Liaquat Ali Khan’s Property Declared ‘Enemy Property’ in Muzaffarnagar | Agra News – Times of India

The land in question includes a mosque and four shops, and according to its ‘caretaker’ was registered with waqf board in the 1930s

AGRA: A plot of land associated with the family of Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, near the railway station in Muzaffarnagar, has been declared as “enemy property”. This comes after the “Custodian of Enemy Property for India, ministry of home affairs”, in its letter dated December 5, directed the district administration to “assume control and manage the property”.
City magistrate Vikas Kashyap on Saturday confirmed that the enemy property office in Delhi, after reviewing reports and “hearing all parties”, issued an order officially designating the land as “enemy property”.
Mentioned in historical records under the name of Liaquat Ali Khan’s family, the property was at the centre of complaints filed by national convenor of a right-wing organisation (Rashtriya Hindu Shakti Sangathan), Sanjay Arora. The exact worth of the land is not known.
Arora had submitted petitions to the district administration about a year-and-a-half ago, demanding its declaration as enemy property. Subsequently, following investigations, the district magistrate was instructed to “proceed with the notices”.
Arora said, “The demand that we were making for declaring the property in front of a railway station as ‘enemy property’ for over a year was fulfilled yesterday…”
The land in question — identified as “Khasra No. 930 and measuring about 0.0820 hectares” — includes a mosque and four shops, and according to its ‘caretaker’, Maulana Mujibul Islam, was registered with the Waqf Board in the 1930s.
Speaking with TOI, the ‘caretaker’ claimed that “the family” gave this property to ‘waqf’ (Islamic endowment) and “three months ago, after receiving a notice from the administration that the property was being acquired under the enemy property law, approached the local court (in Muzaffarnagar) where the matter is being heard.”
Meanwhile, Mujibul’s lawyer MK Rathore, who is fighting the case in the local court, said, “In 1918, Rustam Ali Khan (Liaquat Ali Khan’s father) built a mosque on the property. He died in 1919. In 1934, it was registered as waqf property, a ‘property of God’… The mosque was built in 1918 and ‘namaz’ has been offered ever since. So, how can it be an enemy property?”
Incidentally, a raging debate is on in the country following the recent tabling of a Bill in Parliament seeking to amend the 1995 Waqf Act. It was later referred to a joint panel after protests by some MPs of opposition parties.
The Enemy Property Act, 1968, enables and regulates the appropriation of properties in India belonging to Pakistani nationals. The Act was passed following the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. It transfers the ownership of such properties to the “Custodian of Enemy Property for India”, a government authority.