Most of the stories being swapped in the lobbies of Hyderabad’s five-star hotels in the early 1990s concerned Javeri’s property dealings and his alleged involvement in the theft of antiques from Jah’s palaces. The Chronicle’s Ayoob Ali Khan recalls the rumour mill:
Supposing Sadruddin was selling ‘x’ property. How much of the money was going back according to the Prince? Supposing he had sold ten articles. Were all these ten articles accounted for? Was there any inventory when he took over? Was there any inventory when he left? Sadruddin walks into a void and gets in a situation where there are fair chances of him being accused of malpractices. True or not, that’s debatable.26
Javeri’s wife, Scheherazade, admits her husband had no choice but to bend the rules to satisfy his boss’s need for cash. Unable to evict land-grabbers, he brokered deals that allowed them to keep the properties they had illegally acquired by paying the Nizam’s Estate a percentage of the market value. Scheherazade claims that her late husband raised A$15 million this way and sent all the proceeds to Jah’s companies on top of the millions he loaned him personally.27
As in other large Indian cities, Hyderabad’s property laws are virtually unenforceable, its Municipal Corporation is riddled with corruption and local politicians are easily bought off. Vacant land is considered fair game. Any piece of garbagestrewn dirt that does not already have a building on it or is not a construction site has a sign painted in large red letters on a boulder or hastily erected wall saying: ‘This land belongs to . . .’ followed by a mobile telephone number. Within a few years it will become another shopping mall, office suite or residential apartment block without any reference to building codes or urban-planning guidelines. When Hyderabad was beginning its building boom in the 1980s, by far the largest swathes of vacant prime real estate were under the control of the Nizam’s Private Estate. By the time Javeri had left the scene only a few dozen of the 2200 properties that Osman Ali Khan had bequeathed to his grandson would still be in Jah’s possession, and that number was about to drop even further.
In January 1995, three MLAs belonging to the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party threatened ‘to hoist the Indian tricolour’ from the flagpoles of the Nizam’s palaces if the state government did not consider a cabinet subcommittee report recommending their takeover. The committee had found that ‘there had been a lapse on the part of the higher officials as they had failed to take timely action to safeguard the [Nizam’s] properties from encroachments’. The BJP politicians also alleged that Jah had collected US$25 million as an advance from foreigners to covert Falaknuma into a five-star hotel.28
Though on shaky ground financially and now under attack politically, Jah still commanded some clout. On 17 February he hosted an Iftar party at Chowmahalla palace to celebrate the end of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. The candlelit dinner, attended by Krishan Kant, the state’s governor, Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi, the president of the main Muslim party, the Majlis Ittehad-ul-Musulimeen, as well as other local luminaries, was arranged in front of the Khilawat where Jah had been crowned as Nizam 21 years earlier. The party not only gave Jah the chance do some lobbying, it was an opportunity to introduce guests to his new wife, 37-year-old Turkish national Ayesha Arkide. The two had married the previous day. It was the fifth time for Jah, the third time for Ayesha.
A few weeks later Jah had discarded his fez, sherwani and patent leather shoes and was back in his old workman’s trousers and braces at Murchison House Station doing what he loved most: tending his graders, dozers and four-wheel drives. In April he gave what would be his last media interview to Mara Beare of Perth’s Sunday Times. Jah spoke of how he had been dropped into a ‘void’ when he was made the Eighth Nizam of a state that had ceased to exist. ‘So what do I do? I go back to doing this.’ Beare described him as looking as though ‘he could be anyone’s granddad – gentle, grey-haired, even a little eccentric’. The rambling outback homestead was the reverse of what one might expect an Indian prince to own, observed Mara, ‘right down to the old pictures on the wall that look like they came from the local jumble sale’. ‘Prince Jah said he had nothing to hide,’ added Beare. ‘The past three years had been rocky but now he hoped a turnaround would occur.’29
Once again the isolation of the Australian outback afforded Jah a mental escape from his mounting financial and legal problems, but this time there would be no turnaround. As Jah showed his new wife around the station, another round of litigation, relating to the sale in January of the Nizam’s jewels, was being launched in India. Jah’s eldest children, Azmat and Shekhyar, were challenging their father’s right to his share of the sale on the grounds that he was incompetent to handle money. The other beneficiaries, all of them related to Jah, had been forced to put their spending plans on hold after finding out that they were only entitled to the interest on the corpus during their lifetime. After the tax authorities claimed their share, there was little of the 2.18 billion rupees left over apart from Jah’s 537-million-rupee entitlement as ‘the head of the family’. It was this share that now became the focus of litigation. Jah’s counterattack was to challenge the government’s compulsory acquisition of the jewellery, which if sold on the open market could have received at least three times the price.
