MUMBAI, Oct 5: The Indian government has rebuffed a claim by the daughter of Pakistan’s founder to a colonial mansion in the heart of Mumbai that belonged to her father.

The government said in a submission to the Bombay High Court that it owned the prized piece of real estate overlooking the ocean that her father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, built in 1936.

Dina Wadia, 88, who has appealed to successive Indian governments for the property’s return, lives in the United States but says she wants to spend her remaining days in the stately home in Mumbai’s wealthy Malabar Hill district.

She launched the latest battle claiming she was the legal heir after learning the government planned to convert the property into an arts centre.

Last year she wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seeking its return. “It is now over 50 years since my father’s death and I have been deprived of my house ... where I grew up and lived until I married,” she said.

“I request you return it to me.”

Following partition of the subcontinent into mainly Hindu but officially secular India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru asked Mr Jinnah what he wanted done with the house.

He is reported to have answered: “You do not know how I love Bombay. I built that house brick by brick. Tell Jawaharlal not to break my heart.”

Wadia’s family insists that as strange as it may sound, Mr Jinnah planned to come back to India. However, when Mr Jinnah died in 1948, his will left the property to his unwed sister, Fatima Jinnah, who had moved with her brother to Pakistan.

As Ms Jinnah had been declared an evacuee, the property was taken over by the government.

The government said in its affidavit that “the late Fatima Jinnah was his rightful legal heir as Jinnah had willed the house to her. Only Fatima or her legal heir could have applied for restoration of the property.”

Pakistan had at one time said it wanted to establish a Mumbai consulate in the house but the request was turned down by the government and another location was found.No date has yet been set for a decision by the court on the property claim.—AFP