Vested Property Act (Bangladesh)

The Vested Property Act is a controversial law in Bangladesh that allows the government to confiscate property from individuals it deems as an enemy of the state. Before the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, it was known as the Enemy Property Act. It is now called the Vested Property Act – 2013. The act was criticized as a tool for appropriating the lands of the Hindu population who went to India from 1965 to 1969.

Quotes

• What we must understand is this: The Vested Property Act is legalized racism and legalized thievery. The fact that the Bangladeshi government has refused to repeal it, let alone compensate the victims, makes it quite clear that it is not interested in developing a society that allows freedom and equal protection under the law for all of its citizens.
  • Benkin, Richard L. (2014). A quiet case of ethnic cleansing: The murder of Bangladesh's Hindus.(176)

• While the act has been used against other religious and ethnic minorities on occasion, only Hindus have faced a consistent and organized effort to use the law to eliminate them from the Bangladeshi polity. Hindus are the VPA's real targets. Professor Abul Barkat of Dhaka University undertook the most authoritative study of the VPA and concluded that by 1997, 40 percent of Hindu families in Bangladesh had been affected by it and more than half of all Hindu-owned land already had been confiscated under thee act. Much more land and many more Hindus have been affected in the fourteen years since then. So, there is no doubt that the VPA is a critical ingredient in ethnic cleansing. The fact that the percent of Hindus in Bangladesh has been cut in half concurrent with the act is evidence of those even more sinister, ethnic cleansing, motives behind the law.
  • Benkin, Richard L. (2014). A quiet case of ethnic cleansing: The murder of Bangladesh's Hindus.(177)

• The VPA is so clearly immoral that the question of its being an outrage to every decent human being should not even be a legitimate topic for discussion among civilized individuals. There is no justification for it, and every Bangladeshi should be embarrassed by it. Trying to make a case for it is like trying to justify Holocaust denial.... Some appeasers in universities and elsewhere are now trying to say that holocaust denial is merely another point of view that is a legitimate topic for study. Nonsense!... Trying to justify the VPA is a racist lie, too. (177)
  • Benkin, Richard L. (2014). A quiet case of ethnic cleansing: The murder of Bangladesh's Hindus.

• After independence, officials of the Bangladeshi government under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman reviewed the laws of Pakistan under which they previously lived. Their mandate was to ratify some and eliminate or change others. At one point, they encountered Pakistan’s Enemy Property Act, passed in 1965 after another embarrassing defeat at Indian hands as a retaliatory law against Hindus. The openly anti-Hindu nature of the law matched the national rhetoric before and during the war, as well as most of the time since. Significantly, this was one of the laws that Bangladeshi officials decided to keep on the new nation’s books. Since, however, it had to maintain the fiction of a break from Pakistani bigotry, it was circumspect about it. They changed the name of the law from Enemy Property Act to Vested Property Act while adopting the Pakistani law verbatim
  • Richard L. Benkin in Richard L. Benkin (editor) - What Is Moderate Islam_-Lexington Books_Fortress Academic (2017)

• According to Professor Abul Barkat (and Shafique uz Zaman 2008) of Dhaka University, after about thirty years of Bangladeshi rule, approximately 75 percent of all Hindu land in Bangladesh was seized under the VPA. Nor did it matter if the ruling party was the Awami League or the BNP. Barkat’s data showed that the percentage of the spoils did not depend on which party was in power but on the party in power. Whoever held power took essentially the same amount of loot. During BNP rule it was BNP 45 percent, Awami League 31, all others 24. During Awami League rule it was Awami League 44 percent, BNP 32, all others 24. Despite the enormous amount of property seized, Barkat also noted that only about 0.4 percent of the Bangladeshi population derives any of the proceeds; the greatest number of it goes to party loyalists
  • Richard L. Benkin in Richard L. Benkin (editor) - What Is Moderate Islam_-Lexington Books_Fortress Academic (2017)

• In Bangla Desh the property of the Hindus has been threatened by the Enemy Property Act (the democratic caliber of Bangla Desh is poor, but it is quite certain that even otherwise, no majority would have come forward to prevent the enactment of this law).
  • Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

• The Law Ministry of the Awami League, moved in the parliament, the much hated ‘Enemy Property Act’ of Ayub Khan under a different name, ‘The Acquired Property Act’. Under the previous regime, the property of Hindus who had left the country was declared ‘Enemy Property’. In other words, were Sudhamoy’s uncles enemies of the country?
  • Lajja by Taslima Nasrin. Day Six, 123