ABSTRACT
The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh lies on the country’s international borders with Myanmar and India. The present boundaries of the CHT were carved out of the British colonial empire in 1860. CHT is about 10% of the total land area of the country. Formerly, CHT was a single unified district, but administrative reorganization has led to its division into the three districts of Rangamati, Khagrachari and Bandarban. The CHT differs from the rest of Bangladesh, which is a flat terrain. Scattered along this mountain range, there live 11 different ethnic minority groups. Customary laws and practices within these communities vary, but they share commonalities in terms of their social and political organization. The hills are relatively rich in natural resources, particularly timber and bamboo. In recent years, parts of the region have been developed for pulpwood and rubber plantation by Bangladeshi companies and investors. The paper explores the changes of administrative system of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and how the government policies regarding natural resources specially land and forests have created and a situation of ‘dispossession’ for the ethnic minority groups in Bangladesh. The field material for this paper has been collected from Bandarban and Rangamati districts of CHT during June – December 2013 through participant observation. Focusing on the period after independence of Bangladesh in 1971 it becomes evident that government initiatives to improve the situation of the multi ethnic region through land and forest governance, improvement of the transport and communication systems, the offering of more schools and better of education, creating markets and job opportunities have created mutations in citizenship and the encroaching borders of the nation has over ridden some aspects of the ethnic boundaries. The paper entails that smaller ethnic groups are in a disadvantageous, unequal and marginalized position because of the Government’s differential treatment of populations through bio-politicial mechanism which have inserted different groups of people differently in the process of development. This situation sometime overlaps with pre-formed racial, gender hierarchies and creates fragmented citizenship for the people of the same country.
Keywords: Government policies, Dispossession, Marginalization, Chittagong hill tracts, Bangladesh.