Waqf law row: BJP’s Nishikant Dubey takes on former CEC Quraishi now, hours after party leader B L Santhosh

On Saturday evening, amid the row over Dubey’s attack on the CJI and the apex court, Santhosh fired a salvo at former CEC Quraishi for his criticism of the law three days ago.

On April 17, Quraishi had written on X, “Wakf Act is undoubtedly a blatantly sinister/evil plan of the govt to grab Muslim lands. I’m sure SC will call it out. Misinformation by the mischievous propaganda machine has done its job well.”

Santhosh posted in reply to Quraishi’s post at 7.47 pm on Saturday, “Just remember that this man once headed the Election Commission of India. The Punya aggregated by our ancestors might be so huge that we still breathe democracy in spite of all these characters. Land grabbing was the aim of the ‘Wakf by User’ clause, Quraishi Saab.”

This was two days after the government agreed to pause two clauses of the Act – Solicitor General Tushar Mehta committed not to appoint any new member to the Central Waqf Council and state Waqf Boards, and also not to change the character of any Waqf-by-user property either notified or registered before the Act came into force, till the apex court begins hearing it again on May 5.

The general secretary (organisation) is a key post in the BJP, traditionally considered the second most powerful after the party president, and has always seen core RSS people occupy it.

On Sunday morning, hours after the BJP’s disapproval of his attack on the CJI, Dubey took to X again and posted, in reply to the same post of Quraishi, “You were not an Election Commissioner, but a Muslim Commissioner; during your tenure, most Bangladeshi infiltrators were made voters in Jharkhand’s Santhal Pargana.”

A day earlier, Dubey had accused the CJI not just of being the cause of the various ‘civil wars’ in the country – in response to a question on Murshidabad violence – but had also wondered under which Article of the Constitution the apex court had imposed a three-month timeline on the President of India, the appointing authority of the CJI, to give or reject his or her assent on a law referred to the President by a governor. He had also said that Savarna (upper caste) judges were doing what they wished, even as people from the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes were minuscule in number in the judiciary.

BJP president J P Nadda distanced the party Saturday night from Dubey’s remarks, saying that the BJP respected the judiciary and rejected the views personally expressed by Dubey. The Jharkhand MP had also told The Indian Express that the views were his own, and that he had not talked to anyone in the party before expressing them.