NEW DELHI, Sept 6: A property Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh, once owned by relatives of former Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf, has been sold at an auction on Thursday, September 5.
The government auctioned the property for Rs 1.38 crore through an online bidding process. The land, totalling 13 bighas, has been purchased by three local farmers from Baghpat.
The property, which was registered under the names of Musharraf’s relatives, will now be transferred to the new owners, effectively removing Musharraf’s family name from the land records in Baghpat. Nuru Mian, a resident of Kotana village in Baghpat’s Baraut tehsil, who is reportedly related to Musharraf, had the property sold. Nuru, who left for Pakistan in 1965, had approximately 13 bighas of land in Kotana, declared “enemy property” by the government in 2010.
The property, which consists of eight plots or Khasra numbers, was auctioned online. The e-auction, managed by the Enemy Property Custodian Office, took place from 11 am to 9 pm on Thursday.
With this sale, the land’s historical ties to Musharraf’s family will be officially severed. Pervez Musharraf’s family, originally from Baghpat, relocated to Delhi in 1943 and subsequently moved to Pakistan in 1947.
Assets left behind by people who took citizenship of Pakistan and China — mostly between 1947 and 1962 — are known as enemy property. The government has vested these properties in the Custodian of Enemy Property for India, an office instituted under the central government.
The Enemy Property Act was enacted in 1968, three years after the India-Pakistan War of 1965, to regulate such properties and list the custodian’s powers. As of April this year, there were a total of 12,611 establishments called ‘enemy property’ roughly estimated to be worth over Rs 1 lakh crore in the country.
(Manas Dasgupta)