A midst hours spent talking with and interviewing Naushad sahib — a member of the Bihari community displaced following the 1971 war and presently residing in Orangi Town, Karachi — the spectacle of displacement and the waiting condition was perhaps most aptly described when he said, “Intizar hai hi buri cheez [Waiting in itself is a terrible thing].”

For him, it was waiting for a childhood lost in conflict, waiting to return to his first home in Rehmatnagar in then East Pakistan, waiting in jail, waiting for reunification with family, waiting in transit camps, waiting for clearance, waiting for a homeland.

While the wait now belongs in his past, in his stories, just the act of having to wait for his story to be documented by someone accidentally stumbling across his house, is also part of a gruesome wait in history — a wait that is oppressive and often accompanies many stories to their graves.

Naushad sahib’s story of waiting is one of many that can elucidate on the realities of waiting in exile. It is a way of knowing and thinking about the waiting that accompanies the process of creating borders in a post-Partition order, via displacement and exile.

Within the context of the 1971 ‘Bangladesh Liberation War’ emerged new borders, sovereign states, identities, citizens, and their antithetical — the exiled. The exilic condition has consumed lives, families and identities for certain South Asian diasporas and communities, including Bihari and Bengali communities across Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.

The Bihari community has repeatedly found itself in search of acceptance, be it following the Partition in 1947, after the 1971 war, or in their current status in Pakistan. With many of them still confined to ghettos, what can their plight tell us about how we imagine nationhood and inclusion?

Exile for some communities sticks like a feeling, a past, a long wait, a memory and an experience oft-ignored in our texts and curated memories.

BORDERING LIVES: 1947-1971

In the events leading to the 1971 war and its aftermath, approximately 10 million individuals migrated to India, while others, a figure that currently evades historians, sought refuge in Pakistan, Nepal and Myanmar, or were internally displaced within what became Bangladesh.

Several spaces materialised or expanded across Bangladesh and Pakistan, often marked as ghettos, slums and camps for migrants from the 1971 partition and its consequent years. These include 116 existing refugee camps in Bangladesh, such as the Geneva Camp, the Murapara Camp and the Kurmitola Bihari Camp in Dhaka, and massive townships and colonies in Karachi, such as Orangi Town, Korangi Town, Musa Colony, Machhar Colony and Chittagong Colony.

The history of the 1971 war has to be critically approached from the perspective of migrants and refugee collectives, allowing us to record the histories of displacement and border-making. This can help us understand how bordering and re-bordering has implications for the ones that actually inhabit the lands circumscribed by borders. It is important to understand that borders are not erected overnight and in distant lands with barbed wires and security forces. Borders penetrate towns, cultures, families and real lives.

The story of Naushad sahib, a Bihari born in Rehmatnagar, District Parbatipur in erstwhile East Pakistan, is one like that, cutting across 1947, 1971 and the eastern and western boundaries of the Radcliffe Line.

As a Bihari, he traces his family’s history to the 1946 Bihar riots and the 1947 Partition, wherein his family first encountered violence and migration and resettled in East Bengal. On the eve of the 1947 Partition, communal rioting in 1946 across Bihar led to many of its residents being displaced, moving to the safer and neighbouring lands in East Bengal.

The trickle of migrants and refugees continued till after the 1947 Partition, as these Muslim communities were advised by the All-India Muslim League and its leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, to migrate to Pakistan — which then included the Eastern wing of Bengal and Sylhet — a homeland for the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent.

However, a second partition of the South Asian Subcontinent in 1971 led to his having to leave a homeland again in search of ‘Pakistan’ — a homeland generations in his family have been striving towards.

The violent events preceding the 1971 war in East Pakistan prompted many individuals to move across borders, as they sought refuge from the volatile landscape of the province. Large-scale militarised operations and militant violence targeting particular ethnic and racial groups triggered massive waves of migrations that seeped across South Asia.

When asked about the time before the creation of Bangladesh, Naushad sahib describes the time during and beyond March 1971 as, “Whether day or night, sometimes there was firing here, sometimes there was firing there.”

As violence spread across East Pakistan and eventually led to the creation of Bangladesh on 16 December 1971, approximately 10 million people migrated and took refuge in India, around 16 million were internally displaced in East Pakistan ie Bangladesh, and 500,000 people were left stranded across the Subcontinent.

Amongst the internally displaced was also Naushad sahib’s family, who were forced to flee their hometown in search of refuge and protection. Describing the scene, he states: “The food was cooked, but no one was eating, meaning there was such chaos, like doomsday, so we left in such a state.”

NEITHER HERE NOR THERE

Following the ‘Fall of Dhaka’, the non-Bengalis in Bangladesh were subjected to ‘denationalisation’ by the Government of Pakistan, as the government did not allow non-Bengalis to enter into Pakistan.

