NEW DELHI, Oct 25: India’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the restoration of all properties to the Indian son of the late Raja of Mahmudabad, who had migrated to Pakistan in 1957, and directed the government to vacate the seized properties, mostly in Lucknow, New Delhi and Mumbai, within eight weeks.
The properties were acquired by the Indian government after the 1965 war with Pakistan when these were declared as enemy property.
The Supreme Court’s verdict came 32 years after the only son of the Raja of Mahmudabad, Mohammad Amir Mohammad Khan, who did not migrate to Pakistan at the time of the country’s partition, filed a petition to reclaim his ancestral properties.
“My mother and I stayed back. We remain citizens of India, but we had no claim on the property that truly belonged to us,” Mr Khan, also known as Sulaiman Mian, told a TV channel after the verdict.
The Cambridge graduate, who was elected to the state legislature in Uttar Pradesh, began fighting the case after his father died in 1973.
In their order, a two-judge bench comprising Justice Ashok Bhan and Justice Altamas Kabir directed the federal government to return all the buildings it had acquired of the Raja of Mahmudabad back to his son within eight weeks.
The judges threw out the writ petition of the Federal Government Union filed to oppose an earlier High Court order to restore the properties to Sulaiman Mian.
The government was also ordered to pay Rs500,000 to the Mahmudabad heir towards the cost of the case. The assets include a fort, dozens of buildings, hundreds of hectares of farmland and a hotel.
The Raja of Mahmudabad had gone to Pakistan in 1957 but his wife Begum Kaneez Abidi and son stayed back. In 1962, defence-related laws were framed under which property of citizens who had migrated to Pakistan was declared as ‘evacuee property’.
Some of the properties were used to house senior government officials.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court said the provisions of law declaring a property as enemy property could not be invoked against an Indian citizen.
