Saif Ali Khan.
Supreme Court Puts Hold on Five-Decade-Old Royal Property Case Involving Saif Ali Khan and Family: NEW DELHI – In a significant development for one of India’s most prominent royal families, the Supreme Court has stayed a Madhya Pradesh High Court order that sought to reopen a decades-old partition dispute over the personal estate of the Nawab of Bhopal. The ruling offers a temporary reprieve to Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan and his family, whose inheritance of the estimated ₹15,000 crore ($1.65 Billion) property had been thrown into uncertainty.
A bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Atul S. Chandurkar on Friday issued an interim stay on the High Court’s June 30 order, which had remanded the case back to a trial court for a fresh consideration of heirship. The stay was granted in response to a special leave petition (SLP) filed by Omar Ali, a cousin of Saif Ali Khan and a descendant of the Nawab’s elder brother.
During the hearing, Senior Advocate Devadatt Kamat, representing the petitioner, argued that sending the case back for a fresh trial after fifty years was legally unsound. “There was no case of remand made out by the plaintiff or the defendant,” he told the court, emphasizing that neither party had requested a retrial or the presentation of new evidence. Kamat pointed out that the High Court’s decision was based on a Supreme Court judgment (Talat Fatima Hasan v. Syed Murtaza Ali Khan) that had actually accepted the plaintiff’s point of view, yet it still sent the entire matter back to the trial court.
After hearing the arguments, the Supreme Court bench simply stated, “We’ll grant stay,” effectively freezing the High Court’s order and preventing the case from returning to the lower court.
A Tangle of Rulings
The legal battle stems from a series of decisions spanning decades. The High Court’s June 30 order, delivered by Justice Sanjay Dwivedi, had set aside a trial court ruling from February 2000. That original verdict had affirmed that the Nawab’s private properties were part of the gaddi (throne) of Bhopal and would, therefore, pass to the successor to the throne, Sajida Sultan.
Justice Dwivedi’s ruling to remand the case for a fresh trial was predicated on the argument that the trial court’s original judgment had relied on a precedent that was later overruled by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Talat Fatima case had established that the private properties of former rulers should be governed by personal laws—in this case, Muslim Personal Law—and not by traditional succession rules like primogeniture. The High Court believed that since the foundation of the 2000 ruling had been invalidated, a fresh trial was necessary to determine the proper distribution of the assets.
Supreme Court of India.
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A Royal History of Inheritance
The property in question belongs to the last Nawab of the erstwhile Bhopal state, Hamidullah Khan, who died in 1960. He had three daughters. The throne would have normally passed to his eldest daughter, Abida Sultan, but she had migrated to Pakistan in 1950. As a result, the succession passed to the second daughter, Sajida Sultan—Saif Ali Khan’s paternal grandmother.
In 1962, the Government of India officially declared Nawab Hamidullah Khan’s personal property as the personal property of Sajida Sultan. Her son, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi (Saif’s father), and his family—Saif Ali Khan, his mother Sharmila Tagore, and his sisters Soha and Saba—later inherited the vast estate.
However, the transfer of properties to Sajida Sultan was challenged by other family members, including descendants of Nawab Hamidullah Khan’s brother, Obaidullah Khan, and his third daughter, Rabia Sultan. They argued that the inheritance should be divided according to Muslim Personal Law among all legal heirs.
The Supreme Court’s latest decision to stay the High Court’s order means the case will not be re-examined by the trial court, but will instead be taken up directly by the apex court for further consideration. This leaves the final fate of the royal inheritance in the hands of the nation’s highest judicial body.
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