Last Nizam (9781742626109) (31 page)

The Congress Party's willingness to shield Jah from such attacks was losing momentum. Gandhi was wooing the electorate with a populist ten-point program which promised social control of banking, a check on monopolies, the nationalisation of the insurance sector, curbs on property and the abolition of princely privileges and privy purses. Jah responded by making his first and last foray into national politics. He told Gandhi there would be a ‘crisis in confidence' if privy purses were abolished as the agreement with the princes was enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Jah was not alone in objecting to Gandhi's brazen bid to attract electoral support. The 279 princes on the civil list received 50 million rupees a year between them. At the top of the scale was the Nizam of Hyderabad, followed by the maharajahs of Mysore, Jodhpur and Jaipur, who received around two million rupees a year. At the bottom of the scale was the Talukdar of Katodia who received around 400 rupees, worked as a clerk and travelled everywhere on a bicycle. The princes argued that all this was a small price for the government to pay considering what they had willingly given up at Independence. ‘It wouldn't buy every Indian a postcard,' scoffed the Maharana of Udaipur.
²³

At first it appeared Gandhi might have trouble getting the numbers for the constitutional amendment required to abolish the princely perks. There were 12 princes in Congress and several others in opposition parties including the formidable Rajmata of Jaipur who was listed in
The Guinness Book of World Records
for winning the largest majority in a democratic election when she stood for the Swatantra Party. The issue, however, failed to cut across party lines, nor was there a public outcry. In September 1970, Gandhi introduced a bill abolishing princely privileges in the Lok Sabha, where it sailed through by 339 votes to 154. On 21 December the bill went to the upper house, the Rajya Sabha, but was defeated by just one vote because ‘some fellow had diarrhoea
and didn't come'.
²⁴
The Cabinet held a special session into the night and the next day the President of India, V. V. Giri, was roused from his bed to sign an order that stripped the princes of their privileges and their titles. Though the princes won a sixmonth Supreme Court stay, the President's signature on the 26th Constitutional Amendment Bill effectively consigned India's royalty, Jah included, into history. Just as there would be no more maharajahs after the present generation died, there would be no more Nizams.

Looking back at those events, Jah remains philosophical. ‘It didn't affect me as much as other princes because I am half-Turkish. If they can throw the Ottomans of out Turkey, what's a few Indian princes?'
²⁵
His Turkish heritage, however, was not compensation for the loss of his privy purse and other privileges. The cut in his income worsened the cash-flow problems that plagued Jah from the outset and were becoming a breeding ground for corruption and intrigue. ‘When Jah was in Hyderabad he would spend one
lakh
of rupees per day. The actual expenditure was, say, only 30,000, but his people would take 70,000. They used to grab money,' remembers Basith Nawab.
²⁶

As Jah began spending more time abroad, the firesale of his assets intensified. Mir Ayoob Ali Khan of
The Deccan Chronicle
recalls the free-for-all:

Jah was always short of cash. Even in those early years he was already running up debts and tax arrears. The order would come that he needed money and out came the jewels and antiques. If the offer was 10,000 [rupees] they would say take it, 2000 – take it, two rupees – take it. And these two rupees would be unaccounted for. How much of these two rupees went to Mukarram Jah nobody knows, how much went to the GPA [General Power of Attorney] nobody knows. But the property, the precious
antiques and so on were vanishing from his palaces like snaps of his fingers. Lots of people were making money and the controlling authority was very weak. Whoever Jah put there was unable to check the slide. Within a couple of years there was a huge conspiracy against him at various levels and the advisors he had with him at the time, they were not up to the mark. They could not guide him properly.'
²⁷

Years later, after the downslide Jah had set in train had run its course, after his Australian assets were seized by the courts and after four failed marriages, Esra would be one of the few people willing to defend her former husband. ‘He wanted to be a mechanic or a military man. He found it hard. He couldn't accept what was going on,' Esra narrated at her family home on the island of Sedef, a photograph of her mother-in-law, Durrushehvar, displayed prominently on a cabinet behind her. ‘He had never received any training for this sort of thing. He thought he should rely on close friends – that was a big mistake.' Esra also accepted partial responsibility for Jah's dislike of Hyderabad. ‘I didn't like India, I dampened his enthusiasm.'
²⁸

