1. CORNELIUS, J.-The appellant in this case describes himself as Nawab Mirza Muhammad Bakhatyar, Zamindar of Mughalpura Estate in village Hamidnagar in Rampur State in the United Provinces of India. By an order dated the 6th August 1954, the Rehabilitation Commissioner (General), Punjab (Mr. S. S. Jafri) confirmed the finding of a Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner that the appellant is not a refugee, and at the same time confirmed certain action taken by the Rehabilitation Department to eject the Appellant from a house in Lahore which had been allotted to him as a refugee. Under Mr. Jafri's direction, the Rehabilitation Commissioner (Lands) made a consequential order cancelling the allotment of certain lands and a garden which had stood in the appellant's name.
2. The case comes before us as an appeal by special leave from an order of a Division Bench of the High Court summarily dismissing the appellant's petition for a writ to quash the order of the 6th August 1954 and the consequential order affecting the land and garden. The main grounds upon which this relief was sought were firstly, that the order was made mala fide since the Rehabilitation Commissioner (General), Mr. Jafri, had "manoeu--vred" the making of the order and had a personal interest based on hostility, against the petitioner, secondly, that this order proceeds entirely upon a secret report made concerning the antecedents of the appellant by the Criminal Investigation Department, which the appellant was offered no opportunity of challenging, and lastly, that the order was in contravention of the relevant law and also contravened principles of natural justice.
3. The history of the case may be briefly stated as follows. The house occupied by the appellant is a half portion of a bungalow, the other half being occupied by certain refugees from Lucknow. Each half was occupied on the basis of allotments by the Rehabili--tation Department. It seems that the occupants of the other half moved for the ejectment of the appellant on the ground that he was nova refugee, but a resident of Lahore, i.e. a local. The case going up to the Rehabilitation authorities, the decision given at first was that the appellant was a refugee and subsequently; an Additional Rehabilitation Commissioner made an order dated the 25th December 1951, that since the bungalow was small, the whole of it should be allotted to the appellant in view of "his status and requirements". The direction was given that other accommodation should be found for the occupants of the second half of the house. These persons, however, again represented that the appellant was not a refugee at all, that he had once owned a bungalow at Lahore which had been sold in 1938, and that from a date prior to the Partition he and his family had been living in a rented house No. 24, Canal Park, Lahore, and further that his father Mirza Alauddin had been employed as a clerk in the High Court at Lahore. The matter was referred to the Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner, Lahore for enquiry, which was commenced about the month of October 1953. A preliminary objection by the appellant that that officer was not competent to revise the order of the Additional Rehabilitation Commissioner dated the 25th December 1951, was overruled, and evidence was recorded for both parties, commencing with that for the appellant.
4. A number of very important admissions were made by the appellant under cross-examination. He admitted that his father had been in service in the High Court, and that he died in Lahore on the 6th August 1953. He admitted having been educated at St. Anthony's School in Lahore and at the Govern--ment and Forman Christian Colleges in Lahore. He stated that he had graduated from the Punjab University in 1939. He admitted further that two or three years before the Partition his father had rented a house in Canal Park, which they left in 1949. That was the year in which it seems that the appellant went into' occupation of house No. 9, Canal Park which is concerned in the present dispute. When questioned regarding the Zamindari in India of which he claimed to be the owner, the appellant's knowledge proved to be extremely vague. For instance he said lie could not remember the full details of the property, but there were 40 or 50 squares in different villages and a bungalow in Mughalpura which had no number because Mughalpura was a village, that he thought that this bungalow was now in the possession of Rampur State, that he owned some land in Bijnaur district also, but could not remember the area; and that all the papers relating to his properties in India had been stolen from his bungalow in Lahore. He had made a report of the theft to the Police, but said nothing then about having lost these extremely valuable papers upon which his whole case for compensation out of evacuee property in Pakistan necessarily rested. The appellant claimed to have a "Private Secretary" although his present activities were confined to dealing in cloth and doing some "private business", on such a scale that he did not have to pay income-tax. His "Private Secretary" is his own brother whose education was cut of at the Junior Cambridge level. Only one witness was produced in support of the appellant's claim to the possession of property and status in India and that was a man named Abid Hussain Khan, who lives in Lahore by conducting claims cases before the Railway administration on behalf of traders whose goods have been lost in transit, for which he gets a salary of Rs. 150 per month. Abid Hussain Khan professed to have known the appellant since 1943 and to have stayed in Balaspar in India in his house. As to the status and wealth of the appellant, he made the following statement :---- "I did not go there to see the property of the Nawab, but I heard there that he was a man of property, as it was evident from his way of living that he owned property. He belonged to a high family. He was called a Nawab."
5. There was other evidence besides produced by the parties, and at the conclusion of the enquiry the Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner reported to the Rehabilitation Commissioner (General) that; "Mirza Muhammad Bakhatyar is local, who had been living all along at Lahore with his father, who was employed in the High Court. He bad no right to keep an evacuee property as a refugee and he should be ordered to be ejected under section 8-2 (b), Pakistan Rehabilitation Ordinance, 1948, as he is local, unauthorized and has not paid rent."
