topics: |  bangladesh |

During a visit to Bangladesh in 2012, I had an opportunity to spend two days in the kamalApur area, near the elegant fluted railway station and an important bus terminus.

What we didn't know then is the story of the painful evictions of slum dwellers from this area, a part of urban rejuvenation in Dhaka.

Background : Independence, 1971

In the Pakistan era, Bangladesh was a neglected province of Pakistan, and Dhaka was a crumbling city.

After the formation of Bangladesh in 1971, the national revenues started accruing in the capital, and Dhaka boomed with opportunities, attracting an enormous rural influx.

Starting 1975, the city authorities started evicting thousands of squatters who had occupied private and government land. Some of these people had been living on these lands for decades. No alternative housing was provided. A significant number were evicted to Mirpur, where you can see the signs of new tenements even today. The evictions continued through the 1990s, and scaled up in the late 1990s, during the Awami government of Sheikh Hasina (June 1996 to July 2001).

This book is based on a visit from August 2000, and documents this last
phase. It is a sad tale: 

	A typical case would be that an announcement would be made through
	loudspeakers one evening informing the community that they would have
	to move their belongings and house by 7:30 AM the next morning, if
	they didn’t it would all be destroyed. Any requests for
	clarifications were met with threats of beating or incarceration.

	Next morning at 7:00 am the settlement would be surrounded by police
	and the demolition crew, who came with bulldozers. Once again
	announcements would be made to gather all belongings and vacate their
	homes. Usually the men and women would try to plead with the
	police. [Meanwhile, the bulldozers would start demolitions.]  The
	people would scramble to collect whatever they could and to save
	themselves.



evictions in Dhaka
image from article: Violence and displacement in suburban Dhaka
 	Shahadat Hossain, 14 August 2013
	http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/shahadat-hossain/violence-and-displacement-in-suburban-dhaka

Authors

This report was prepared by a fact-finding group of four people:
	- Ted Añana (Philippines),
	- Francisco Fernandez (Philippines),
	- Kenneth Fernandes (Australia (orig. Pakistan)), and
	- Ms. Lajana Manandhar (Nepal).

They spent about a week in Dhaka in early August 2000, talking to various
stakeholders about the large-scale evictions in the preceding decades.

The visit was organized by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and
Evictions (COHRE) and the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR).

Political background

As can be expected of a visit over a few days, the book gives a rather
shallow view of the evictions.  Who were the evicted people?  What was the
social dynamics that had brought them to the desperate measure of leaving
their homes and coming to the city?  What validity was there to the claim
of the authorities that these people were "terrorists"?

Many of the evicted were Bangladeshi "biharis" - an Urdu-speaking community
who had emigrated in 1947 from Bihar and U.P.   They are not Bengalis, and
this has marked them as a minority in Bangladesh. For the last three
decades, this group has been asking to be repatriated to Pakistan - and
have been in limbo without citizenship in Bangladesh.  Despite being
granted Bangladesh citizenship papers in 2008, they remain alienated from
the bAnglA-speaking majority, and some in the community may be aligned to
the ultra-right terrorist groups.

However, surely the majority of the several lakh who have been evicted may
not have been Biharis, the soccio-political perspective remains incomplete
without some idea about the dynamics of the ruling elite and these
marginalized groups.

The Biharis: "Besieged" in Bangladesh

During our 2012 trip, we also visited Mirpur, largely populated by Biharis.
The streets are new, and the whitewashed shops smell of fresh concrete.  The
area has many high-rise garment factories, one of which

These are the people whose mother tongue is Urdu and many of whom hope for a
re-alignment with Pakistan.  Many are tnAtis - handloom weavers of elegant
dhAkAi sAris.  Many of the notorious razakars are also associated with
this population; these are the people who, in 1971, worked with the Pakistan
army in the mass killings of millions of bengali-speaking bAnglAdeshis.

After the formation of Bangladesh in 1971, many Bihari Bangladeshis wished to
repatriate to Pakistan.  This group is known as the mehsUreen (besieged).
Despite feeble political attempts to organize ships etc for them, two
generations of mehsureen remained stranded without
citizenship in Bangladesh.

The Biharis are closely linked with the right-wing party Jamaat-e-Islami,
which opposed (and possibly continues to oppose) independence from Pakistan.
One of the aging leaders of the Jamaat, Abdul Kader Mullah, was
controversially hanged in 2013 as a leader of the razakars (he is often
referred to as the "butcher of Mirpur").  A number of witnesses testified,
after forty years, to hundreds of killings by Mullah and his group, including
the brutal decapitation of the pro-Liberation poet Meherun Nesa, whose head
was strung up from a ceiling fan.

The Ameer (leader) of the party is Motiur Rahman Nizami, who has also been
sentenced to death for involvement in the smuggling of truckloads of arms.
Both were leaders of the Al-Badar militia in 1971.  Another leader, Abul
Kalam Azad (Bachchu Razakar) has also been sentenced to death, but remains
untraceable in Pakistan.

Evictions

This is only part of the background against which one needs to understand
these evictions.  The other part involves the bureaucratic upper middle-class
mindset which viewed these slums as eyesores, as did Sanjay Gandhi in Delhi
during Indira Gandhi's emergency of 1976.

However, by documenting at least the extent of the evictions, this book does
make a solid case for a more principled approach to such evictions.

Excerpts

After listening to the various sides to the issue, the fact-finding team
from COHRE concluded that there was no justification for the brutal forced
eviction of over 100,000 people in the past year. The forced evictions
caused hardships for very poor urban dwellers, and impoverished them
further.

