43 years on, dispossessed man gets help

New Delhi: He has been fighting a lone battle for 43 years to recover a plot that belonged to his father but was allegedly appropriated and sold by the government as evacuee property. Now the Delhi High Court has taken cognisance of Qayyum Khan's plight.

A division bench of the court has ordered the government to deposit with it the Rs12,500 (around Dh1,090) it had received from the sale of the plot in south Delhi's Bhogal neighbourhood, along with interest, before it decides how to move ahead in the case.

One of many

Khan's case exemplifies how the trauma of partition - when many families migrated to Pakistan, resulting in their land and other property being treated as evacuee property - continues to haunt many in India even today.

The difference in Khan's case was that his father Chand Khan never migrated, and was alive and working in the capital even after partition in 1947. The latter even approached the authorities for restoration of the property but failed to get it back.

It was in 1965, after the plot had been sold by the government, that Qayyum Khan decided to go to court.