The Hindu : National : Enemy Property Bill back in amended form

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National

Enemy Property Bill back in amended form

Special Correspondent

Listed for consideration and passage in the Lok Sabha

New Delhi: The controversial Enemy Property (Amendment and Validation) Bill, 2010 is back. On Wednesday, two weeks after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acceded to the request of a cross-party delegation of Muslim MPs, including several Ministers, who met him on August 4, to withdraw this law as it would throw into question the possession of ancestral property by citizens whose parents or grandparents migrated to Pakistan after Partition, it was listed for consideration and passage in the Lok Sabha. However, the House was adjourned before it could come up.

Government sources said the Bill was brought to the Cabinet on Monday, after the Union Home Ministry introduced some amendments in it to ensure that legal heirs are allowed to hold the property of their parents or grandparents who had migrated to Pakistan, even while it will continue to address the larger question of empowering the custodian to deal with frivolous litigation launched by illegal occupants of such property. Section 18 has been made more transparent and fair, according to the sources, and now property of Indian-born citizens, who are the legal heirs, will no longer revert to the government.

For some unexplained reasons, the note that precedes a Cabinet meeting did not mention the Bill or the proposed changes, though a note on it was circulated among Ministers at the Cabinet meeting itself, the sources said.

Earlier, on August 4, after the Prime Minister heard out the delegation, he had “consulted” Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram on the matter and a decision was then taken to allow the ordinance, currently in operation, to lapse. But evidently, there was a sense of urgency in government and so an amended version was brought to the Cabinet earlier this week.

The Bill, in its earlier form, would have prevented Indian family members of those who migrated to Pakistan at the time of Partition from going to court to regain possession of the property of their forefathers that had been seized as “enemy property” and had been vested in a custodian. The government's keenness to pass the Bill was demonstrated by the fact that it had got the President to promulgate an ordinance on July 2, which means it is currently in operation. The Enemy Property Bill, 2010 is intended to replace this ordinance amending an Act of 1968 to contend with court judgments that “adversely affected the powers” of the custodians and the Government of India.

At the August 4 meeting, the MPs had told Dr. Singh to re-examine the Bill as it would have “a politically adverse impact on a large number of families in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam and Maharashtra.” It would be “putting the clock back to 1968,” an MP had said, “as many people had ordered their lives based on court verdicts and it would serve no public purpose to unsettle them.”

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