THE ROW OVER JINNAH HOUSE

South Court, better known as Jinnah House, has been lying vacant for decades. A 2.5 acre Malabar Hill property, it is valued at $400 million. Mangal Prabhat Lodha, a BJP MLA and the city’s big gest builder, has demanded that the “enemy property” be razed to make way for a cultural centre. “The Union government announced in 1970,” he said, “that Jinnah House would become a cultural centre. I’m only demanding that the property be transferred from the central government to the state.” It is a demand he has been making for 20 years.

Lodha is supported by Shiv Sena MP Rahul Shewale, who described the estate as “a symbol of Jinnah’s thrust towards Partition”. Shewale wants a memorial for freedom fighters built on the site. In 1993, Jinnah’s only daughter, Dina Wadia, filed a petition for sole ownership. Some 15 years later, Jinnah’s grandnephew, Mohammed Ebrahim, and his son Shakir, went to court claiming Jinnah had willed the estate to his sister Fatima. “The matter is still in court,” says their lawyer Yusuf Muchhala. “Demands for demolition are provocative statements made by ignorant politicians.”

Lodha’s description of Jinnah House as enemy property is questionable. “When the Enemy Property legislation, provoked by war, was passed in 1965, some pieces of evacuee property were automatically turned into enemy property. But Jinnah House was not an operative concern,” says Dr Pallavi Raghavan, assistant professor at Jindal Global Law School and a researcher of contemporary IndiaPakistan relations. Besides, Jinnah’s descendants are Indian citizens. “They were neither declared evacuees nor enemies of the state,” says Muchhala. Enormously successful, influential and wealthy, they are unlikely to simply allow the estate to be destroyed. “Wanted by his daughter,” says Raghavan, “who chose to live in India, and of sentimental import to Pakistan as a reminder of its founding father, Jinnah House is an ode to the messiness of Partition.”