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Dina Wadia, Jinnah's daughter, passes away in New York

She was 98

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Dina Wadia, the only daughter of Pakistan's founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his Parsi wife Rattanbai Petit, and perhaps the last human connection between South Asian arch rivals India and Pakistan, passed away in New York on Thursday. She was 98.

Interestingly, she was born in London on the intervening night of August 14 and 15 in 1919. Twenty eight years later in 1947, on the same night, Jinnah succeeded in carving Pakistan out of undivided India.

After his separation from Rattanbai and her subsequent demise, Jinnah fell out with his daughter Dina, too, when she opted to marry Neville Wadia at the age of 17. Her mother Ruttie the only child of Mumbai industrialist Sir Dinshaw Petit, had also married Jinnah at 18.

Dina who opted to live in India, visited Pakistan just twice, in 1948, when her father passed away and then in 2004, accompanied by her son, Nasli Wadia, and grandchildren, Jehangir and Ness. She moved to New York after the divorce. Nusli Wadia is the chairman of the Wadia group, which owns Bombay Dyeing, among other interests.

In 2005, Wadia laid claim on the house where she was born, her father's most famous property in Mumbai — Jinnah House. Situated on Mount Pleasant Road in Mumbai's expensive Malabar Hill, the house, now in a state of disrepair, bore witness to landmark meetings between Jinnah with Subhash Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi (1944) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1946). One of Dina's contentions was that her father was a Khoja Muslim, a community which followed Hindu law and not the Sharia and therefore under the Hindu Succession Act, she became the rightful heir of the property.

After the separation of parents and demise of her mother, Dina was raised by Jinnah's sister, Fatima Jinnah. Dina at an interview had shared that she never shared a healthy connection with her aunt.

She added that Fatima Jinnah was the only barrier between her and her father. Dina, however, disappointed Jinnah's biographers and historians, never agreeing to talk about her father.

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