It was a warm evening in Karachi, and sitting in his beautifully appointed home Liaquat Merchant was talking about his great-uncle. The garden was exquisite too. His great-uncle would have approved. He had been a stickler for impeccable standards of a European sort, which is why he is probably turning in his grave at the catastrophe that has befallen his own beloved home in Mumbai.

Liaquat Merchant’s great-uncle was the man who, in the words of historian Stanley Wolpert, achieved the triple feat of altering the course of history, modifying the map of the world and creating a nation-state ? Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Merchant, also a lawyer who started his career in Mumbai, is the sole remaining administrator of Jinnah’s estate and executive trustee of the Jinnah trusts.

Jinnah’s bungalow on Malabar Hill in Mumbai is now a forlorn wreck, left vacant and allowed to go to ruin over the last 20 years by the Indian government which has control of it as ‘evacuee property’. Its garden is over-grown, rubbish litters the grounds, stray dogs wander in and out of the locked gates which until recently sported a faded sign saying ‘No Photography’.

A group of security men sat across from it ? one hoped that might have a rational explanation related to the chief minister’s bungalow down the road. Recently the police acquired a pucca lookout, and the ‘No Photography’ sign was replaced by a new one proclaiming ? equally inexplicably ? ‘SAARC’.

Jinnah’s house continues to languish amidst rival claims. Pakistan was promised it by India for its consul-general in Mumbai, but India reneged on this. Jinnah’s daughter Dina Wadia has reportedly appealed for it as her father’s private residence. The Indian government continues to exercise possession by the might of ‘evacuee’ rules.

One bonus of the controversy created by Bharatiya Janata Party leader L.K. Advani’s recent statements on Jinnah has been a burst of commentary in India about the man Indians are schooled to love to hate along with the country he founded. Many Indians have newly discovered the speeches termed Jinnah’s ‘Gettysburg Address’ ? the first on August 11, 1947, when the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan elected him its first President, and the second on August 14, 1947, Pakistan’s Independence Day.

On the eve of Pakistan’s founding, its founding father set out this vision for the new state: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed ? that has nothing to do with the business of the state? We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state.”

Thoroughly Westernised in personal life and never overtly religious, Jinnah ended up founding a nation-state in the name of a religion. He then declared in a broadcast to the United States on February 26, 1948: “? Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims ? Hindus, Christians and Parsis ? but they are all Pakistanis. They will enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other citizens and will play their rightful part in the affairs of Pakistan.”

If such paradoxes have perplexed observers, so did Jinnah’s apparent expectation that he would return to Mumbai to live in the home he had built. He sold his house in Delhi, but not the one in Mumbai. The memoirs of the first Indian high commissioner to Pakistan indicate that he seemed scandalised to hear that it might be requisitioned and let out by the Government of India, appealing to Nehru and later agreeing that if absolutely necessary it might be let out to a suitable foreign consulate which would maintain it to standard.

While Jinnah mentioned Americans as possible candidates, it was the British who leased the house as the residence of their deputy high commissioner for over three decades until 1982, when they vacated it upon the Indian government’s request on the understanding that the house would be leased to Pakistan.

British papers record a tortuous history with Indian authorities during their tenure at the Jinnah bungalow. India offered an annual lease, resulting in constant threat of non-renewal, and repeatedly attempted to raise the rent by large amounts. In 1955, the British came to know that the property was about to be auctioned only when two gentlemen turned up at the deputy high commissioner’s residence asking to view it. It is unclear if such shabby treatment of the envoys of the former colonial master was deliberate or just ham-handed incompetence.

The British were sensitive to Pakistan’s sentimental interest in the bungalow from the Fifties. Indeed, they thought that as India and Pakistan reached settlement of their problems, the house might be given to Pakistan as a goodwill gesture by India, perhaps in return for a “shrine” of interest to India in Pakistan. This prospect is very much alive today, despite India’s poor record for the last two decades.

In April 1982, the British vacated the Jinnah bungalow to make way for the Pakistanis, leaving curtains, carpets, furniture and air-conditioners in place for the Pakistanis to ‘buy’ them off when they took over. India’s foreign minister had stated in Islamabad and confirmed to Parliament in 1982 that the house would be leased to Pakistan. By the mid-Eighties, the furnishings were rotting as the roof was leaking. The Pakistanis are still waiting.

While the British were sorry to depart from Jinnah’s house, they did so to help further good relations between India and Pakistan. The United States also took an interest in the prospect of the house being given to Pakistan as part of goodwill gestures between India and Pakistan. These positive approaches contrast with the petty behaviour of the Indian authorities ? even the notification of the end of the lease to the British was done in a manner that lacked courtesy, and the government was unhelpful about finding alternative accommodation.

The extraordinary conduct of not allowing Pakistan to move in for years prompted some British observers to wonder if India had actually never expected the British to leave Jinnah’s house, and had merely hoped to make an offer to Pakistan and then blame the British!

Dina Wadia’s claim to her father’s residence has sentimental appeal, but a legal problem exists. In his will (The Jinnah Anthology, OUP, Pakistan, 1999), written at the Malabar Hill house on May 30, 1939, Jinnah left his house in Mumbai not to his daughter, but to his sister Fatima, along with Rs 2,000 a month for life. To his other sisters Rehemat, Mariam and Shereen, and brother Ahmed, he left Rs 100 a month for life.

Several descendants of his sisters still live in India. For his daughter, Jinnah set apart Rs 2 lakh, the income from which was to be paid to her for life, after which the corpus would go to her children. After Jinnah’s death in 1948, Fatima Jinnah was the owner of the house in Mumbai as per his will. As India took it over as ‘evacuee property’, Pakistan gave her another house in Karachi as compensation.

Merchant believes the best use of the Mumbai house would be a historical museum to Jinnah. His concern is that it would not be accessible to the public if it were only the consul-general’s residence. India’s reported plans to make it into a cultural or ‘SAARC’ centre are entirely unsuitable in principle, as it would be a shabby attempt to deny history, and practically as it is built as a family home in a residential area without mass public access. It is unclear what Dina Wadia would want to do with the house that her father had left to her aunt ? letters and telephone calls to her son, Nusli Wadia, the industrialist, seeking his comments about the house were in vain.

Jinnah’s place in history is as the father of a nation. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with his politics, he is a towering historical figure of South Asia of enormous complexity who merits serious study ? in India. Keeping the promise to Pakistan to lease it for its envoy’s residence would bring together his memory and the country he founded.

Perhaps Indian and Pakistani scholars could create a living museum in the style of historic homes that serve both private and public purposes. Such steps would look to the future and end the politics of spite that has come to be embodied in the crumbling bungalow of Malabar Hill.