Jinnah's will says he bequeathed Jinnah House to his sister

In a fresh twist to the ownership dispute over Jinnah House, a central government office has found a copy of the will made by Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah which mentions that the leader bequeathed the property to sister Fatima Jinnah. The development may hamper the Wadia family’s claim to the posh property located on Mount Pleasant Road at the upmarket Malabar Hill.

The will was legally certified as genuine by the Bombay high court and executed in Fatima’s favour in 1962. A copy of the probate (legal certification) was found in the records of the custodian of enemy property for India. “We have sent the copy to the ministry of external affairs for their perusal and action,” said Dinesh Singh, the custodian, who has his office in Mumbai.

If the probate is accepted by the court, government sources say it may weaken the claim of Dina Wadia — Jinnah’s daughter — to the bungalow. A British citizen and the mother of well-known industrialist Nusli Wadia, the 90-year-old Dina had moved the Bombay high court claiming rights to the bungalow on the ground that her father had not left behind any will.

Challenging the Centre’s move to take over the property — it wants
to convert it into a cultural centre — she had claimed that the government was relying on the wrong premise, that the property was willed to Fatima who was declared an evacuee when she left for Pakistan in 1947.    

The Centre has been maintaining that the will of Jinnah was a public document and Dina’s ignorance about it was a “brazen denial of a widely documented historical record”.    

The government had, in an order dated September 10, 1965, declared movable assets like shares, securities and debentures invested in Indian companies and bequeathed by Jinnah in his will to Fatima as enemy property. “Since the bungalow was an immovable property and both Jinnah and Fatima had migrated to Pakistan, it could not have been placed in the same category. The government had already declared it as an evacuee property,’’ said Singh.

The certified copy states that the constituted attorney (executor of the will) had filed petition number 199 of 1959 for a succession certificate on behalf of Fatima, who mentioned herself as a Muslim.

According to officials, the high court then granted Fatima the succession certificate on January 1, 1962, with an undertaking to deposit the share and securities with National and Grindlays Bank Ltd., Bombay, and to open an NRI account for carrying out the transactions which will not be operated by her without the permission of the Reserve Bank of India under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) and directions of the high court.

The credit balance in the NRI account (current a/c) was Rs2,16,133.79 as on June 24, 1965. Jinnah made a bequest in favour of his other sisters, brother, and three public bodies - Anjuman Islam School, Bombay (Rs25,000), University of Bombay (Rs50,000), and Arabic College (Delhi College now, Rs25,000). His entire residuary estate, including corpus, was directed to be divided in three parts and one part each to be given to Aligarh University, Islamia College Peshawar & Sind Madrassah, Karachi.

The payments to Islamic College and Sindh Madrassa were, however, not released by the Indian government. Importantly, government records show that an amount of Rs1,64,333.33 (cheque number 493475 dated July 21, 1976, paid to Nusli N.Wadia, son of Dina Wadia, in part payment of the legacy bequeathed to her by the deceased in his will at Rs 1,000 per month for the period from September 11, 1948,  to January 31, 1976.

According to government officials, there is no record of Fatima Jinnah taking legal action during her lifetime to claim Jinnah House as the property was taken over under the Bombay Evacuee (Administration of Property) Act, 1949, and vested in the custodian of evacuee properties on June 27, 1949.