By the close of 1971, whatever little enthusiasm Jah may have had for being crowned the Eighth Nizam had all but evaporated. Jah never drank alcohol and until now his only vice had been the occasional cigar. He would remain a teetotaller, but he was starting to smoke heavily and have difficulties sleeping. He was obsessed about his security. He had visited Baghdad in 1958 just before his close friend King Faisal was assassinated in a coup that paved the way for Saddam Hussein to come to power. Taking a leaf out of Mahboob Ali Khan's book, Jah spent hours sitting incognito in Baghdad's tea shops. Sensing the public's mood of dissatisfaction, he warned Faisal of the danger. Now he sensed that his own relatives were planning a
similar bloody coup to get their hands on his fortune. He was worried about his children, fearing they could be kidnapped and held for ransom.

Outside his home, disgruntled employees were burning his effigy, the state administration had dishonoured their agreement to pay rent for properties his father had leased to them, and the court cases brought on by jealous relatives kept piling up. Esra was increasingly frustrated by her husband's almost paranoiac concern about his privacy and security and the restrictions he placed on her movements in Hyderabad. Friends urged him to offer his services to Indira Gandhi and enter politics or accept an ambassadorship. ‘If you invite the Chief Minister to your home, he'll frame your invitation card. You'll become so powerful you'll be able to change the government,' his old friend Chandrakant Gir remembers telling Jah. ‘He was so hesitant when I told him that he didn't even want to speak.' Gir blames Zahir Ahmed for Jah's reticence. ‘People would flock to the mosque at Banjara Hills to
salaam
him when he went to pray, but Zahir Ahmed did not want him to become popular. It would have made it harder to control him. But Jah also had an inferiority complex. He lacked knowledge of Hyderabad, he didn't even know the history of the Nizams.'
²⁹

In December 1971, Jah assumed for the first time something of the role that was expected of him as a ruler. In the grounds of the Purani Haveli palace where his great grandfather, the Sixth Nizam, had lived, he presided over the opening of the Mukarram Jah Trust for Education and Learning. ‘Modern India is beset with myriad problems and if each individual chooses to devote himself to the solution of a problem in which he can be effective he serves all,' he said in a prepared speech.

Democracy has absolved me from the cares and responsibilities of rulership borne by my ancestors; but I
still share with them the urge to render service where most needed and where it can be most effective. With resources available to me, however, I can add to these by providing an Institute where the best minds of the country can gather and study and plan collectively . . . To lend concreteness to this proposed Institute I hereby agree to hand over my entire property known as ‘Purani Haveli' and also a part of Chowmahalla . . . to form the corpus of a trust over which I shall preside.
³⁰

Today, the trust is the only institution in Hyderabad named after Jah, compared with the hundreds of trusts, institutes, charities and public works that bear the name of Osman Ali Khan. Jah's style as the Nizam of Hyderabad was to be very different from that of his forefathers. When the affairs of state grew too complicated and tiresome, the Nizams traditionally retreated into their attar-scented palaces, drowning themselves in the ‘vicious pleasures' of the
zenana
, surrounding themselves with cringing courtiers and obsequious servants. Jah sought refuge in his workshop. The only pleasure he got from going to Hyderabad, he told an American reporter after becoming the Nizam, was tinkering with the 56 mostly broken-down cars in his grandfather's garage. ‘I inherited a scrap yard. I have a lifetime's work before me.'
³¹

In early 1972, Jah decided to look up George Hobday, his old friend from Harrow and Cambridge, who was working as a country doctor in Western Australia. He did not realise it at the time, but the trip would mark a new beginning, one that had very little to do with being the Nizam, staying in Hyderabad or pursuing a military career. His Exalted Highness, the Rustam of the Age, the Aristotle of the Times, Ruler of the Kingdom, Asaf Jah VIII, the Conqueror of Dominions, the Regulator of the Realm, the Administrator of the State, Nawab Mir Barakat Ali Khan
Bahadur, the Victor in Battles, the Leader of Armies, Faithful Ally of the British Government, the Nizam of Hyderabad and Berar, was about to become plain Mr Jah, the proprietor of Murchison House Station.

