Twist in tale as Arcot Nawab says 5th prince had no son

Giving a new twist to the decade-long legal wrangle of two brothers — Khursheed Mohammad Khan and Rafique Mohammad Khan — who have been seeking compensation for a piece of land claiming to be the sons of the fifth prince of Arcot, the present prince, Nawab Mohammed Abdul Ali, on Monday clarified that the fifth prince had no sons at all.

Reacting to media reports on the ‘sons of the fifth prince’ getting a favourable judgment in the Madras High Court, Abdul Ali, who is the eighth prince, tried to set the record straight. “The said fifth prince had no sons born to him at all. He had only two daughters, Mrs Azamuissan Begum and Mrs Fazilathuniassan Begum, who are no more. The former left for Pakistan at the time of Partition,” his signed statement said.

The Mohammad Khan brothers, referred to in media reports as sons of the fifth prince — who held the title from 1903 to 1952 — are not his sons, Abdul Ali said and added: “It would seem that the facts have been misrepresented to the Madras High Court in a case relating to a property in Numngambakkam by name ‘Mackey’s Garden’, which was originally owned by the late fifth prince of Arcot.”

However, as discreet enquiries revealed, the brothers are related to the nawab’s family members. Since the fifth prince had no male heir, his younger brother Gulam Mohinuddin Khan Bhahadur succeeded him as the sixth prince. Abdul Ali is the direct grandson of Khan Bhahadur.

But in 2003, the Mohammad Khan brothers approached the Tamil Nadu government seeking compensation for two-thirds of the Mackey’s Gardens, a 82.5 ground piece of land, which had then been occupied by slum dwellers. When the government refused to entertain their plea, they went to the Supreme Court, which directed the revenue department to dispose of their case within three months.

When the revenue department rejected their plea in 2006, they approached the Madras High Court in 2007 and a single judge directed the State to handover their land in 2010. So, the government filed an appeal and the first bench set aside the 2006 order and remitted the matter back to the revenue department.