Autumn of 1971: what US archive reveals about stranded Pakistanis

There is no mourning officially, not for the slaughter of a pro-Pakistan community.

Every December, a thin slice of English-language Pakistan performs the same liturgy about 1971, the same small drama: military failure, political mismanagement in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, India's intervention, the birth of Bangladesh. The stranded, stateless Bihari issue rarely gets a line.

How has this ritual remained so unchanged: the same debate restaged every year, on schedule, and mistaken for reckoning? Too little attention goes to how the crisis was shaped by outside powers, and how those calculations left a population's devastation largely unnoticed.

Today, I want to try the register of international relations: dispassionate, treaty-and-cable analysis, the great-power view from above. I have my reservations about that dispassion. As the old description of economists goes, they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. But feeling something about a fifty-five-year injustice is not a flaw, even in an argument built from declassified cables and treaty dates. Both can be true in the same piece.

The US State Department's own historical account of the period is instructive because it is unsentimental: 1971 appears not as moral drama but as a crisis Washington managed around its other priorities. After East Pakistanis overwhelmingly voted for the autonomy-seeking Awami League in the 1970 elections, Pakistan's government blocked it from governing and jailed its leader, Sheikh Mujib, a name the State Department's own retrospective leaves out.

From March 1971, Pro-Pakistan Biharis faced displacement and what I regard, personally and academically, as "genocide", as nationalist Bengali mobs attacked Urdu-speaking communities in Chittagong and Khulna – violence that the Pakistani government later cited to justify the military crackdown, but which the State Department's account omits. That crackdown and ensuing protests sent refugees into India, and by late autumn East Pakistani guerrillas, increasingly backed by India, fought Pakistani forces, until war opened fully on 3 December.

Washington's dilemma had little to do with East Pakistan itself. India had just signed a treaty with the Soviet Union; Pakistan had made itself indispensable to Washington by quietly enabling Nixon's opening to Beijing, and had recently resumed buying US arms after a channel shut since 1965.

Washington backed Islamabad initially, wary of another war and of a badly weakened Pakistan, even as international condemnation limited how far it would go.

What followed was calculated ambiguity, not commitment. The USS Enterprise (CVAN-65) moved from Vietnam toward the Bay of Bengal, signalling to Moscow and Beijing that American help was possible, but Washington stopped short of intervening, showing both the real limits of that commitment.

India's Soviet treaty helped prevent effective UN intervention and deterred China from opening a second front. Defeated on both fronts, Pakistan lost its eastern wing; Bangladesh joined the UN in 1974. The State Department's own retrospective says this damaged American standing while cementing India's regional dominance. That same crisis left an unresolved human question that neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh has treated with comparable seriousness since.

The Urdu-speaking population of former East Pakistan found itself on the losing side of a war it had mostly not chosen and was left without effective citizenship rights. Many were repatriated under the 1973 Delhi Agreement and later arrangements, while many more remained in camps for decades, until Bangladeshi court rulings culminating in the 2008 High Court judgment recognised citizenship rights for the Urdu-speaking community. That ruling addressed the legal question, not the economic or social one. The residents of Mohammadpur's Geneva Camp Dhaka and elsewhere continue to live in overcrowded conditions and informal work. While their citizenship remain recognised on paper for almost two decades, their circumstances have barely changed.

I have written at length elsewhere, in Urdu and English, through podcasts and study circles, on the contested data, the camps' inhumane conditions, stalled repatriations, the Foreign Office's posture, and policy paralysis; I will not relitigate that here.

In Pakistan, some Bihari-descended Karachi residents have managed to obtain national identity cards amid a nationalist hostility that has yet to be fully named.

Pakistan has hosted millions of Afghan refugees, while the problems of a patriotic people tied to its own history remain unresolved, a policy contrast, not a comparison of suffering, and no complaint against ordinary Afghans.

No single power orchestrated this outcome. In a crisis of superpower rivalry and diplomatic leverage, a specific, identifiable group was simply not the variable anyone was optimising for, what subaltern studies might call a people with no seat at its own negotiating table, then or now, explicable enough in the fog of 1971.

Is it harder to explain why, five decades on, the statelessness of the stranded Bihari population has failed to awaken national conscience, let alone secure repatriation for those who want it, or integration for those who do not?

I made this same argument once before, in this paper (31-07-26), from a gentler angle: somewhere between justice, diplomacy and ideology, humanity itself quietly slipped away; there has been no truth commission, no formal apology to our Bihari community; our dignity has not been restored, nor our own history understood. That failure is ours. It cannot be outsourced to Washington, or to anyone else.

Great-power calculations shaped the war. Our own apathy shaped what came after. Fifty-five years is a long time for a debt to sit unpaid, one we could still choose to pay. As Prof Gayatri Spivak argued, the subaltern cannot speak in ways that redress or restructure, and yet I dare to speak anyway.

Usually, I write about this paused tragedy with a "naive" attachment to the imkaan - the possibility of wapsi, return - for a community, guilty of loving Pakistan, still waiting, more than five decades on.

Silsilay torr gaya wo sabhi jaate

Warna itne to maraasim thay kay aate jaate