BHOPAL: Actor Saif Ali Khan and other members of the Pataudi family are at risk of losing ancestral properties in MP worth several thousand crores after 94 of 131 such assets bequeathed by his great-grandfather and the last Nawab of Bhopal, Hamidullah Khan, were found to be within the ambit of “enemy property” during a verification process spanning nine years.
Custodian of Enemy Property for India (CEPI), which was assigned the task of identifying and assessing these properties in accordance with the Enemy Property Act of 1968, provided the status of the investigation in its Jan 3 response to an RTI query.
Enemy property refers to assets left behind in India by entities who migrated to countries designated as “enemy nations” during times of conflict. In this case, the dispute stems from the heir to the Bhopal estate, Abida Sultan, relocating to Pakistan three years after Partition. The last Nawab’s properties then passed to his other daughter Sajida Sultan, whose son Mansur Ali Khan ‘Tiger’ Pataudi is Saif’s father.
In 2015, CEPI sent a notice to the MP govt, vesting control of all properties of “Gowhar-i-Taj” Abida Sultan. Until February 2017, CEPI cited 88 immovable properties in MP as being part of the “enemy” estate. The Pataudis moved court against the notice soon after.
The recent RTI reply valued the cumulative 113.6 acres of immovable assets at Rs 1,796 crore.
CEPI provided details of the assessment barely three weeks after Madhya Pradesh high court instructed Saif and his mother, actor Sharmila Tagore, to approach the ministry of home affairs’ appellate authority for information regarding the assets vested as “enemy property”. The Pataudis didn’t have any legal representation at the Dec 13 hearing.
RTI petitioner Naresh Kadyan, who filed a query regarding the case in Aug 2023, questioned why CEPI hadn’t listed the “enemy properties” linked to the last Nawab of Bhopal in the public domain all these years.
