A court in Pakistan has rejected an appeal to seek possession of late Bollywood actor Raj Kapoor’s Haveli in the historic walled city here in the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which the provincial government been declared as national heritage in 2016.
In that same year, an appeal was filed in Pakistan demanding the Haveli’s possession. On Thursday, the Peshawar High Court’s two-judge panel, which was made up of Justices Ishtiaq Ibrahim and Abdul Shakoor, dismissed the petitioner’s ownership case.
The Federal Government, led by the then-prime minister Nawaz Sharif, had already declared the legendary actor Dilip Kumar’s haveli in Peshawar’s renowned Qissa Khwani Bazaar to be a national treasure. The court dismissed the appeal due to an earlier decision of the same court on the acquisition process of late actor Dilip Kumar’s haveli in Peshawar.
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s Additional Advocate General informed the court that the Kapoor Haveli had been designated a national treasure by the provincial archaeology department through a notice in 2016.
Justice Shakoor questioned the archaeological division about this in order to find out whether they had any records or other evidence that the Raj Kapoor family had ever resided in the haveli.
Saeed Muhammad’s petitioner’s attorney, Advocate Sabahauddin Khattak, informed the court that Saeed Muhammad’s father purchased the home at an auction in 1969 and remained the only owner until the provincial government began the acquisition procedure.
The bench told the counsel that the matter should be resolved in civil court. The Kapoor Haveli, Raj Kapoor’s family home, is located in Peshawar’s renowned Qissa Khwani Bazaar and was built between 1918 and 1922 by Raj Kapoor’s grandfather, Dewan Basheswarnath Kapoor.
In the 1990s, Rishi Kapoor and his brother Randhir had been here. Raj Kapoor and his uncle Trilok Kapoor, were both born there.
