A property dispute ended after seven decades on Monday following the Lahore High Court’s (LHC) ruling against the petitioners who claimed ownership of the land purchased from Inder Singh just before the partition of 1947.
The case involving land ownership over 414 acres in villages of Lahore was pending before the court for years. It snowballed between the revenue department, patwaris, settlement commissioner office, courts and claimants for decades.
Singh moved to India and was also served a legal notice years ago but his whereabouts were yet to be known. Agha Muzammal Khan claimed ownership of the rich agricultural land on the basis of an agreement involving selling and purchasing between the parties.
An LHC single bench comprising Justice Ch Muhammad Iqbal imposed a fine of one million rupees on the petitioners. Dismissing their petitions, the court held the land was purchased on the basis of forgery and directed them to trace their legal remedy against the vendor (Singh)—the same from whom they claimed to purchase the land.
“As the alleged title in favour of Anwar Khan, Wajid Ali etc. has been declared illegal, as such, subsequent purchasers have to soar and sink with their vendor and they are debarred to claim any better title.”
The petitioners claimed they purchased the land from Anwar Khan who acquired it from Singh. Khan died in 1951 and his legal heir came to know in 1998 that the land belonged to them in Mauza Rai of Lahore. Interestingly, the sale deeds between his family and Singh came to his knowledge. The heir contacted the revenue department [patwari] to correct the entries of record accordingly and incorporate their name in the record.
The petitioners then went to knock the door of chief settlement commissioner for redressal of their grievances. On directives of chief settlement commissioner, the consolidation gave information that Mauza Rai’s record was stolen in 1962. Whereafter the name of the petitioners’ predecessor-in-interest (Anwar Khan) disappeared from the revenue record.
The petitioners, then, suddenly got information about mutation number 198 on July 9, 1956 and they found that Patwari Halqa issued a copy of jamabandi for the year 1950 and 1960, which showed the name of predecessor-in-interest of the petitioners in the revenue record. But no entry was available in revenue record after 1960.
The petitioners then filed a petition in 2000 with a pray to direct the revenue hierarchy to correct the entries of the record. The same petition was disposed of the same year with direction to the respondents to attest the mutation of the remaining portion of the land in favour of the petitioner. The same order was challenged, recalled and the writ petition was dismissed.
At one stage the case was moved to the Supreme Court but the apex court remanded to the LHC with a direction for decision-a-fresh.
Another petitioner Ali Muhmmad and others had sought allotment of Evacuee Land in Mauza Rai before the year 2000. The direction was passed to the chief settlement commissioner to decide the case.
Besides this lis (a suit pending), Muhammad Akram emerged as another applicant who approached the member judicial-V board of revenue submitting that Agha Muzammal and others fraudulently obtained a huge chunk of land through forged and fabricated documents.
The board conducted inquiry and found the record as bogus. The petitioners challenged the board of revenue order before the LHC in 2013 and 2015, claiming the land belonged to them. After hearing arguments of both sides, the court dismissed the petitions and declared the alleged title in favour of Khan and Ali as illegal.
The court held the subsequent purchasers have to “soar and sink” with their vendors and debarred them from claiming better title. The court also said the petitioners may trace their remedy against the vendors from whom they purchased the land.
