Three plots of land and a missing Begum

Till last year,Aisha Begum,wife of Ahsanul Haq,was the owner of two properties: plots 1190 and 1191,totalling 0.307 hectares,in Muzaffarnagar. At present,this is part of a 13-hectare agricultural farm of the Chaudhary Chhotu Ram (P.G.) College. “We have both BSc. and MSc. courses in Agriculture,and the farm serves as a requisite hands-on experience for our students. The produce is sold commercially,” says Malik.

Maps of the property,where Aisha Begum’s plots are marked to show their position against the larger farm are supposedly available,but none of the officials The Sunday Express met produced one.

“Though we pay around Rs 3,000 annually as lease,I do not know where exactly the property lies. It is supposed to be a small plot,” says Malik,who is in his seventh year as principal.

“It is in a corner of the college’s farm,” says an official at the Sadar tehsil,sketching a map with his pen and marking a different corner each time.

There was good news for Aisha Begum in 2009,when the Custodian of Enemy Property informed college authorities that they may have found a new plot registered in her name. This plot is part of the dairy farm that the college runs.

“We established the dairy farm in 1959,the same year this college began,as a laboratory of sorts for our dairy department. Some officials surveyed the land last year and informed us that they suspected another of Aisha Begum’s properties to be enclosed within the farm,” says Malik.

Aisha Begum has a total of three properties registered to her name. None could confirm if the third,plot number 1192 measuring 0.102 hectares,was the one found inside the farm.

While Enemy Property was added to the vocabulary of a generation of Indians only recently,shatru sampathi is not new to the area. “Even last year,some two to three people approached us,claiming that they were heirs to a shatru sampathi that falls inside the dairy farm. We asked them to provide documentary evidence. They didn’t return,” says Malik.