When a home is ‘enemy property’

Contact Counsellor

Last Updated20/07/2024

Custodian of Enemy Property for India (CEPI), a department under the Ministry of Home Affairs, formed after the Indo-Pak war of 1965 and the two Indo-China wars in 1962 and 1967.
The Act enabled the state to regulate and appropriate real estate belonging to those who had left India and got citizenship of countries it has gone to war with: Pakistan and China.

Now, the Union government has begun to e-auction many of the 12,611 properties across the country, out of which 126 belong to Chinese citizens.
These ‘enemy properties’ could be “any property that belongs to, is held or managed on behalf of an enemy, an enemy subject, or an enemy firm”.
The word “enemy” signifies any country that has committed an act of aggression or declared war against the Union of India, and “property” is immovable assets and all negotiable instruments such as shares, debentures, and other commerce.
The most well-known among these properties is the three-storeyed Butler Palace, built on the banks of the Gomti river in the 1910s.
The palace was originally constructed in a mix of Indo-Mughal and Rajasthani styles as the official residence of the commissioner of Avadh, Harcourt Butler, in Lucknow.
It has remained empty since the 1960s, and has been branded ‘haunted’, by the Lucknavis — either by ghosts of the past or addicts of the present.