Pakistan’s renunciation of non-Bengalis as Pakistani citizens was also motivated by its understanding of non-Bengalis as mere refugees and aliens, conceiving their unauthorised movement into Pakistan as a breach of its borders and sovereignty. Additionally, the People’s Republic of Bangladesh’s failure to recognise them as citizens of Bangladesh led to their de facto status as stateless individuals.

The trilateral Delhi Agreement (1973-1974) attempted to aid the repatriation processes, and organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the Stranded Pakistanis General Repatriation Committee (SPGRC) pushed for the resettlement of refugees across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

However, the states’ aporetic dialogues over the refugee crisis of 1971 have been marked by their anxious sovereignties. The three countries persistently downplayed and denied the aforementioned figures in their efforts to deny the large influx of refugees and the porosity of the borders, as that implied a border breach for them.

The leadership in Pakistan then created a discourse and rhetoric that ungraciously sidelined non-Bengalis, specifically the ethnic Bihari community. The overall national dialogue and political activities were oriented around an unfailing unacceptance of non-Bengalis from East Pakistan in erstwhile West Pakistan.

This was palpable in the criteria set by the Government of Pakistan for their clearance in the Delhi Agreement (1974) as well, as seen in a clause of the agreement: “In respect of non-Bangalees [sic] in Bangladesh, the Pakistan side stated that the Government of Pakistan had already issued clearances for movement to Pakistan in favour of those non-Bangalees [sic] who were either domiciled in former West Pakistan, were employees of the Central Government and their families, or were members of the divided families, irrespective of their original domicile.”

The total number of non-Bengalis repatriated, which included ethnic communities such as Biharis and other non-Bengalis originating from the United Provinces etc, came down to 144,800, while more than 258,000 people still awaited repatriation to Pakistan from Bangladesh.

In the newly independent Bangladesh, the ICRC established transit camps for people awaiting repatriation and seeking protection in the aftermath of the war. Amongst the non-Bengalis that inhabited the camps were people belonging to the ethnic Bihari community and some belonged to Urdu-speaking communities that originated from the erstwhile United Provinces of British India.

By 1972, around a million Biharis had relocated to camps with hopes of finding shelter and security, with many wanting to repatriate to the now-truncated Pakistan or to return to their homes in Bangladesh.

THE PROCESS OF DENATIONALISATION

In the wake of the new sovereign power succeeding the previous Government of Pakistan and the creation of an independent Bangladesh, the status of Biharis became a subject of controversy and political debates. With Pakistan’s continuous denationalisation and willingness to only accept a certain number of Biharis and not the entirety of the 95 percent existing Biharis wanting to repatriate to their homeland of Pakistan, Bangladesh was their only recourse.

The President’s Order No. 149 of 1972, promulgated by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the first president of Bangladesh and leader of the Awami League — the party spearheading Bangladesh’s liberation — provided an opportunity for accruing Bangladeshi citizenship through a provisional order called The Bangladesh Citizenship Temporary Provisions Order, 1972.

It stated the following: “Notwithstanding anything contained in Article 2 or in any other law for the time being in force, a person shall not, except as provided in clause (2), qualify himself to be a citizen of Bangladesh if he — (i) owes, affirms or acknowledges, expressly or by conduct, allegiance to a foreign state, or (ii) is notified under the proviso to Article 2A.”

Consequently, the Bihari community overwhelmingly desired to resettle in the former western wing. They pledged their allegiance to the state of Pakistan and hoped for an eventual repatriation to their homeland, one which they had sacrificed for for the second time since 1947. This pledging of allegiance meant their denial of Bangladeshi citizenship.

Naushad sahib was one of those Biharis, as a prisoner of war, who did not have access to citizenship as he spent time in prison. For him, living in a prison was the safest place in a post-war South Asia. The idea of living in an actual country only occurred to him when he was finally released from jail and met his mother, after which he promised himself that he would go to Pakistan.

Even later, as he worked and waited for clearance to migrate to Pakistan, the erstwhile ‘western wing’, he refused Bangladeshi citizenship as he remained committed to the long cross-generational and arduous wait to go to ‘Pakistan’ since the eve of the 1947 Partition. He had decided that “Ya tau main Pakistan jaunga, ya qabristan [Either I’ll go to Pakistan or the graveyard].”

However, even the idea of opting for naturalisation in Bangladesh was not as simple, since Biharis had been already marked out as ‘traitors’ and considered to have colluded with the central government during the months-long war.

Moreover, the academic Sumit Sen notes in the paper ‘Stateless Refugees and the Right to Return: The Bihari Refugees of South Asia — Part 2’ that the government of Bangladesh’s additional measures seemed to contradict the message in the Order above with the forceful acquisition of private properties, businesses and bank accounts of Bihari residents.

