One of the majestic properties bequeathed by Raja Mohammed Amir Mohammad Khan of Mahumudabad in UP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBy 1994, he realized that the only way out to secure the property was to take legal recourse. He filed a writ petition in 1997 in the Bombay High Court as the office of the Custodian of Enemy Property was in that city. A year later, his wife, Vijay Khan, met then commerce minister P Chidambaram to plead the property case. He wanted to see the earlier judgment of the civil court of Lucknow. When it was given to him, he said: \u201cYou will get a decision by the end of the month.\u201d Nothing happened.<\/p>\n
POSITIVE JUDGMENT<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\nIt was only years later on September 21, 2001, that a judgment came from the Bombay High Court in this regard. It said that the properties of the Raja of Mahmu-dabad were illegally held by the government and they should be returned.<\/p>\n
Soon after, the central government filed an appeal in the Supreme Court. And in a historic judgment in October 2005, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Ashok Bhan and Altamas Kabir ruled in favor of the son and said that the government had been in illegal possession of the property since 1973 which revealed its high-handed attitude. The court asked the government to hand over vacant possession of the property.<\/p>\n
\nSterling Examples<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nHow enemy property around the world was dealt with: <\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nRespecting the provisions in the Hague Conventions 1899 and 1907, many countries compensated enemy nationals for property seized during war<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nBangladesh <\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nIn 2011, the Bangladeshi parliament passed a landmark bill that will enable the return of property seized from the country\u2019s Hindu minority under a law enacted in the 1960s. This law, initially known as the Enemy Property Act, allowed East Pakistan authorities to take over land and buildings of Hindus who migrated to India.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nUnited Kingdom <\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nAt the outbreak of World War II, assets of all residents of Germany and certain German nationals were placed under the control of the Custodian of Enemy Property. The total property was estimated to be around 15 million pounds. After the war, the assets of the occupied countries were released from British government control. An exception was made for victims of Nazi persecution and soon after the war, Nazi victims or their heirs could claim the return of their assets.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nCanada <\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nThe Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property was established in 1916 and existed until 1985. In the early 1980s, the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NJAC) mounted a vigorous compensation campaign directed at the federal government. On September 22, 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney delivered a formal apology and a package was presented to Japanese Canadians who had been interned in camps and their properties in Canada seized. The package included $24 million for the development of human rights projects and anti-racism education to the NAJC. All those who had been deported to Japan and stripped of Canadian citizenship also had their citizenship returned to them.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nGermany <\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nAfter World War II, according to the Potsdam conference held between July 17 and August 2, 1945, Germany was to pay the Allies $23 billion mainly in machinery and manufacturing plants. Since 1951, Germany has paid more than 102 billion marks, about $61.8 billion at 1998 exchange rates, in reparation payments to Israel and Third Reich victims. In the mid-late 1990s, Germany paid nearly 1.8 billion marks on the basis of special bilateral agreements concluded in 1991 and 1993 with Poland and three successor states of the former Soviet Union\u2014the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus\u2014even though in 1953 Poland and the Soviet Union renounced any further reparations payments from Germany.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nPoland <\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nPoland was under German occupation during WWII. According to some observers, it was plundered so severely that after the first raid, it never contributed to the German war effort again. Subsequently, Poland was placed under a communist regime instituted by the Soviet Union which continued till 1990. Poland remains the only ex-communist country in the EU yet to make substantial reparations to the former property owners.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n \u2014Sucheta Dasgupta<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n
\nAfter that, most of the properties were returned and there were a flurry of court cases challenging the government\u2019s right in taking over these properties.<\/p>\n
As for Raja Mohammed Amir Moha-mmad Khan, things started looking up. \u201cWe started developing the properties between 2005-06. We enjoyed restoring some of the old heritage properties,\u201d remembered Vijay Khan painfully. Her son, Ali Khan Mah-mudabad, an assistant professor at Ashoka University in Sonepat, said: \u201cAlthough my father is an Indian, the 2016 bill now sees him and thousands like him as strangers in their own country.\u201d<\/p>\n
On July 2, 2010, the UPA government came up with an ordinance annulling the judgments from 1968 to 2010 on enemy property which had deprived Indian citizens of their right to succession.<\/p>\n
Firoz Bakht Ahmed, the grandnephew of freedom fighter Maulana Azad, told India Legal that the apex court had declared in 2005 that a claimant had the right to inherit an \u201cenemy property\u201d provided he or she is an Indian citizen and a natural legal heir or successor. The court had also observed that the government charged with the task of maintaining the properties had no right over the assets. \u201cOne hopes that sanity prevails and the law takes its natural course,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Thousands of Muslims all over India are desperately nursing the same hope.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Modi government has promulgated an ordinance that allows it to take over such property even if it has legal heirs who are Indian citizens and bars civil courts from entertaining such cases By Ramesh Menon Nearly seven decades after the Partition and five decades since the 1965 war with Pakistan, the NDA government is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[372],"tags":[1248,36,1227,551,10],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/fort3-new.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indialegallive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}