflame a sensitive subject.
For the parties, the dismissal confirms the Board’s and the Tribunal’s orders and leaves the appellants to whatever further remedy the law allows. The underlying contest over the shrine, its name, its denominational character and its management, has been resolved at this stage on the evidence the statutory authorities weighed, and the High Court has declined to reopen that assessment in a first appeal.
Case Title: Kutubuddin Fakruddin Faruqui and Others v. The Gujarat State Waqf Board and Others [First Appeal No. 1002 of 2026]
Bench: Justice J.C. Doshi, High Court of Gujarat at Ahmedabad
Reserved on: August 11, 2026 | Pronounced on: September 14, 2026
Order Under Challenge: Judgment of the Gujarat State Waqf Tribunal dated February 9, 2026, confirming the Waqf Board’s resolution and the CEO’s order of April 2025
Status: First appeal dismissed. Concurrent findings of the Waqf Board and the Waqf Tribunal confirmed.