Javeri was also angry, calling the final amount paid by the government a ‘pittance, an insult’. But he blamed Jah for the mess. ‘His [the Nizam’s] biggest mistake was that instead of staying here and fighting he turned his back on his problems and left the country,’ Javeri told London’s Sunday Times on 16 April 1995. ‘It is very difficult for anyone from that dynasty to adapt to modern times. Until 20 years ago money had no meaning for the Nizams of Hyderabad. If they paid £1 or £1 million, it meant the same to them. Money was just something to spend.’30
It was the last time Jah allowed Javeri to speak on his behalf. On 25 May 1995 a public notice was published in several Hyderabad newspapers announcing the termination of Javeri’s services and citing alleged irregularities committed by him as chairman of the Nizam’s Private Estate. Javeri would later claim that he was sacked two days after a heated argument with Jah’s England-based legal advisor, Anwarullah Pasha, over plans to hand over control of his palaces to the Taj Group, India’s largest hotel chain. The Taj had already converted several properties belonging to former rulers into five-star hotels, including the Lake Palace in Udaipur, made famous in the James Bond movie Octopussy. It had long coveted the 220-room Falaknuma, the most opulent and best preserved of Jah’s remaining properties. Jah was hoping that leasing it to the Taj would give him some financial breathing space.
Jah’s spin-doctors put out a different story. Shortly after the sacking, Calcutta’s The Telegraph quoted ‘palace sources’ as saying Javeri and his wife ‘were allegedly involved in embezzlement and did not list all antiques and jewellery listed in palace inventories’. The article alleged that antiques had disappeared from palaces only to surface at Javeri’s shop in Geneva. Javeri denied any wrongdoing, claiming that the sale had been authorised by Jah to meet his expenses. The Telegraph traced the royal rift back to an earlier stoush between Jah and the Javeris over their refusal to accept a deal by the Hyatt Hotel group for converting the palaces into five-star hotels. His dismissal, the paper said, had ‘come as a relief to royalists’.31
Shortly after his sacking Javeri was evicted from the Taj Residency. When the Nizam’s Private Estate refused to immediately clear a 1.6-million-rupee bill for five years’ room rental, the Taj obtained a court injunction and sealed the suite. Humiliated, Javeri hit back where it would hurt the most. He called in the A$2.3 million loan he had extended to Murchison House Pastoral Company in 1992. The loan was secured against the company’s only remaining assets, the chattels of Havelock House and Murchison House Station.
