HC allows Nusli Wadia to inherit mother’s battle for Jinnah House

Wants Petition Changed Within A Week


Industrialist Nusli Wadia has been allowed to step in as petitioner in place of his mother Dina, who died last year, in a decade-old claim for ownership of Jinnah House by the Bombay high court. The bungalow at Malabar Hill belonged to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Dina’s father and the founder of modern Pakistan.


Wadia had approached the high court in 2017 following his mother’s death. His counsel Darius Khambata said the son should be permitted to substitute the mother as the petitioner in the 2007 writ filed by her since he is her legal heir and representative. Dina died on November 2, 2017, leaving behind her last will of April 2009 relating to her properties in India. Wadia was appointed executor of her will.

A M Sethna, counsel for the central government, objected, saying that since he has not obtained probate, he cannot be substituted as her legal heir and representative. A bench of Justices Ranjit More and Anuja Prabhudessai said: “We are keeping this issue open to be agitated at the time of hearing of the petition.”

After allowing Wadia’s plea on Wednesday, the bench said the petition should be amended within a week.

In 2010, the high court had admitted Dina’s petition, in which she had staked claim to the palatial property as the daughter of Mohammed Ali Jinnah and as his “sole heir’’. Almost 91 then, Dina had challenged a 60-year-old notification of the Indian government that defined Jinnah House, spread over 2.5 acres in the elite locality, as “evacuee property” — property of a person who left India after March 1, 1947, to stay in Pakistan.

The government said Jinnah willed his house to his sister Fatima on May 30, 1939. But Dina and her lawyers denied the existence of any such valid will. The dispute turned into a three-way fight when the HC also admitted a petition by Jinnah’s grandnephew Mohammed Ebrahim and his son, staking independent claim to the house. Their counsel Yusuf Muchala had contended that under Muslim law, they were the legal heirs of Fatima Jinnah and, hence, entitled to the property.

The foreign ministry said the government acquired the bungalow as evacuee property and, as a result, all rights of the evacuee and others stood extinguished. “The propert vests absolutely with the central government. There is no residuary right or right of reversion in favour of either the evacuee, or the evacuee’s heirs,” it said in an affidavit in 2010.