India's Modi govt to handover Mumbai's Jinnah House to ministry

MUMBAI: Indian government has been in a process to handover historic Jinnah House of Mumbai to the country’s Ministry of External Affairs, Indian media reports said.

External Affairs Minister of India Sushma Swaraj has said that her ministry was in the process of getting Jinnah House.

The palatial bungalow at Mumbai sea front owned by Pakistan’s founding father Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, being transferred to the ministry.

Swaraj, in a letter to Mumbai BJP legislator Mangal Prabhat Lodha, also said that her ministry will refurbish the bungalow on the lines of Hyderabad House in Indian capital Delhi.

The BJP member had in a letter to Swaraj demanded that Jinnah House should be made a cultural centre.

“We are in the process of transferring the ownership in our name,” the minister in her letter, on December 05, further said.

The BJP legislator had once also demanded that the structure be demolished calling it a “symbol of partition”.

Pakistan had in recent years demanded the Indian government that the bungalow of Quaid-e-Azam should be handed over to the country for housing its Mumbai consulate.

Quaid-e-Azam’s Ms. Dina Wadia had filed a case against the Indian government in Year 2007 for ownership of the palatial palace.

Ms. Wadia, an Indian national was died last year.

The bungalow on Malabar Hill in Mumbai was designed in European style and built in 1936 on a piece of land of 2.5 acres. Mr. Jinnah lived there in the late 1930s.

The historic residence of Muhammad Ali Jinnah witnessed several improtant pre-independence political meetings including the meetings between Quaid-e-Azam and India’s freedom icon Mahatama Gandhi.