From a hotel,the story of a Nawab and his tenant

The recent Cabinet nod to an amended Enemy Property Bill has brought the focus back on the Raja of Mahmoodabad and his battle for his ancestral properties worth hundreds of crores.

Deepak Mehta is a hotelier who speaks like a lawyer. The old wooden desk in his office,at Hotel Gautam in Old Delhi,is covered with files and law books. Mehta is a third generation litigant in a complex property suit that has spanned four decades and might go on for many more.

To trace Mehtas obsession with the Enemy Property Act,one has to visit the story of Nawab Firoz-u-din,a wealthy man who owned considerable property in Old Delhi circa 1947. When Partition threatened to disrupt his life,he quickly shipped his wife and five children off to Karachi and continued living in India where he could man his estate. Mehtas grandfather,O P Mehta,was a tenant of property number 185,one of Firoz-u-dins properties,since 1938. He ran a small guesthouse and called it Hotel Gautam,for which he paid Firoz-u-din a princely monthly rent of Rs 3 a month. Today,the hotel stands just the way O P Mehta left it,the second and third floor of a squat building thats a few metres away from Fathepuri mosque in Chandni Chowk. The property is one of the 300-odd enemy properties in Delhi.

In those days,there was a room with a pool table in the guesthouse and well-off men would come and hang out there. From what I have heard,it was a popular spot, says Mehta. He has heaps of documents from the Custodian of Enemy Property declaring that property number 185 is immune from sale,seizure and/or attachment.

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Firoz-u-din died in 1959,an Indian citizen. His family members,who were Pakistani citizens by then,travelled to Delhi,where a district court granted them a succession certificate for 13 properties listed in Firoz-u-dins name. O P Mehta started paying rent to Firoz-u-dins family. In 1968,the Indian government enacted the Enemy Property Act and set up a custodian to oversee all property owned by Muslims who had migrated to Pakistan. O P Mehta then started paying rent to the custodian.

In 1971,in what appeared to the Mehtas to be an unrelated incident,a man called Pir Abdul Majid was taken to court because he owed large sums of money to various people. Majid pleaded that he had no money but said that before dying,Firoz-u-din had willed his properties in Delhi to him,and the court could sell any one of those properties to recover the money. My grandfather was shocked. This was the first he was hearing of a will,12 years after Firoz-u-dins death. The court immediately held an auction and the property was auctioned off to Om Prakash and Mangat Ram for Rs 62,000, says Mehta. Before the sale deed could be completed,the Custodian of Enemy Property in India,along with tenants of Firoz-u-din,filed an objection in the court and the sale was stayed.

Oddly enough,before he died,Pir Abdul Majid managed to sell the property once more in 1991 for Rs 3 lakh. This has only served to make matters even more complex.

Monthly visits to the court became a norm for the Mehta family and when O P Mehta had to stop being actively involved in the case,his son P R Mehta took over and now,Deepak Mehta has been entrusted with the task.

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Today,the Mehtas pay a measly Rs 400 to the custodian as rent for a property whose market worth is valued between Rs 3.5-4 crore. We would like to buy this property,having been the tenants for three generations,but we dont know who the owners are, says Mehta.

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