The High Court has paved the way for opposition leader Khaleda Zia to get kicked out of her house situated in Dhaka’s Cantonment. It doesn’t help her cause that the house she has occupied since 1981 was given to her as a political favor. Further, that she has run against the rules that govern property use in the cantonment probably doesn’t help her claim.
The house was given her by President Justice Abdus Sattar along with order parcels of land. Successive government had allowed the exchange to stay just as it was– perhaps for fear of voiding many such gifts across many party and ideological lines.
Nevertheless after the 2009 BDR mutiny, the sitting Awami League government asked that Begum Zia leave the premises so that the government could build apartments to house the families of the victims of the violence of that time. (Certainly one can read political motives into the allocated plot of land where the apartment complex is meant to be built.)
The government’s moves and the opposition leaders counter-moves now remain one more move: appeal. It is unlikely that the case will be decided in her favor, however. Quite apart from the electric charge of the BDR fiasco, the house is being used for purposes other than the given ones.
First, the house was supposed to be the home of the Deputy Army Chief of Staff. Furthermore, no civilian–and she must thank her stars, that Begum Zia remains, as yet, a civilian–can live in the Dhaka Cantonment. Finally, it has been alleged that she has engaged in political activity, an act forbidden by the allotment. Indeed it is a prohibition that, given the history of army interventions in the country’s politics, seems a prudent move.
Combined these charges justified the original request that Begum Zia vacate the premises. Moves and countermoves later, the charges remain. And given the complicity of the memory of the BDR massacre, popular sentiment might stand against Begum Zia’s privileges.