David Michael still maintains Javeri never lent any of his personal funds to Jah as ‘all of the money was the proceeds from the valuables that Mukarram Jah put on the table in Geneva’. He also claims th
at Jah was duped into putting the money from the jewellery sales into Javeri’s family company to obtain ‘Forex import credits’. But Michael admits his boss’s aversion to involving himself in financial matters was partly to blame for the mess. The moment discussions began on transferring money Jah ‘immediately shut off’, Michael says. ‘He did not even wish to hear such convoluted things. He could not, or did not, want to understand such matters.’ Michael even claims Jah was misled into believing that Kingsburg was his own company.32
In the spring of 1995, Perth’s largest auction house, Gregsons, received instructions from Kingsburg to conduct a mortgagee auction. In the 40-odd years Bob Gregson had been working with his family company he had never handled a sale this size. Almost 600 lots, ranging from a child’s pair of sequinned slippers to a Holland & Holland Royal Grade double-barrel elephant gun, were up for sale. The 54-page catalogue listed the entire contents of Havelock House, including Jah’s prayer cap, a painting by his Turkish grandfather, a 1909 child-sized model of a horse and cart, dozens of books, family photographs, curtains and chandeliers, as well as a 442-piece Mappin and Webb ivoryhandled silver cutlery service. The sale attracted international attention. Jah, who was in London, found out about the auction only three days before it was held. It was David Michael who spotted an advertisement placed in The Times announcing an auction of ‘The chattels of the Nazim [sic] of Hyderabad’ to be held on 1 December 1995.33
Short of paying Javeri the money he owed him, Jah could do nothing to stop the court-ordered disposal of his personal possessions. But he did ask his old friend, Ayoob Khan, Pakistan’s Consul General in Perth, to withdraw from sale several items of religious and personal value including the prayer cap, a silver tray given to Jah on his fiftieth birthday, an Asaf Jahi flag, and a book, Best Loved Cars of the World. ‘There was also a chess set there. I wanted to buy it and give it him because I knew he was fond of it,’ says Khan. ‘But he told me: “Don’t buy it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”’34
Gregson says he heard a rumour that Jah was among the 500 people who crammed the Beaufort Street rooms because he ‘was worried about the bag with his togs in it’.35 In truth, however, Jah had stayed away as buyers put in bids ranging from A$10 for a pair of damaged pink and milk glass dishes to A$112,000 for the elephant gun. ‘There were people bidding twenty dollars for my towels,’ says Jah incredulously.36
Today, Lot No. 526, Abdul Mejid’s oil painting of a deer running through the snow, is one of the few items Jah managed to salvage from the sale. It was purchased by Javeri for A$3200 and presented to Jah as a belated peace offering by his wife in 2001. Hundreds of other lots purchased by Javeri at the auction are stored in a Perth warehouse awaiting a final resolution of litigation still being carried on by Scheherazade. Most of Jah’s precious family memorabilia is not among it. Though many of the items had gone beyond their estimated value, the A$985,000 raised by the auction was well short of what Javeri was owed. Jah was now down to his last asset and the one that he coveted the most: his half-million acres of bush, barbed wire, blowflies and dust.
But there were to be several more apocryphal twists to the tale before the fate of Murchison House Station was finally decided. On 17 November 1995, page 13 of The Deccan Chronicle carried a lengthy report that the Ministry of Home Affairs was probing allegations that Javeri had smuggled one billion rupees’ worth of antiques out of the country over the past five years. On the same page was another report, without a byline or a dateline, going into great detail about Javeri’s affairs in Switzerland. The article alleged that a Geneva court had sentenced Javeri to two months’ imprisonment in September 1994 after he had been declared bankrupt and found guilty of misappropriating 2.5 million Swiss francs. The article said that Javeri had told the prosecutor’s office in December 1993 that ‘he worked for an Indian prince as chief advisor. For all his business he received a commission for the work done by him’. Because of the ‘precarious political situation in India and the global economic crisis’ the prince had not been able to recover the proceedings of asset sales and had not paid the commission due to Javeri.37
The story turned out to be a crude attempt to undermine Javeri’s credibility. A few weeks later came the grovelling, misspelt apology. ‘The article in Deccan Chronicle “Javeri Lives Like a Prince as the Prince Goes Pauper” was based on materials make [sic] awarable [sic] to is [sic] by sources close to the prince. It was not our intension [sic] to malign the reputation of Mr Javeri.’38
Now it was Javeri’s turn to go on the offensive. In December Javeri wrote to the Home Minister, Y. B. Chavan, and Hyderabad’s police commissioner welcoming an inquiry into the affairs of the Nizam and his private estate. Javeri claimed that when he took over, ‘the palaces were in a dilapidated and neglected condition’ and most of the antiques and artefacts had already disappeared. Javeri then went on to accuse Jah’s General Power of Attorney, Asadullah Khan, as being ‘probably one of the persons who during the last 27 years was responsible for the removal and disposal of the antiques from the palaces’. Javeri alleged that following his own dismissal the administration of palaces had been entrusted to the Taj Group ‘without taking any inventories, exchange of documents or any form of agreement’. It was an ‘irrational action on the part of the Nizam under the advice of his so-called close advisors who were keen to remove him, so as to continue looting the remaining artefacts and properties’.39
The tit-for-tat over who was robbing whom suddenly got nastier. Acting on a tip-off from a Hyderabadi jeweller, police raided Javeri’s Jubilee Hills house, where they seized ‘antiques, diamond jewellery, ivory and marble statues, gem-studded daggers and champagne and cognac bottles’. The police also seized an unregistered 1883 Colt gun. Javeri, who police said ‘was absconding’, was booked under the Prohibition Act, the Antiquities Act and the Indian Arms Act. Newstime quoted customs officials as saying the antique pieces were worth 100 million rupees, but could fetch more on the international market ‘if they had the Nizam’s name tag attached to them’.40
Javeri, who was in Delhi at the time, issued a statement denying any wrongdoing and pointed the finger at Jah’s coterie: ‘The raid was part of a deep conspiracy hatched by the “sycophants” surrounding Prince Mukarram Jah,’ he told the Pioneer newspaper. ‘The police action was nothing less than the misuse of police force by some vested interest.’41
Javeri would be vindicated when the Andhra Pradesh Court ruled in October 1997 that the police raid was a violation of his fundamental rights and ordered the state government to pay 500,000 rupees in compensation. Javeri would also be vindicated on another score. His warning to Jah that he would regret the Taj hotel deal had been remarkably prescient.