Social improvement

Despite its serious problems, Bangladesh is noted for its remarkable
improvement in key social indicators such as birth rates, life expectancy,
girl’s school enrolment, and child immunisation which have improved
remarkably while poverty has been declining. Its non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) are among the most active in the world, providing
microcredit and social mobilization to some 8 million poor, mostlywomen. The
annual per capita income is US $350.

Dhaka

Prior to December 1971, Bangladesh was part of Pakistan, and known as East
Pakistan. Dhaka’s overall rate of urbanization in East Pakistan was low,
partly because much of the industrialization occurred in West Pakistan. There
were slums in Dhaka, mainly along the railway lines. During the struggle for
liberation, the Pakistani army began demolishing slums by burning them,
ostensibly because these slums harboured terrorists and anti-social elements.

From 1971 onwards, the rate of urbanization was exceptionally high. Dhaka
grew at a rate of 9 per cent per annum. From a city of 500,000 it grew to its
current population of over 9,000,000.

In January 1975, the first large-scale forced evictions occurred in
Dhaka. About 200,000 lowincome people were evicted. Only 75,000 people were
re-located to three distant sites in Mirpur.  However, many NGOs assisted the
people.

Today Kamlapur is a bustling rail and bus center, and the slums of Mirpur
are attracting evictions No amenities were provided.

[PM: Sheikh Mujibur Rahman 12 January 1972 - Jan 1975; killed August 1975]



The elegant kamalApur railway station in Dhaka, opened 1969.
Land surrounding nearby railway tracks were often occupied by
migrants, and saw many eviction drives in the 1970s and 80s.
[image from dec 2013]


Between 1989 and 1998 there were twenty demolitions carried out in the
following places: Taltola Sweeper Colony, Gulshan 1, Agargaon, Shikdir Basti,
Nikhet, (twice) Bakshi Bazar, (twice), Baridhara, Kamalpur, Mirpur, (thrice)
Pollobi, Agargaon, (thrice) Kallyanpur, South Shahjanpur (thrice), Azimpur,
Panthopoth, Karwan Bazar, and (thrice) Bashantek. During this period over
100,000 people were made homeless by the Government. The squatters filed
petitions in the court and were given stay orders. However, after returning
to their place and rebuilding their houses the authorities evicted them
again. In some cases, after a year or two some settlements were evicted twice
or thrice.

PM: [Khaleda Zia : 20 March 1991 - 30 March 1996]

In 1990, the Government went on a squatter clearance drive and evicted people
from their homes in Kamalapur, Mohammedpur, and Moghbazzar, amongst
others. Over 20,000 homes were destroyed leaving nearly a hundred thousand
people homeless.

In 1999 - 2000, about 100,000 people were evicted in Dhaka. Ain-o-Salish
Kendro and Coalition for the Urban Poor (an NGO working in squatter
settlements) carefully documented these forced evictions in Slum Evictions in
Dhaka 1999-2000.22 The fact-finding team met with numerous people, including
Ministers for Housing and Land, and all said that the forced evictions were
initiated by the Home Minister and sanctioned by the Prime Minister. The
reason given for the large-scale forced evictionswas to curb terrorism.

[Sheikh Hasina : PM from 23 June 1996 to 15 July 2001]

According to those evicted and NGOs, the forced evictions were conducted in a
war-like fashion, with a large number of armed police as well as police in
riot gear deployed alongside demolition crews. Often no written notices were
given, only oral notices were given through loudspeakers a day earlier,
usually in the evening. A typical case would be that an announcement would be
made through loudspeakers one evening informing the community that they would
have to move their belongings and house by 7:30 am the next morning, if they
didn’t it would all be destroyed. Any requests for clarifications were met
with threats of beating or incarceration. Early the next morning at 7:00 am
the settlement would be surrounded by police and the demolition crew, who
came with bulldozers.  Once again announcements would be made to gather all
belongings and vacate their homes. Usually the men and women would try to
plead with the police. The community was met with threats, and at times the
police beat up the men and women.

"We didn’t stand a chance." Evictions at Kamlapur

The three settlements of Balmat Basti, Railway Barrack and TT Para are in
Kamlapur and each had a population of about 400,350 and 1,000 families
respectively or a total of 1,750 families or approximately 9,000 people. Most
people lived in the area for about four years, some even longer. The people
worked as motor and cycle rickshaw drivers, construction and garment factory
workers, vendors and other daily wage earners. Some rented their place for
between 500-800 Taka a month. Most lived in their house having spent about
5,000 Taka to build. The average family size was 6-7 persons. The average
family income was about 80-120 Taka per day.

On the evening of Sunday 8 August 1999, the people in the settlements got
oral notices through loudspeakers informing them to clear the area by
removing their house and belongings as the following day bulldozers are
coming to clear the land.

The following morning at around 7:00 am the police arrived and asked the
people to get out of their houses. The people pleaded with the police and
while they were doing this, bulldozers came and started destroying people’s
houses. There were over 1,000 police and a demolition crew numbering
approximately 300. The people quickly scrambled to collect whatever they
could and save themselves.

Most people lost their houses. The Home Minister had ordered the demolition
and promised to resettle the people but nothing has happened. He promised to
resettle them in Kalapani, Mirpur. Kalapani is very far and commuting costs
50 Tk per day. This would mean most of their earning would be spent on
transportation. In the absence of any alternatives or compensation they have
rebuilt their shacks in nearby places, some have rented in nearby low-income
settlements, and some have moved in with their relatives nearby.  Their
places of work are in the surrounding area.

Currently the land is contracted to railway staff to grow vegetables.

Send your jottings to Book Excerptise

to contribute some excerpts from your favourite book to book excerptise. send us a plain text file with page-numbered extracts from your favourite book. You can preface your extracts with a short review.
email to (bookexcerptise [at] gmail [dot] com).