The Vested Property Act of Bangladesh is a very controversial law of Bangladesh which involves the Independence War of Bangladesh. This law allowed the ones who were gone during the war of 1971 in Bangladesh’s Independence War, not to gain their property back.
This law has been renamed to the “Vested Property Act of Bangladesh” in 1974. You can simply declare someone an enemy of the country (Bangladesh) and make the property to be gone from their hands to the government’s.
What that meant?
First, let’s look at figures. The amount of property that can be declared to “enemy” state is 702,335 acres (2,842 km²) and 22,835 homes are listed in these lands. Much of this land is from Dhirendranath Dutta, a Hindu politician in Bangladesh after the war period. His body was never found after the Pakistanis took him and it is said that he had not left the country by his own thinking. Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen’s property’s were confiscated by the Pakistani government. In 1999, the Bangladeshi government started investigating in this case but there is not much information about their progress.
Professor Barkat of Dhaka University took a survey and a research about what the regular citizens think about who has taken the vested properties. In his Inquiry into Causes and Consequences of Deprivation of Hindu Minorities in Bangladesh through the Vested Property Act, it mentioned more of the statistics about the vested properties. About 40% of the Hindus or 925,050 Hindu families of Bangladesh were affected by this act.
Now to add it all up, which party took over most of these properties?
Bangladesh Awami League 44.2%
Bangladesh Nationalist Party 31.7%
Jatiya Party 5.8%
Jamaat-e-Islami 4.8%
Others 13.5%
Tags: Bangladesh, hindu, laws, Politics, Vested property act
Oppression does not only occur in a violent physical form. Mental, political and lawful oppression is rampant in Bangladesh and many times is the hardest to document and prove.
However one such example that is blatant and a travesty to the secular nature of the birth of Bangladesh is the Vested Property Act (aka Enemy Property Act). The act in practice right now applies predominantly to Hindus. So if a member of a family leaves Bangladesh for India due to personal/political reasons the government takes ownership of the land. No such law is in place for people of other religions. There has to be no written proof just insinuation. Cases have occurred that when the owner of the land dies in Bangladesh a claimant will declare that the deceased has gone to India, in order to grab their land. Such a disgusting violation of humans rights is rampant and commonplace in Bangladesh. Read the wikipedia article for more info.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vested_Property_Act_(Bangladesh)
Tags: Bangladesh, enemy property act, Hindu opression, Human rights violation, land, Vested property act
