Woman wins inheritance right after 27 years

Court slams misuse of oral gifts, restores daughter's share in ancestral land

LAHORE:

The Lahore High Court (LHC) has enabled Sadiqan Begum, a woman from Toba Tek Singh, to reclaim her rightful share in her father's inheritance after nearly three decades of being wrongfully deprived through a fraudulent gift mutation.

Justice Khalid Ishaq of the LHC overturned the verdicts of both the trial and appellate courts, which had previously favoured the petitioner's brother, Muhammad Siddique, in an inheritance dispute stemming from a contested oral gift mutation executed in 1998.

The court found serious irregularities in the judgments passed by the Civil Judge of Pir Mahal in 2014 and the Additional District Judge in 2017, both of which dismissed the woman's suit for declaration and permanent injunction seeking cancellation of gift mutation 600 dated April 29, 1998.

The disputed property—measuring 59 kanals and 18 marlas—was owned by Muhammad Ibrahim, the father of both parties.

After his death on October 8, 1998, Sadiqan Begum, who is uneducated and from a rural background, was led to believe by her brother that the inheritance had been properly distributed and that she had received her rightful 1/3rd share.

However, her trust in her brother was betrayed. Years later, when she requested to sell her share of the land to support her children after her husband's death, she was told she had no legal claim.

Upon investigation, she discovered that a fraudulent gift mutation had been executed in favour of her brother without her knowledge or consent.

In court, the brother defended the transaction, claiming that their father had gifted him the property during his lifetime through an oral agreement, and that the mutation was sanctioned in a public gathering.

He asserted that he had been in possession of the land ever since.

Justice Ishaq, however, found the brother's claims to be unsubstantiated and criticized the frequent misuse of oral gift transactions as tools of inheritance fraud in Pakistan. "This case reflects a recurring pattern where female heirs are deprived of their legitimate rights through concocted claims of oral gifts," he remarked in his judgment.

He further observed, "There is an unstoppable bent to invent grotesque devices conceived to deprive daughters, sisters, mothers, widows, and orphans of their lawful inheritance—the oral gift being the most fancied of all."

The court held that the alleged gift was never proven in accordance with law and declared the mutation void, granting the petitioner her rightful share in the estate.

Legal experts have welcomed the judgment as a strong stance against systemic deprivation of women's inheritance rights in rural Pakistan, where social pressures and forged oral gift claims have long been used to exclude female heirs from property ownership.