Recent story on DS.

BNP cadres grab land of Hindu families in Munshiganj, Allege victims

Local BNP cadres grabbed the lands and other properties of 50 Hindu families at Louhajang in Munshiganj and forced them out of their houses about two months ago, the victims alleged yesterday.

Same story has been going on for ages with state protection with a state stipulated law called Vested Property Act. Its about time we kill this darkest of all laws. To see the actual law, go here.

From Shahrier Khan

Minority Hindus deprived of land rights in Bangladesh
Sharier Khan OneWorld South Asia , June, 2004

A discriminatory law enacted decades ago in Muslim majority Bangladesh continues to deprive hundreds of thousands of minority Hindus of land rights, despite being repealed in 2001.

Before Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, West Pakistani military rulers had enacted the Enemy Property Act, 1965, to drive Hindus out to neighboring India after grabbing their lands.

Since then, encroachers have misused the law with the help of corrupt state authorities to grab property by identifying Hindus as “enemies of the state.”

Explains the secretary of the Bangladesh Economic Association and land researcher, professor Abul Barakat, “Following independence, a predominantly Muslim but secular Bangladesh should have had abolished this law. But the state renamed it the Vested Property Act to acquire the properties of people from West Pakistan who had left after the war.”

The four-decades-old law has seen around a million Hindus lose at least 2.1 million acres of land.

To amend the situation, the former Awami League government had enacted the Vested Property Repeal Act in 2001. But it was never implemented because of objections from politically influential encroachers and legal complications.

Explains a senior land ministry source, “While the government is responsible for taking over all land under the Enemy Property Act, in reality it does not control 99 percent of these lands. If the repeal is implemented, the government will have to return the lands to their rightful owners. But how will it do so when it has lost track of these lands?”

The initiative further lost steam when the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led ruling coalition came to power.

Charges the vice chairman of the Bangladesh Bar Council, barrister Amir-Ul Islam, “The BNP government has stayed the execution of the repeal with ulterior motives, putting the minority community in trouble.”

Defending the government, Law Minister Moudud Ahmed informs, “We are scrutinizing the (repeal) act. The issue has a legacy of nearly 40 years now. It is a very difficult problem that cannot be resolved overnight. But we are committed to tackling it.”

Concedes advocate Mahbubur Rahman, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Land, “The government is aware of land grabbing and the committee is working on reforms. We are recommending laws to take stern action against encroachers.”

The law seems to have served its masters well. The nongovernmental organization for the landless Samata found that because of migration to neighboring India, Hindus comprised just 9.2 percent of the population in 2001, down from 18.4 percent in 1961.

Abul Barakat also conducted research which revealed that apart from Hindus, land encroachment victims also included 31 other ethnic minority groups that comprise 12 percent of the country’s 140 million population.

According to him, the share of landless households increased from 19 percent in 1960 to 56 percent in 1996.

But Barakat maintains that, “Hindus are the worst affected as they are the biggest minority group who owned plenty of land before the discrimination began. More than one-third Hindus have turned landless or marginal landowners.”

Agrees Hindu lawyer Arun Pal. “All the Hindus of two villages in our region in Gopalganj (140 kilometers southwest of Dhaka) have become landless from 1965. Over the years, many of my neighbors have gone to India and many others are living destitute on other peoples’ lands although they are land owners themselves,” he discloses.

Pal is lucky his ancestral home was not seized, unlike 50-year old Debashish of Tangail, 120 kilometers north of Dhaka. Debashish’s life changed in the early 1980s when encroachers in connivance with land officials took away his lands.

Recalls Debashish, “I discovered I was no longer the owner of my land one morning when I went to the land office to pay my taxes.” Encroachers promptly descended on his property and drove him away.

But Debashish has not yet abandoned hope. “I am waiting for the government to implement the repeal of the Vested Property Act,” he says optimistically.

Rights groups are also campaigning for the cause of people like Debashish.

Lashes out land rights activist and Dhaka University professor Ahmed Kamal, “This law has caused mass migration, dispossession of huge amounts of land and other assets, breaking of family ties, the loss of human potential, disruption in social capital formation, and the creation of parasitic vested interest groups.”

Activist and advocate Subrata Chowdhury asks the government to ensure the repeal of the Act and help dispossessed people get their land back, calling the legislation a “death trap for the minorities.”

Leader of the National Committee of Vested Property Act Resistance Movement Kamal Lohani terms the Act a “black law,” charging, “It discriminates against religious minorities in a democratic society. Yet the government is reviving it by empowering district officials to lease out so-called ‘vested’ property.”

He adds that grabbers have captured 4.2 million acres of government land. “If we can recover them, hundreds of thousands of landless families will be rescued from a life of poverty.”

Bangladesh has 37.4 million acres of land area with 60 percent under agricultural use. According to the NGO Samata, 57 percent of the population is landless.