Last Nizam (9781742626109) (30 page)

But Jah could not brush off the responsibility he now faced as the inheritor of possibly the largest private estate in the world. In the last decade of his life, Osman Ali Khan had projected the aura of being a rich ruler who had fallen on hard times by having to borrow money, sell property and eat into the corpus of some of the trust funds to pay off his son's debts and maintain his vast household. But the caskets of Golconda diamonds, Burmese rubies, Colombian emeralds and Basra pearls were left largely untouched, even after setting aside some of the most valuable pieces in various jewellery trusts. The heirlooms of Mughal Emperors, the plunder of the Mysore wars, the State regalia, the robes of silk studded with precious stones, were still lying untouched in various safes and strongrooms.

Most experts doubt there was ever an inventory made of this collection. When the gemstones and jewellery set aside in two
trust funds and acquired by the Government of India were finally catalogued, they comprised more than 25,000 diamonds weighing over 12,000 carats, more than 2000 emeralds and 40,000
chows
of pearls. Yet this was only a fraction of the jewellery in Osman Ali Khan's possession. The late Nizam once turned down an offer to value his hoard when told it would take six months. His acute memory was said to be the only list, and the dust which covered each tray, cabinet and chest its only protection.
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The inheritance did not stop there. Indian and European antiques, rare books and manuscripts, Mughal miniatures and old bronzes cluttered the dingy rooms of dozens of palaces, villas and bungalows spread across half a dozen Indian states. In addition to a privy purse of two million rupees a year, Jah received money from five different trusts including the ‘Grandson's Pocket Money Trust', which had a corpus of 215,000 rupees. He was the owner of a fleet of mostly broken-down cars including a 1911 Fiat, 1912 Rolls-Royce and two 1914 Napiers, a stunning collection of jade, a solid gold table-setting for 100 guests, the world's largest coin – a dinner-plate-sized 12 kilogram gold mohur minted during the reign of Jehangir – a priceless collection of Mughal weaponry and a Holland and Holland Royal Grade 600 bore elephant gun.

Like the Seventh Nizam, Jah also inherited a state within a state. His grandfather created an administration that included departments of health, education and religious affairs, each with their own staff and offices looking after every aspect of his establishment. He had to shoulder the responsibility of being the chairman of more than 30 trusts and the custodian of around 500 mosques, temples and shrines. ‘Obviously, I have to put my house in order and find out my assets and liabilities,' Jah told
The Washington Post
's Warren Unna in August 1967. ‘They asked me, “Do you want this to drag on for five years? Or overnight?” I said overnight. But I now think it will take about a year.'
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Jah vastly underestimated the complexity of putting his house in order and finding people who were both experienced and honest enough to help him. He needed someone of the calibre of Salar Jung, but was surrounded by Chandu Lals. The coterie that had served his grandfather now began grovelling for his attention. ‘People would take his shoes off when he arrived, just like a servant would do, just to please him,' says Basith Nawab, who was once a close confidant of Jah's. ‘If it was night and he said it was morning, they would bow and say, “Yes sir, it is morning.” That I didn't like. I was the only who would say, “No, this is wrong,” if it was wrong, and “This is right.” He would always say to me, “Go and get some others.”'
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Jah was determined to replace the grovelling old guard with a politically savvy and well-connected administrator who could keep the government off his back and the litigants at bay. Indira Gandhi's newly elected government was toying with the idea of ridding the princes of their privy purses and sovereign rights and opposition politicians were using the government's recognition of his succession to make a mockery of its socialist credentials. Within weeks of Jah's inauguration the Home Minister, Y. B. Chavan, was caught up in a fierce debate on the floor of the Lower House of Parliament, the Lok Sabha. Opposition MPs directed a barrage of questions at Chavan about why the government had allowed a coronation ceremony that smacked of ‘colonialism and imperialism' to take place in ‘a free democratic India' and whether the succession was legal.
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Independent MP, Bakar Ali Mirza, asked whether any assessment had been made of the late
Nizam's movable and immovable property for the purpose of estate duty and wealth tax and if the minister was aware of allegations that the ‘Nizam is sending out jewellery through Britishers and Turks to some foreign countries'. As the debate got more heated, Chavan was also asked why the government had done nothing to help the ‘12,000 poor employees of the late Nizam' Jah had allegedly sacked and those close relatives who claimed to have been evicted from their ancestral properties.

