Daughter stakes claim to Jinnah House, writes to PM

<div class="section0"><div class="Normal"><span style="" font-size:="">NEW DELHI: Mohammed Ali Jinnah''s only daughter, Dina Wadia, has made a fresh claim to the house where she was born, her father''s most famous property in Mumbai - Jinnah House.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">In a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last month, she requested possession of the house, which has emerged as an emotive diplomatic point between India and Pakistan.Wadia''s letter came immediately after Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, for the nth time, tried to cajole Manmohan Singh into getting Jinnah House for Pakistan''s consulate in Mumbai.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Jinnah House remains elusive to the most persuasive of Pakistani arguments. Instead, the Pakistan high commission has been given a choice of three plots in northern and central Mumbai, including one in upmarket Bandra. These were shortlisted during last week''s visit to Mumbai by Pakistan high commissioner Aziz Ahmed Khan.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Pakistan has never given up trying to get Jinnah House, and Musharraf, in particular, has carried on a sustained campaign. During his April visit, he pressed his claim with Leader of Opposition L K Advani. This, after trying for at least two years when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was PM, when Pakistan tried to sell the line that India''s gesture on Jinnah House would be the ultimate CBM.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">After the Musharraf visit, a discussion on Jinnah House between the government and opposition also revealed a finding by former attorney-general that Jinnah''s legal descendant still had first rights to the property.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">As a matter of fact, Wadia had made several claims to her filial property during the previous NDA government, which had attempted to begin the process of returning the property to her. In her petition, Wadia had used the precedent of Salman Rushdie retrieving his ancestral property to fortify her case. But for reasons that remain unclear, the issue fell through the cracks in the hurly-burly of governance and there was no closure.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">In 2004, Wadia made her first visit to Pakistan during the cricket series, where she was accorded the singular honour that can only be due to the daughter of the Qaid-e-Azam.</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Jinnah House is intimately tied to the partition of the subcontinent, apart from being her birthplace on, interestingly enough, August 15, 1919. </span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Situated on Mount Pleasant Road in Mumbai''s prohibitively expensive Malabar Hill, the house, now in a shocking state of disrepair, bore witness to Jinnah''s landmark meetings with Subhash Bose, Mahatma Gandhi (1944) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1946).</span><br /><br /><span style="" font-size:="">Significantly, Nehru resisted registering Jinnah House as evacuee property, though any move to give it to Pakistan died a swift death in India. </span></div> </div>