Delhi HC junks plea by widow of Bahadur Shah Zafar descendant seeking Red Fort’s possession

The Delhi high court’s division bench on Friday upheld a single judge’s order dismissing a woman’s petition seeking possession of the Red Fort. The woman, Sultana Begum, is the widow of Mirza Mohammed Bedar Bakht, who was the great-grandson and legal heir of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor.

The court junked the plea because Begum, who reportedly resided in Kolkata, had challenged the order after an inordinate delay of more than two-and-a-half years, said a bench of acting chief justice Vibhu Bakhru and justice Tushar Rao Gedela.

The court also said that Begum’s explanation justifying the delay on account of her ill health and daughter’s death was “inadequate”.

“The appeal has been filed after a delay of 913 days. The only reason for explaining the 913 days’ delay was that she ‘fell ill severely and thereafter her daughter died’ so the appellant could not file the same within time. We find the explanation inadequate, considering the delay is more than 2.5 years. Given the above the application for condonation of delay is dismissed. Consequently, the appeal is also barred by limitation,” the court said in its order.

The woman had approached the division bench against a single judge’s December 20, 2021 order junking her plea citing an inordinate delay of more than a century. Her plea had then sought compensation from the Union government for the alleged illegal occupation of the historic monument. The judge had said that the petition was a gross misuse of time. “In my view, merely because the petitioner claims to be illiterate cannot be a ground for this court to examine a highly stale claim which is barred by gross delay and laches even according to the case set up by the petitioner that the cause for approaching this court had arisen in 1857,” the judge had said.

In her petition before the division bench, the woman had claimed that she had legally inherited the property from her ancestor, and was entitled to seek possession and compensation for its alleged illegal occupation by the government.