6. This report was made on the 15th June 1954 but while the enquiry was in progress, an order for ejectment of the appellant was made by the Rehabilitation Commissioner (General) on the 31st March 1954 in the following terms :---- "As Mirza Muhammad Bakhatyar is a local resident of Lahore and has failed to pay rent of the evacuee bungalow despite repeated requests, he does not deserve its allotment since he did not defend the ejectment notice served on him."
7. Against this order, the appellant had moved the Custodian, Evacuee Property, Lahore by petition which was sent on to the Rehabilitation Commissioner (General) for disposal as a Rehabilitation Revision Petition. When the case again came before Mr. Jafri, whose predecessor had ordered the enquiry by the Deputy Rehabilitation commissioner, there was before him not only the report of the latter officer but also the matter of revision of the order of the appellant's ejectment.
8. Mr. Jafri's order of the 6th August 1954 of which the appellant complains commences with a lengthy statement of the legal position qua the order of the Custodian referred tc above and proceeds to consideration of the order of ejectment of the 31st March 1954 which he finds to have been made in continua--tion of an earlier report dated the 7th December 195', by the Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner. As to this, it seems clear that the notice of ejectment was issued in proceedings which were wholly unconnected with the enquiry proceeding before the Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner regarding the status of the appellant. We see no force in the contention raised before Mr. Jafri, as well as before us, that by the issue of this notice, the Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner was influenced to make a report against the appellant. Next, the question was taken up whether the original allotment had been obtained by the appellant through fraud and misrepresentation, and it was in this connection that after recounting certain lengthy proceedings, Mr. Jafri reproduced a very unflattering report regarding the antecedents of the appellant which he had receive from the Senior Superintendent of Police, and another report, even more damaging to him, which had been made by the Criminal Investigation Department after an enquiry ordered w the Governor of the Punjab upon a representation by the appellant Later, when Mr. Jafri came to consider the main question i.e "how far the 'petitioner has shown that he can be considered to be a refugee", he said at the outset that the police reports "give a direct lie to his claim". Next, he pointed out that the only documentary evidence which the appellant had produced to support his claim to be the proprietor of a Nawabi Estate in Rampur consisted of two receipts showing that his father had purchased some cattle in a mandi in Rampur. It was observed that a person who:--- "has so much at stake and who 'has made such definite accusations against responsible officers would not have relied, on two receipts of purchase of buffaloes by his father to establish that he was a Nawab of a State in India and that he migrated as a consequence of partition."
9. Next, notice was taken of the report of the Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner and it was said that he had "made a very detailed enquiry and has given good reasons for holding that the petitioner is not a refugee". The point as to the place of "ordinary residence" of the appellant was then taken up.
10. The discussion commences with the remark that the mere fact of owning land in Rampur State would by no means prove that the appellant was a refugee. On this the conclusion reached was as follows :- "Now it is evident that the petitioner has " no claim to having been ordinarily resident in Rampur State in India. He bad ordinarily been a resident of Lahore."
11. Mention was made of the then policy followed by the Rehabilita--tion Department to refuse allotments of residential property to persons ordinarily resident in Pakistan, when giving compensa--tion to them for properties which they had been obliged to abandon in India. With reference to the appellant, it was further said that he did not even claim to have lost any urban property in India, apart from the fact there was "no option but to hold that the petitioner is not a refugee". On these grounds, the directions already mentioned were made, namely, that the notice of ejectment and the finding that the appellant was not a refugee were confirmed.
12. The appellant argued his own case before us. He made no attempt to show that the order directing his ejectment suffered from any legal defect. The contention that it contravened the "principles of natural justice" appears to have been based on nothing but the fact of its having been made while the status of the appellant as a refugee was still under enquiry. As to that, it has been seen that the ejectment order was made in a wholly different proceeding, and could not have had any effect upon the conclusions reached in the enquiry. He argued that certain of the remarks made by Mr. Jafri on the basis of the Police reports mentioned above were uncalled for and tended to show bias against the appellant. There may or may not be a great deal of force in this contention, but what appears very clearly from the order of Mr. Jafri is that besides the Police reports there was ample material on the record, much of which came from the mouth of the appellant himself, to justify the finding reached by the Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner. It is entirely incorrect to suggest, as was suggested in the writ petition, that Mr. Jafri's order was "nothing but the reproduction of the entire C. I. D. Secret report". If that had been the case, and the appellant not having been offered an opportunity of challenging the correctness of the C. I. D. Reports, there would no doubt have been substance in his contention that the order of Mr. Jafri being of a quasi judicial nature was vitiated by violation of a basic principle of justice. But, we find that the order is adequately and strongly grounded on a number of other considerations and that it received support from clear admissions by the appellant himself. In the circumstances, the order of the High Court dismissing the writ petition would appear to be correct.
13. This appeal is accordingly dismissed, but in all the circum--stances we consider that as regards the costs, it will be proper to leave the parties to bear their own costs themselves, and we direct accordingly.