In January 1996 Jah flew from Perth to Hyderabad to host his customary Iftar party. But when he tried to enter the Chowmahalla palace, Taj security guards blocked his way. Never before had a Nizam been barred from entering one of his properties – even during the days when the British Resident virtually controlled the state. The Indian Government dared not interfere with the Seventh Nizam’s ancestral rights even after invading his state with three army divisions. Now a bunch of hoteliers were telling him where the Eighth and last Nizam of Hyderabad could and could not go.
Jah had appointed the Taj Group to manage his private estate following Javeri’s sacking the previous May. The Taj hired one of its executives as the administrator of the estate, put its own personnel in charge of security at the five palaces still owned by Jah, drew up an inventory of his assets and began untangling the accounts. Three months later it sent Jah a bill for 18 million rupees. When Jah refused to clear the bill, the Taj obtained a court order to secure possession of the properties until the account was paid. Jah’s officials responded by issuing notices to the group to vacate the property and withdraw its security personnel. The Taj went to the High Court, where it got an injunction barring the prince from entering the Chowmahalla and Falaknuma palaces. Stung by the publicity surrounding the Iftar affair, the T
aj Group backtracked slightly, saying the entire episode was a ‘misunderstanding’. Jah was still the owner of the palaces and everything could remain open for him provided he gave them ‘advance warning he was coming’, a company spokesman said.42
But the Taj was not the only party to deny Jah access to his ancestral property. In May, Jah’s third wife Manolya Onur obtained a court order sealing all 44 rooms of the Chiraan palace. Onur alleged that her ex-husband had stopped maintenance payments to her and their daughter Niloufer, now aged five. She also alleged that Jah owed her US$250,000 plus interest that he had borrowed in 1989 before they married, and the return of a US$70,000 dowry. Niloufer, she told the court, was the legal heir of the Chiraan palace and the Cedars summer palace at Ootacamund. The court later agreed to allow all but 20 of the rooms to be reopened after a petition was filed by the Nizam’s Private Estate. To add insult to injury, Onur then vented her anger in an 11-page tell-all interview to the mass-circulation Bombay magazine Savvy, which specialises in exposing the seamy side of Bollywood. The problems of the past few years, she concluded, had made her decide to become a ‘feminist’.43
One week after the Andhra Pradesh High Court issued an order restraining Jah’s staff from removing any items from Chiraan, Western Australia’s Supreme Court put Murchison House Pastoral Company into liquidation. The Company’s directors, Howell and Tilden, had appointed Maurice Lyford as provisional liquidator on 1 April 1996, after Javeri had served statutory demands of A$1,629,700, being the balance of the A$2.3 million it had loaned to Murchison House Pastoral in December 1992, and A$263,675, being the amount owed to Shanaz. Howell had tried unsuccessfully to have the demands set aside on the basis that no actual loan agreement existed. After taking evidence from both parties in the dispute, the Supreme Court ruled on 5 June that Howell’s evidence was ‘ambiguous and unconvincing’ and ‘substantial sums’ were owed to Javeri’s companies.44
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