ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court of Pakistan has dismissed a plea challenging Balochistan High Court verdict and upheld concurrent findings of the trial court and the high court that agricultural land was fraudulently mutated away from the rightful female heirs of a deceased landowner.
The land situated in Deh Chattan Pati and Deh Shahwah, Tehsil Jhatpat, was fraudulently mutated away from the rightful female heirs of a deceased landowner. The bench, however, modified the lower courts’ decree to precisely fix the Islamic inheritance shares due to the successful respondents.
A two-member bench comprising Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhail and Justice Irfan Saadat Khan – who authored the detailed judgment – heard Civil Petition No.97-Q of 2024, filed against a Balochistan High Court order dated 07 May 2024 that had dismissed the petitioners’ appeal and upheld a 2017 trial court decree.
The dispute traced back to land owned by one Mitha Khan, who died in 1938 survived solely by his daughter, Mst. Lal Khatoon. The chain of succession passed to her daughter, Mst. Ayesha Bibi, and eventually to the respondents – Raheema Khatoon and the late Karima Khatoon – as Ayesha Bibi’s daughters. The respondents alleged that their father, Abdul Razzaq Khan, having contracted a second marriage, fraudulently transferred the ancestral land into his own name and subsequently into the name of his son from that marriage, effectively cutting out the legitimate female heirs.
Counsel for the petitioners, Abid Mahmood, argued that a prior revision petition on the same property had already been decided in the petitioners’ favour, invoking res judicata, and pointed to a 1968 partition agreement and standing mutation entries as proof of ownership. He further contended that only proven blood heirs could inherit under Islamic law, and that the petitioners, as legal heirs of Abdul Razzaq Khan, held valid title.
Representing the respondents via video link from Quetta, Ghulam Mustafa Buzdar countered that mutation entries are maintained purely for revenue purposes and carry no evidentiary weight as documents of title. He argued that the fraudulent transfer by Abdul Razzaq Khan and his brother, Wahid Bakhsh, was rightly struck down by both lower courts, and that fraud vitiates even the most solemn of proceedings.
In its judgment, the Supreme Court found that the petitioners had failed to establish any blood relationship between Abdul Razzaq Khan, Wahid Bakhsh, and the original owner, Mitha Khan, and had not produced the court order they claimed had transferred the land to them. The bench further held that any customary or Jirga practice suppressing women’s inheritance rights is void ab initio, being irreconcilable with the Holy Quran, Sunnah, and Section 2A of the West Pakistan Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1962.
While upholding the concurrent findings of fraud, the court clarified — citing Surah An-Nisa, verse 11- that the respondents’ entitlement flows only through their mother Ayesha Bibi’s one-fourth share in Mitha Khan’s original estate, not the entire property. The trial court was directed to reframe the decree sheet accordingly. Later, the petition was dismissed, and leave to appeal was refused, with no order as to costs.