By the middle of 1967, the atmosphere was becoming so poisonous that Jah sent Esra and their two children back to England while he remained to deal with the growing queues of people offering advice on how to spend his money and the litigants wanting their share of the estate. Within a week of the Nizam's death, Jah's father Azam filed a suit challenging the deduction of 300,000 rupees from his 700,000-rupees-a-year allowance for the debts owed to Osman Ali Khan. He claimed there was no longer any obligation to repay the loan now that he was dead. Bitter at being left with little more than 200 pairs of shoes, 750 suits, a trunkful of neckties and several dozen race horses, Azam took out a public notice in the local press claiming that he was entitled to receive a share of the Nizam's ‘considerable property, movable and immovable, jewellery, cash, etc.' and that Jah had no ‘right about the property of the late Nizam'. Jah's aunt, Shehezadi Pasha, was the next to move to the courts by suing the Government of India for recognising her nephew as the sole heir. Since the kingdom had become merely an estate, her lawyers contended it was subject to Islamic law and had to be divided among the immediate descendants. After some initial hesitation, Azam lent his backing to the suit.

In January 1968, the Andhra Pradesh High Court ruled in Shehezadi Pasha's favour and ordered that all of the late Nizam's private wealth had to be divided among his immediate heirs. Jah took the court's decision, which could have left him with little more than his two million rupees' privy purse and the money he was entitled to in his trust funds, in his stride. Quarrels between fathers and sons ‘are a tradition in our family', he told Joseph Lelyveld of
The New York Times
.
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His father and aunt were mistaken if they thought their suit would make them wealthy. They would find themselves being sued by the several
thousand descendants of the seven previous Nizams. ‘If they get 10 rupees in the end, they'll be lucky.' Shortly afterwards, Jah's lawyers filed an appeal in the Supreme Court arguing that the inheritance was sanctioned by Article Four of the agreement the Nizam made with the government in 1950 that the usual Muslim law of inheritance and intestate succession would not apply and Jah would become the sole heir to the fortune. The appeal was upheld.

To sort out the growing legal and financial mess, Jah appointed Zahir Ahmed as his chief secretary and the chairman of his Private Estate. Ahmed had served as Hyderabad's representative at the United Nations in the lead-up to the Police Action. He had been closely associated with Walter Monckton in negotiations between Hyderabad and the Government of India. After India's invasion, Nehru appointed him to wind up Hyderabad's affairs in London. He then represented India at the UN. He had good connections with the Nehru–Gandhi family, but it was his closeness to Durrushehvar that clinched the post of running the estate. Durrushehvar liked Ahmed's Westernised manners and the fact that he had no connection to the late Nizam's coterie.

Ahmed's most urgent task was to wrest control of 18 of the 54 trusts set up by the late Nizam from Azam Jah. The trusts in question had all been established before Jah's father had been formally disinherited by Osman Ali Khan and included the valuable Jewellery Trust and Supplemental Jewellery Trust. Ahmed feared that Azam would use his position as president of the trusts to stack them with his own appointees and then sell off the jewellery to meet his debts, which stood at around four million rupees and were growing at a rate of up to 10 per cent a month. It was a view shared by the government's representative on the board of trustees, M. K. Venkatachalam: ‘[The Prince of Berar] seems bent on making attempts to wreck the structure of
the Trusts and also probably, under the influence and advice of his “friends” to misuse the trust funds and divert them for liquidating the enormous debts he himself has been incurring in his life.'
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Ahmed enlisted the help of Jah's brother Muffakham and began running a smear campaign against Azam to get bureaucrats in the Home Ministry on-side. ‘[Azam] is said to have a stud of horses for whose feeding a number of buffaloes are maintained,' the Joint Secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs M. V. Oak wrote after meeting with the trustees. ‘There are all sorts of other odd things. He is hardly ever sober. He is under the influence of a mistress and other hangers-on who exercise a sinister influence over him. Away from them he is quite a gentle soul, though without any judgement or will of his own.'
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Azam fought back, blocking a move by Jah, Muffakham, Ahmed and two other trustees to appoint an advisory committee to take over management of the trusts. In early February 1968, however, he was dealt a blow when the telephone and electricity supply at his residence were cut off for non-payment of bills. Later that month the city civil court ordered that the payment of his allowance from his trust fund cease until his debts had been cleared. Azam reacted by demanding an immediate inspection of the contents of the jewellery trusts, which were in a safedeposit box in the Mercantile Bank at Bombay on the grounds that they formed part of his assets. Ahmed's fears, it appeared, were not unfounded.

