Author: Chanchal Sarkar
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 1, 2000
There is talk in Bangladesh
today of repealing the Vested Property Act which was born under another
name in East Pakistan in 1965.
The original name was
Enemy Property Act and was directed at the Hindus of East Pakistan who
migrated from that country leaving property behind. After Liberation
in 1971 it was widely expected that the law would be annulled but under
Sheikh Mujeeb only the name was changed to Vested Property Act, the text
remained as it is. In fact in 1976 the government which earlier was
the custodian and protector of the property left behind became its owner.
Oddly, the most vesting took place between 1976-1995, well after Liberation.
The land dispossessed from the Hindus is about 2.1 million acres, its value
at current prices is $ (US) 22,823 million which is about 70 per cent of
Bangladesh s GDP in the year 2000. The number of households affected
is about a million, some 40 per cent of Hindu households of the country.
One has to be very careful
when using the words `Hindu' and `Muslim' about this wresting of land.
At its start the Enemy Property Act was clearly a discriminatory and vengeful
law. However more land was vested during military rule in liberated
Bangladesh than during the Ayub-Yahya period and obviously the occupation
of land is a case of the rapacious, powerful and influential terrorising
and squeezing the weak to grab the property of neighbours. As said,
about a million Hindu households have been squeezed and, of them, especially
terrorised have been female-headed families.
The atmosphere of an
East Pakistan, brought into being under the two nation theory, was such
that there were large waves of migration from East Pakistan mainly into
India, a migration which has continued apace even though the incidence
of communal clashes and tension in Bangladesh is now extremely little,
much less than in India. According to the Population Census of 1991
the total size of the Hindu population in Bangladesh was 11.2 million.
In other words 7 million Hindus have migrated from Bangladesh between 1961
and 1991, Unfortunately migration continues till today though the number
of Hindus in responsible positions has been going significantly up.
A prime reason for the migration has been the continuation of the Vested
Property Act.
This Act, be its name
new or old, was conceived as punitive and divisive. To quote its
most authoritative study it, produces and reproduces, on the one side,
extreme misery among the Hindu community manifested through mass outmigration,
dispossession of property, all sorts of mental hazards, the breaking of
family ties, loss of human potential and disruption of the social capital
of the nation. On the other it helps the formation of parasitic and
vested interest groups with strong unholy ties with the prevailing institutional
agents the State the Administration, the Local Governments and the leading
political parties.
Following the trend in
the subcontinent must of the beneficiaries of the land grabbing are either
in politics or have political connections. When the law began to
run the biggest beneficiaries were worthies of the Muslim League.
Today they are divided between the Awami league, Bangladesh National party
the Jatio Party and the Jamaat-e-Islam. The two principal parties
have the largest number of beneficiaries, with many of them prepared to
jump ship to the opposite party if by that they could keep a hold on the
land they have grabbed. It is this which prevents, for instance,
a party like the Awami League which would probably like to erase the law
from doing it and certainly not while an election is in the offing.
Already some of the beneficiaries of the Act have started making speeches
in their constituencies crying that four or five hundred thousand Hindus
will return to Bangladesh to reclaim their land! With some courage the
Awami League government has attempted to correct another misjudgement of
Sheikh Mujeeb his inability to understand the sentiments of the people
of the Chittagong Hill Tract and one hopes that the pact with them will
hold.
If the Vested Property
Act is rubbed off the statute book will that make a great difference to
those whose property has, over 35 years, gone into the hand of others?
Hardly. Few Bangladeshis know that the Vesting of land continued
till as late as 1996. To put what is wrong right would be symbolic,
it would hold aloft the honour of Bangladesh as a democratic State and
be an example of justice and fairplay. But after so many years, two
generations of encroachment, transfer and occupation it will be well nigh
impossible to yank the clock back. To begin with if those pushed
towards destitution, helpless female-headed families and others like them
could be given relief that would bring much credit to Bangladesh.
This is what the liberal
and fair minded people of Bangladesh hope for. The issue of the Vested
Property Act was first raised in Bangladesh s Parliament in June 1979 by
some members and outside by some public figures. The Vested Property
Act is considered by distinguished lawyers to be outside the Proclamation
of Independence of 1971 and of the Constitution. These lawyers have
raised the issue before the Supreme Court of Bangladesh which has deftly
sidestepped giving a decision. Oddly, the Supreme Court of Pakistan
had asked the Government of East Pakistan to explain the purpose of the
law, but that government dilly dallied for years and never did. India,
too, has cases like the challenge to the law which, by the demand of orthodox
Muslims, blocked the giving of maintenance to divorced Muslim wives beyond
a short period. A writ petition alleging that this law was violative
of Fundamental Rights was filed before the supreme court which the court
sat on for years, heard arguments only the other day and has reserved judgement.
The ways by which strong-armed
people grabbed the properties of the weak and helpless are the same as
everywhere in our subcontinent. Tehsil and Thana Revenue Officials
were bribed; documents were forged; physical threats were made and used
sharecroppers were planted; property was enlisted under the Act for reasons
not known to the owners; politicians interfered and manipulated and owners
spent many thousands of rupees in lengthy and futile legal action.
On the other side of the scale there were neighbours who went all out to
help, courts which gave repeated judgments in favour of the owners and
some local politicians who did their best to help the beleaguered owners.
This long and painful
story would not have been chronicled in detail but for a team of scholars
led by a Professor of Economics at Dhaka University, Dr Abdul Barkat.
The work first began in 1995 and a preliminary study was published in 1997.
A much more detailed study has ben published a few months ago which has
probed the working of the Vested Property Act in 16 selected unions where
64 case studies were undertaken and for which 450 victims were interviewed.
To this is added a countrywide situation report. The overwhelming
majority of the team are Muslims and I believe that they felt they were
studying the effects of an unjust law not something communal. Dr.
Abdul Barkat told me that he and his colleagues would also like to examine
the cases of property left behind by the Biharis who migrated after Bangladesh
came into being.
It is this tenacious
support of the underdog by the team which has drawn me to Dr Barkat on
my visits to Bangladesh. Imagine, then, my anxiety when I heard this
time, that he had been receiving threats to his life because of the study
led by him. The whole issue of vested land in Bangladesh and telephoned
threats to those who reveal to liberal and fair minded people its unfairness
proves once again the truth of: The only thing needed for a catastrophe
to happen is that enough good people do nothing. That is the main
reason why injustices continued in our countries.
