Non-Muslims in Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, Your Property Is Not Your Own To Will Away Without Court Probate

 

Non-Muslims in Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, Your Property Is Not Your Own To Will Away Without Court Probate

Shrikant G. Talageri 

 

I have now completed 67 years of age, and I have spent my entire life in the same house in Mumbai. Before me, my father also spent his entire life (1926-2002) in this same house. Before that, my grandfather lived in this same house from the time the building was built (in 1915). But now, with the government becoming more and more intrusive and control-prone in the lives of its citizens – an essential aspect of “liberalization”? – a member of the society committee told me (in a casual conversation) that it is essential for me, and in fact legally necessary as well, to make a will. I felt it was good advice and I set about finding out what should be done in this matter.

It was then that I came to know something which (even after reading Anand Ranganathan’s superb book “Hindus in Hindu Rashtra: Eighth Class Citizens and Victims of State-Sanctioned Apartheid”) I did not know before: that Hindus living in Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai area jurisdictions (or having properties within these area, even if they do not actually live there) do not have the legal right to will away their properties in these areas, or at least their legal nominees do not have the right to legally acquire their inheritance in these properties, without going through the cumbersome legal procedures of obtaining a probate order from a civil court, and paying a hefty sum as legal fees and court fees in the process.

I would have taken this, and did take it, as just one more example of the intrusive and control-prone nature of governments and courts in India (and perhaps in the world as a whole), until I saw something which startled me (though as a denizen of this Hindu Rashtra as described by Ranganathan, and especially one ruled since 11 years by a Vishwa Guru and Hindu Hriday Samrat, nothing of this nature should really startle me): apparently this mandatory probate law applies to Hindus (including Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs). It also applies to Christians. It also applies to Jews and Parsees. But it does not apply to Muslims.

 

In one or two of my recent articles, I have written as follows: “I know positively now that India, in a hundred years, will be an Islamic state with a sizable Christian minority and a slightly smaller Hindu minority (consisting of different caste groups fighting it out amongst themselves). But unless all my above articles are completely wiped out from all records and memory with Orwellian “1984”-like efficiency, the OIT will still prevail. Who knows: maybe Islamic India will be proud of being the Original Homeland of the IE languages (most of Indo-European Europe also having become Islamic by then)? After all, Pakistan does claim a history of 5000 years from the Harappan Civilization onwards: and the “Aryan” question is purely one of Language, not of Religion, Philosophy, Cosmology or Race!”.

I wrote it in the selfish comfort of knowing that I will not be alive a hundred years from now, and nor will there be any descendants of mine living in future times. 

I stand corrected: I, as a resident of Mumbai, am already living in an Islamic state where my own house is not really my own to give or will away without the express (and procedurally cumbersome and monetarily expensive) sanction of a court. Our film dialogue writers tell us about every human being (whether a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian or anything else): “sab mein ek hi khoon beh raha hai”. Apparently not! Muslims in India (and particularly in Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai) belong to a different species from other Indians: according to the governments, the courts, and the political parties (whether Congress, Communists or BJP), the blood of non-Muslims is impure blood which clots their brains and leaves them incapable and powerless to decide whom their property should go to after their death, unless and until the courts sanction their decisions after due procedures and fees.

I now have to search out a new selfish way to comfort myself: I am still alive and actually living in an Islamic state (in Mumbai), where my own property is not my own to will away, but it is not I who will have to go through the court procedures and pay the hefty fees: it will be my nominees who will have to do it after my death.