A
URANGZEB WAS 40 WHEN
he became the Mughal Emperor and set out to conquer Golconda and secure control of the Deccan. Jah was just one year younger when he stepped out of his Range Rover and first set eyes on Mu rchison House Station. Spread out before this modern-day Mughal Viceroy were almost half a million acres of wilderness bounded by the warm waters of the Indian Ocean on one side and the Australian interior on the other. Instead of forts to keep invaders at bay, there were barbedwire fences and rusty gates. As he stood on the gravel track that wound its way down to the outback homestead hidden among the river gums, he noticed something familiar about the landscape. The chalky blue waters of the Murchison River had cut a wide valley into the plain, exposing the same crimson-coloured sandstone that adorned the tombs of his Mughal ancestors. The occasional flat-topped hills rising above the rough scrub and twisted trees were just like those in the Deccan. ‘It was like the Hyderabad of old,' he would reminisce. ‘The atmosphere reminded me of the days when I used to go hunting on my grandfather's estates.'
¹

It was Jah's second visit to Australia. Five months earlier, in
March 1972, he and Hashim Ali Javeri had flown into Perth and booked into the Transit Inn at 3 a.m. When they stepped out into the bright Perth sunshine around noon they thought martial law had been declared, the streets were so quiet:

I remember it was a Sunday. We walked out of our hotel and then we both stepped back without saying a word. It was instinctive. It looked like there was a curfew. I saw two policemen approaching and waved them into the safety of the hotel lobby to find out what had happened. They asked, ‘Where are you from, mate?' told me it was a typical Sunday morning in Perth and went on their way.
²

After spending a few nights at the Transit Inn, Jah and Javeri drove to Dalwallinu in the wheatbelt, 280 kilometres east of Perth, where George Hobday had his country practice. Jah wanted to see some real desert country so Hobday took them to the Youanmi Station in old gold-mining country near Mount Magnet. They camped out for the night among the mulga bushes and shot a few emus. Jah was instantly taken with the outback. Hobday remembers him standing on the back of the ute, staring in amazement and saying: ‘I love this place, miles and miles of open country and not a bloody Indian in sight.'
³

Jah spent only 10 days in Western Australia before flying back to London, but it was long enough for him to decide that it was the perfect escape from the burdens he now shouldered. Jah says he had in mind buying a hobby farm of ‘some 30 or 40 acres' preferably not too far from Perth. When Hashim Ali Javeri phoned him to say that a property called Murchison House Station was up for sale and that he would like it, Jah flew back to Perth. Thinking that ‘station' referred to a railway, which would make it easily accessible from Perth, he made further enquiries.
‘I went to the Land Office and was shown various charts. I pointed to the one I wanted and asked how big is that. They said 202,000 hectares. To me that was the size of a country.'
⁴

There was no railway running within 100 kilometres of Murchison House Station. Geraldton, the nearest town of any size, was 160 kilometres away. Perth was a long day's drive down the North West Coast Highway, dodging road trains and roos. Kalbarri, 10 kilometres away, was a sleepy coastal settlement that relied on fishing and a few tourists who stopped for a few days at the local caravan park before making their way north towards the Pilbara. It had a pub, where the nightly entertainment consisted of brawls between the abalone divers and cray fishermen, a petrol bowser, a police station, a general store and a scattering of fibro cottages. The station's isolation and its size appealed to Jah. The landmarks on the map he carried were an evocative mix of European and Aboriginal names: Paradise Paddock, Nunginjay Spring, Charlie's Soak, Bully Pool, Mount Curious, Bracken Point, Gee Gai Outcamp and Koorie Dam. From the perimeter gate, the view stretched beyond Jannawa Hill and Pillawarra Hill, the station's northern boundary well-hidden behind the horizon. At half a million acres, the sheep and cattle farm was bigger than most of India's nine-gun princely states. A single paddock could have accommodated Hyderabad city with room to spare. Better still, there were no ‘bloody Indians', or, for that matter, any other people in sight.

