Enemy Property List Of Bangladesh 2012 May 2026

He sat in silence for an hour. Then he took out a matchbox.

Farhad still carries his copy. Not as a weapon. As a witness. enemy property list of bangladesh 2012

Farhad's throat tightened. His great-grandfather had migrated in 1965—six years before Bangladesh even existed as a nation. Yet here, in 2012, the state still called him an enemy. He sat in silence for an hour

He was not supposed to be here. Officially, he was auditing land records for the Vested Property Act—what the common man still bitterly called the Enemy Property List . Unofficially, he was searching for a ghost: a two-story house in Mymensingh that once belonged to his great-grandfather, a Hindu merchant named Jogesh Chandra Dey, who fled to Kolkata during the 1965 war. Not as a weapon

Three weeks later, a truncated version of the list appeared in a German human rights report. The government called it "a conspiracy to destabilize the nation." The Ministry of Land denied any "enemy property" remained in state hands, pointing to the 2001 Vested Property Return Act, which had promised restitution. But the 2012 list proved otherwise: less than 5% of properties had ever been returned. The rest were still marked Enemy .