The complexities of dealing with 54 trust funds were only one of the headaches haunting Jah. In August, 500 members of the newly formed Nizam's Estate Dismissed Employees Association attempted to march on Chiraan Palace demanding severance pay and pensions. Twelve of the marchers were arrested, including two of the late Nizam's bodyguards, a woman who once served water to the ladies of the
zenana
, a man who raised grass for his
horses and the servant responsible for mixing his daily dose of opium.
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The
khanazads
were also staging protests over Jah's plans to sell off the houses they had been given by his grandfather.

Jah defended the cutbacks saying that inheritance tax would eat up most of his privy purse. He was genuinely short of cash. The stories about his grandfather living on seven shillings and sixpence a week were not far from the mark. There were very few rupees in the kitty and the bills for wages and running costs of the estate as well as the taxes were mounting. Establishing a cash flow meant selling assets, and the most liquid of those assets were the jewellery, gold and silver lying in palace vaults, safes and boxes. Jah rarely wore anything more valuable than a gold ring, and according to one associate was unable to tell the difference between a diamond and a piece of glass. The one person Jah knew who did was Hashim Ali Javeri.

For Jah it was always a case of taking someone at face value without first checking their credentials. He had few friends in Hyderabad and very little basis for deciding whom he could and could not trust. His General Power of Attorney for more than 30 years, Asadullah Khan, was a 250-rupee-a-month accountant when he was given the authority to handle tens of millions of dollars' worth of transactions. His main qualification was having attended the same school as Jah in the 1940s. At various stages over the next few decades, Jah handed over the management of aspects of his affairs to his valet, driver and bodyguard.

Javeri, unlike most of the other quislings Jah appointed, was well qualified. The Javeris had set up the first diamond-cutting business in Bombay and helped establish India as the diamond-cutting capital of the world. Hashim Ali Javeri, had worked as a jeweller for the late Nizam and the Aga Khan. The Javeri family had a string of jewellery shops in the US, UK and Europe as well as properties in London, Geneva and Australia. Now Hashim Ali Javeri was keen to prepare his son, Sadruddin, to
take over the family business, and asked Jah to give him a job. Sadruddin became Jah's financial advisor until 1977 and was then made the chairman of the Nizam's Private Estate from 1990 until 1995. Javeri would initiate the first break, Jah the last. From being the closest of friends, the two men would end up the most bitter of enemies. Jah would blame his former partner for precipitating his financial collapse. Javeri would hit back with a list of broken promises and double-crossings. The accusations and litigation would continue well after Javeri's death in 2002.

For now, however, the involvement of Hashim Ali and his son was welcome. They had excellent contacts among gem dealers in Switzerland and advised Jah to move as much of his jewellery as possible to Geneva, where it would fetch a better price than in India. The problem was getting the gems and precious stones out of India without attracting attention.

From the middle of 1967 until the end of 1969, the Congress government was regularly questioned in the Lok Sabha about Jah's jewellery and the value of his estate. Leading the charge was M. N. Reddy. The Independent MP from Nizamabad grilled Chavan on the number of foreign trips Jah had taken, whether the government had scrutinised the list of the late Nizam's private properties and what it was doing about the thousands of sacked workers. The government took the line that the custody of the jewels was the Nizam's responsibility. ‘They are his private property and are in his possession,' Chavan told the Lok Sabha on 5 July 1967.
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The following April, Chavan's deputy in the Home Ministry, Vidya Charan Shukla, said that details of the jewellery recognised as Jah's private property or matters relating to the settlement of that private property were not matters ‘for public disclosure'.
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In November 1969, opposition politicians again demanded a probe into allegations that jewels were being surreptitiously taken out of the country. The Finance Minister, P. C. Sethi, told the Lok Sabha ‘information is being collected'.
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