When Jah first saw the station, the winter rains had turned the open pastures an emerald green. The bush was a blaze of colour with dozens of varieties of wildflowers in full bloom. The landscape's incarnation as a garden of Eden only lasted a few months. In summer, temperatures soared into the mid-forties and the scrub turned tinder dry. The sheep and cattle would congregate around the few remaining waterholes while the feral goats and wild horses roamed among the grasstrees and acacias.

The horses were brought to the station by its original owner, Charles von Bibra. Despite his Germanic ancestry, Charles's branch of the family had settled in England for generations. His brother Benedict travelled to Australia as a guard on a convict ship in 1823, liked what he saw and urged his brothers to join him. Charles arrived in Perth, the capital of Swan Colony, in 1840 and became the licensee for the Perth Hotel. In 1856 he travelled north to Lynton, a depot for the Geraldine lead mine, where he established a public house. A few months later Charles was granted a pastoral lease near the mouth of the Murchison River on the condition that he cleared the acacia and banksia scrub for grazing land. After spending a couple of years camped along the Murchison, he built a stone cottage about 50 metres from the river bank. The station's first output was wheat and meat for the convict lead-miners working the deposits around Ajana 60 kilometres to the west. Charles also began breeding Arab stallions for the British Army in India, at the time the colony's main export.

When Jah's car turned right past the 1880s shearing shed, von Bibra's cottage, overgrown with bougainvillea, blocked his view of the main homestead. Built around the turn of the century, the homestead had wide verandas, a low-slung roof and thick stone walls typical of the outback. Beyond the jacarandas, pepper trees, palms and river gums the Murchison River slipped silently by, its brackish waters full of black bream and mullet.

Apart from the main homestead the station had the usual assortment of outbuildings. Shearers' quarters, a manager's residence, a couple of workers' cottages, a large machinery shed, garages, stables and kennels for the working dogs were scattered for nearly a kilometre along the river. A small cemetery contained the remains of an Aboriginal woman, an alcoholic station manager who had drowned in a nearby waterhole, and two pilots killed in what was the first crash of a commercial airline in
Australia's history. In December 1921, the inaugural flight of Western Australian Airways ended in disaster when the singleengined Bristol Tourer plane piloted by Bob Fawcett and Ted Broad stalled while circling the station. A coronial inquiry was conducted on the spot by a local Justice of the Peace. The bodies were dressed in the station manager's best white shirts, wrapped in white bedsheets, placed in coffins made out of corrugated iron and a couple of doors from the blacksmith's workshop and buried in the soft sand.

In the 1940s Murchison House Station was running 33,000 sheep, and its eight-stand woolshed was turning over 1000 bales of wool a year. In the early 1970s it had 17,000 sheep and 5000 beef cattle, but a downturn in lamb and beef prices had made it a liability for the station's owner, Bill McClintock. The property was infested with saffron thistle and large parts were heavily eroded. Every owner of the station for the past 100 years had come in with grand ideas and gone away empty-handed, but Javeri was careful to hide that side of the story.

He need not have worried. Jah was not concerned about the weakness of the market for sheep and cattle that was driving so many primary producers to the wall. He had other visions for Murchison House Station and they had little to do with farming.

On the other side of the narrow causeway that bridged the Murchison River were hundreds of square kilometres of bush, hidden valleys surrounded by outcrops of bleached coral and narrow multicoloured gorges dug into the soft sandstone. The station's western boundary ran for 60 kilometres along some of the wildest and most inaccessible coastline in Australia. Sailing northwards in his square-rigger in 1629, the Dutch explorer Francisco Pelsaert described the coast as ‘very steeply hewn, without any foreshore or inlets as have other countries . . . It seemed to be a dry cursed earth without any green thing on it.'
⁵
Until the advent of aerial photography in the mid-1950s, the station's sea
frontage was still marked on most maps as a dashed line – the only part of Australia to be shown in that way.

