Fifty-four years is enough

Bolte kyuñ nah?? mire haq meñ - ?ble pa? ga.e zab?n meñ ky?

Why do you not speak in my favour - have blisters formed upon your tongue? - Jaun Elia

 

For over fifteen years I have worked to highlight the plight of the abandoned Pakistanis of Bangladesh, often through my own writings. In that time I have encountered patient editors and those who chose not to respond at all, rude readers and others who remained thoughtful, and above all a ruling class that has remained consistently silent.

I have written before about the silence of our screens and the muteness of much of the media. Only recently has there been a faint shift, when a few journalists finally found the courage to report from the 4x4 camps where these communities still "live". But that is as far as it has gone.

At a time when even the mention of a martyred soldier can attract toxic commentary on social media, questions about loyalty and the obligations of the state feel more urgent than ever.

I write again today not because I believe this time will be different, but because the country around me has changed in ways that make this silence impossible to justify.

Pakistan is fighting on several fronts that are costing us blood and credibility. On the Afghan frontier, our soldiers are martyred in attacks launched from sanctuaries across a border we cannot freely cross. In Balochistan's Musakhail and Turbat, on the roads between them, workers are pulled from buses and shot. Their crime, their killers say, is their ethnicity and their loyalty to the state. Meanwhile, in a Middle East in crisis, Pakistan is trying to hold its position as a credible and principled actor before a watching world.

Many will say this is an old wound, a file that should have been closed decades ago. Why reopen a question rooted in the upheavals of 1971? My answer is simple. It is precisely because Pakistan faces these challenges that this issue cannot remain buried. The fate of the stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh is not a historical grievance preserved in amber. It is a live test of whether this state remembers those who once stood with it.

I have argued in my writings that Pakistan was not broken on 25 March 1971, the night of Operation Searchlight, when elements of the Pakistan Army launched their crackdown and Major Ziaur Rahman of the 8th East Bengal Regiment rebelled against his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Rashid Janjua, before later broadcasting the declaration of independence from Chittagong.

Pakistan, in my view, was politically broken two days earlier, on 23 March, Pakistan Resolution Day, when the flag of Bangladesh was raised in Dhaka and parallel parades were held in open defiance of the state. The 25th was the military response to a rupture that had already occurred. That distinction matters because it tells us who chose what, and when, before the conflict turned into full-scale war.

The East Pakistan Rifles was overwhelmingly Bengali in composition. When many of its soldiers defected and joined the Mukti Bahini, weapons were turned on colleagues who remained loyal and on the unarmed Bihari civilians around them. Although the genocide of Biharis in East Pakistan is rarely acknowledged internationally, the systematic targeting of Bihari civilians during 1971 remains a documented, if politically obscured, reality. These people were killed for their perceived loyalty to Pakistan. That history has largely disappeared from the global narrative of the war, and Pakistan's own silence has helped erase it.

And yet today the two states that emerged from that rupture play cricket together, sign trade agreements and celebrate cultural exchanges in the language of new beginnings. Press releases speak of maturity and healing.

In seventy camps across fourteen cities of Bangladesh, approximately 324,000 people – the ones Pakistan left behind when it surrendered in December 1971 and withdrew – are now into their fourth generation of waiting. A fifth generation is being born into the same camps today.

Nobody visits them. Not the ministers who fly to Dhaka for bilateral meetings, not the trade delegations who return with agreements and photographs, not the parliamentarians who speak so eloquently about Pakistan's place in the world.

Every separatist movement survives on a single core argument: that the state cannot be trusted by those who stand with it. For more than five decades the unresolved status of these communities has quietly sustained that argument.

We live in a country where certain disappearances become causes and the right suffering can fill television screens for weeks. I do not begrudge anyone their advocacy. I simply want to ask where that energy goes when the suffering belongs to people who are Urdu-speaking, pro-Pakistan and sitting in Bangladesh rather than somewhere that carries political currency. Our human rights community has largely chosen silence on this question. That silence is not neutral. It has a politics.

The demographic argument against repatriation has been repeated so often it has acquired the false dignity of fact. Even the highest estimates of full repatriation would represent barely 0.13 per cent of Pakistan's population of roughly 240 million. Pakistan has already repatriated around 170,000 stranded Pakistanis under earlier agreements, leaving roughly 300,000 still in Bangladesh. We absorbed between three and five million Afghan refugees over decades at enormous economic and security cost. The math has never been the problem. The will has never been there.

Pakistan owes these communities four things: 1) Repatriation for those who wish to return through a voluntary bilateral mechanism. 2) Recognition of their sacrifices, formal and state-level, because a country that cannot acknowledge who stood with it has lost its moral record. 3) Restoration of full civic standing for those who have built lives in Bangladesh. 4) Restorative justice property restitution and bilateral legal frameworks for what Enemy Property laws took without compensation or conscience.

Policy frameworks do not move states. Shame does. The cricket will continue. Trade will grow. And in seventy squalid camps, the fifth generation will be born into the same question their great-grandparents were left with. Will Pakistan finally answer them?