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India to return half a billion worth of estates to Muslim royal
India is to return estates worth more than half a billion pounds to a Muslim royal whose father helped to create its neighbouring 'enemy’ Pakistan.
By Dean Nelson, New Delhi
Amir Ahmed Khan was a young protégé of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan Photo: THE TIMES OF INDIA / GETTY IMAGES
Mohammed Amir Mohammed Khan, the Raja of Mahmudabad, has been fighting to recover his family estates, which include a royal fort and a palace built for a former British colonial governor, for 37 years.
The estates were seized by the Indian government along with hundreds of other 'enemy properties’ belonging to Muslims who migrated to Pakistan following the 1965 war between the two countries.
included the family home, the historic Qila Fort, near Lucknow, and the family’s vast property portfolio because his father, Amir Ahmed Khan, decided to become a Pakistani citizen in 1957.
Amir Ahmed Khan was a young protégé of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, but also a friend of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in their fight to end British rule in India. The Khans are one of India’s oldest royal families, one of the most senior in the Shi’ite Muslim world, and can trace its roots back to the Prophet Mohammad.
But while he chose Pakistan, his wife, a Rani in her own right, and son, now the current Raja, chose to stay as Indian citizens. Since his father’s death in 1973, he has been fighting a series of legal battles with the government to challenge the status of his inherited estates as 'enemy property’ and recover them from tenants.
The Raja sacrificed his own career as an astrophysicist – he studied at Cambridge and was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in London – to take over his father’s responsibilities and was nominated by the late Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as a Congress candidate in the state assembly.
Since then, and despite having powerful friends in the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, the Raja has been forced to fight more than 10 court actions to establish his Indian citizenship and his claim as sole heir to his father’s title and estates.
His victory was sealed this weekend when the Indian parliament agreed a new 'Enemy Property Act’ which will restore all confiscated properties to Muslim owners who can prove their Indian citizenship.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, the Raja said he was both happy and sad at the development.
While returning his estates, the new act will erase all previous legal rulings, including all those the Raja has won to establish his ownership. He feels he may have won his case but at the expense of a slow legal system.
“My estate is dead capital, you can’t estimate something which can’t be changed but it’s worth a lot of money and that’s why everyone is interested,” he said. “But that’s not of permanent importance. The Qila is the centre of a lot of religious observances throughout the year. But it’s about the law, the supremacy of the judiciary in interpreting it in India.”
) and all this in backdrop of hoo ha over CWG expenditure.
despite their closeness to political powers.
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