Author: Zubair Ahmed in Dhaka
Publication: BBC News
Date: February 8, 2001
Bangladesh has drafted a bill to
repeal a controversial 30-year-old law which enabled the state to seize
the property left behind by Indians.
The Enemy Properties Act was meant
to allow the India and Pakistan to confiscate the property of those who
had fled across each other's borders during their 1965 war.
But though India repealed it soon
after the war ended, Pakistan retained it as did Bangladesh, which was
formerly East Pakistan.
Bangladesh's Hindu minority says
the government has been too slow to repeal the law which, they say, is
unfair and targets them.
Rana Dasgupta, a lawyer from Chittagong
says it is a black law, a blemish in the brief history of independent Bangladesh.
Piyush Kanti Choudhury's ancestral
home was declared an enemy property way back in 1965, even though, he insists,
none of his relatives ever left for India.
He managed to live there because
he challenged the takeover in court.
But, he says: "I can't sell it,
I can't mortgage it, I can't make any improvement on my property."
Demoralised community
His neighbour, Biswajit Sen, was
only marginally luckier.
Some years ago he was officially
informed that the act did not apply to his property.
But he is still waiting for it to
be handed back to him.
"The government fixed a committee,
we faced it but they haven't returned our property," Mr Sen says.
According to analysts, the act has
affected nearly all of the 10 million Hindus living in Bangladesh.
Nearly one million hectares of land
have been seized from them so far.
But community leaders say the act
has not just taken a material toll.
It has been psychologically demoralising
and prompted an exodus of Hindus that halved their numbers in the 30 years
since Bangladesh's independence.
Vested interests
The Hindus complain the governing
Awami League is going back on its election promise, made five years ago,
to repeal the law.
But the party says it is doing all
it can to change the situation.
Suranjit Sengupta, a senior Hindu
leader of the party, has helped to draft legislation to repeal the act.
"It's the corrupt bureaucrat...
and some other vested interested parties who are delaying it. We are doing
what we can," he says.
Dhaka-based researcher, Dr Abul
Barkat, has spent years collecting data on the seized properties.
"Two sorts of people have grabbed
the Hindu properties - locally influential people and land ministry officials,"
he says.
Some doubt whether repealing the
act would mean anything other than a token gesture.
The seized properties have changed
hands so many times it is difficult to trace the original owners.
But Bangladesh's dispossessed Hindus
say that repealing an unfair and discriminatory law would at least be a
start.