The northern half of the station was a series of sandy ridges covered with low scrub, dissected by an emu-proof fence, a series of oil exploration routes and an old stock route. Over thousands of years Aboriginals excavated a network of shallow soaks that would provide fresh water, but most had been filled in with sand. Apart from a few abalone fishermen, the occasional cattle rustler and poachers searching for the rare Australian sandalwood that grew in isolated stands, the only people who ever came here were farm-hands, shearers and local tradesmen. It was as far removed from the claustrophobia of palace life in India, the snobbery of England and Perth's incestuous social circuit as anywhere in the world. With Bill McClintock's son Ted to guide him, Jah climbed into his Range Rover, engaged the four-wheel drive and took off to conquer his new kingdom. ‘Normally it would take eight or nine hours to see the main parts of the property,' Ted McClintock recalled. ‘With Jah at the wheel it took us two. It was terrifying. He didn't believe in going around corners, he would drive straight through the bush. Fortunately we hit an anthill which knocked the steering out, otherwise I thought it would be his first and last visit.'
⁶

The presence of an Indian prince eyeing off such a large pastoral property did not go unnoticed. There were tough restrictions on foreigners buying land anywhere in Australia. In February 1973,
The West Australian
reported that an international group of French, Swiss, Belgian and Turkish interests had formed an Australian company interested in buying undeveloped properties to produce beef, mutton and wool for export.
⁷
Jah was quoted as saying that it could take the consortium 10 years to bring them into production stage using Australian and international expertise and labour. The article made the plan sound more grandiose than it actually was. The foreign interests were
mostly Jah's friends from Cambridge. The Swiss-based company involved was Hebros Establishment Ltd, whose directors were Hashim Ali Javeri and Jean Crozier, a Geneva lawyer Jah had appointed to manage his offshore financial affairs. The directors of the Australian subsidiary, Hebros (Australia) Pty Ltd, were an ex-pharmacist, Ronald Woss, whom George Hobday had introduced to Jah, and an ex-physicist, Ronald Wise. Hobday also helped in overcoming the insufferable restrictions on foreign ownership by forming a company known as Yadboh (his named spelled backwards) while Jah arranged the $200,000 it cost to purchase the property to be sent from Switzerland through Hebros (Australia). The international expertise and labour would consist of three faithful Indian servants who Jah brought with him from Hyderabad. The locals used to call them ‘Jah's coolies'.
⁸

As he had done in India with his grandfather's estate, Jah took a totally hands-off approach, relying on managers to run his business affairs in Australia once the purchase of Murchison House had been completed. David Nuttal, who owned a Perthbased farm-management consultancy, was given responsibility for hiring staff, drawing up a financial plan and appointing a farm manager. Nuttal gave overall charge of Jah's account to his business partner, Peter Falconer.

Falconer knew immediately that Murchison House could never become a profitable operation unless there was a huge injection of capital. Most of the station's northern boundary was inaccessible, there was an overall shortage of water, much of the arable land was weed-infested and it was impossible to stop trespassers. But Falconer soon realised that Jah was not interested in investing the kind of money needed, even though he had access to immense wealth. ‘As for long-term projects such as putting in reliable water supplies and geographical fencing, he wasn't interested. I suggested tourism-related activities, but the last thing he wanted was people disturbing his privacy. He made some mention of his wife
and that she controlled the purse-strings. He said she allowed access to his jewellery only once a year to get funds.'
⁹

The reality was more complex. To maintain a cash flow while getting around tough foreign exchange controls in India and foreign ownership restrictions on pastoral leases in Australia, Jah's financial advisors set up a complex network of companies and trust accounts.
¹⁰
These included entities registered in Australia, the UK, Switzerland and Liechtenstein as well as offshore tax havens such as Jersey, Panama, the Virgin Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands. The proceeds of asset sales, mainly jewellery deposited in a specially constructed vault in the Banque Credit-Suisse in Geneva, were deposited in various companies and then loaned down the chain or distributed as shares between them. Eventually, some of it would come as cash into Jah's possession via his office in Parliament Square in Perth, or on the weekly air service from Perth to Kalbarri. Wages would be disbursed, rates and tax arrears would be paid and outstanding bills settled, until the next cash crunch came.

Falconer appointed Bill Shimmons to be the station's first manager. Shimmons was well-respected among local farmers. A tough and experienced station manager, he had spent most of his working life running stations in Western Australia, but he had never come face-to-face with a proprietor quite like Jah. ‘He was born a ruler and was going to behave like a ruler. He was not going to take orders from anyone,' Sadruddin Javeri's wife, Scheherazade, recalls.
¹¹