While the Bengali elites from the Awami League, militants from the Mukti Bahini, and civilians took over ‘abandoned’ properties, the government only further reinforced and supported the illegal occupation of properties with the provisions of legal devices.

The Abandoned Property (Control, Management and Disposal) Order, 1972 and the President’s Order No. 16 of 1972 were used to justify the forceful occupation of private properties, including homes and industries that were temporarily left unoccupied by Biharis during the persecution they were subjected to in 1971 and further. Naushad sahib’s family home had itself been later occupied by Bengalis, and his desire to live in or revisit that house remains unfulfilled. The order also disregarded the reality of violence that industrial zones and areas had succumbed to during the war, with a significant number of attacks on Biharis at mills.

Such legislation was hardly a surprise to the post-Partition order of migration and rehabilitation in South Asia, with such acts only being a progeny of the earlier acts, such as the Evacuee Property Ordinance, the Enemy Property Act and Ordinance adopted by India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition.

With the use of legislation by Bangladesh, the denationalisation of the Biharis, and the ceasing of ICRC operations by 1975, the Bihari community was left at the mercy of international laws and actions. While the international refugee protection regime defined them as stateless refugees in need of protection measures by the hosting country and the international community, Bangladesh’s decision to not adhere to those protective mechanisms was not met with any accountability.

It was only after the ruling of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh in 2008 that non-Bengalis and Biharis born after the creation of Bangladesh, or those who were minors then, could qualify for citizenship and voting rights.

However, the continued existence of transit camps keeps one in the folds of exile. In them, despite legal mechanisms, spatial and urban politics reinforces the waiting condition for many Biharis in Bangladesh.

IN SEARCH OF A HOMELAND

Naushad sahib recalls the relief he and his family had felt, after years of waiting, upon finally seeing his name on the board in 1974 for having attained clearance to travel and move to Pakistan. However, the wait hadn’t ended. Upon entry into the transit camp at Saidpur, he remembers hearing about the last two flights leaving for Pakistan until the operation ceased.

Naushad sahib, like many non-Bengalis, spent five years in the transit camp, perpetually waiting and attempting to live in a space and time marked by exile and liminality. He would later marry, witness the birth of his first son, and spend many Eids in the same Saidpur transit camp.

Talking about the camp, he recalls being in an eight-by-10-feet room, with a cloth partition placed in between his own family of nine and another family comprising four members. According to him, “The room was just like this […] there was a partition in the middle, with one family here and another family there […] they cooked their roti on their side, and we cooked our roti on our side.”

Further elaborating on the camp, he says the following: “A camp is a camp. It was a big two-storeyed technical college building. We made our tents using chadars or tin, like people make over here also by draping a chadar on the top and at the sides. Within the boundary of the technical college, four police officers were present day and night. Two of them stood right at the entrance, and the others kept an eye on things from the corners, to ensure that there were no issues.”

It would take almost half a decade more for Naushad and his family to finally receive their tickets, a total of 300 Pakistani Rupees and get on board to finally go to Pakistan, where they lived in Muzaffargarh for two years until relocating to Lahore. His family would relocate to Orangi, Karachi, while he would continue to live in Lahore for work.

His family was part of the approximately 15,000 Biharis to have been repatriated until 1982, and witnessed the ceasing of the repatriation operations again. Between 1977 and 1979, nearly 9,900 Biharis were repatriated to Pakistan, followed by another 4,800 Biharis in 1982. Finally, in 1993, 53 Bihari families were accepted by Pakistan before protests stopped the process.

During this time, owing to economic opportunities and low-priced undeveloped land, many immigrant populations, including Bihari families, ended up settling in Orangi. Adding to these reasons, for Biharis specifically, the biradari [kinship] system also encouraged them to relocate to Orangi, since a large majority of them had settled there in an attempt to restart their lives, and it promised a sense of community.

However, Karachi’s landscape was also succumbing to tensions between ethnic groups such as Mohajirs, Pakhtuns and Biharis, serving as a prelude for later ethnic conflicts and riots in the 1980s and 1990s. These years were marked by incidents such as the Qasba-Aligarh Colony Massacre of December 1986, which particularly targeted Biharis of Orangi Town, or the ethnic violence that would become embedded in the later decade, engulfing Orangi and its residents in fear of the bori-band laash [body stuffed into gunny sacks].

When talking about this period, Naushad sahib recounts the anxiety that engulfed him for years as his family resided in Orangi whilst he lived separately in Lahore due to his job with the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda). Upon asking him about this separation, he shakes his head and repeatedly mutters to himself as to how he had warned his family about relocating to Orangi in the late 1990s. It would take many additional years until he could finally reunite with his family, when he also moved to Orangi in 2016.

BORDERS AND BELONGING

When asked about having to leave his homeland and possessions, Naushad sahib describes the phenomenon of migrating from Rehmatnagar to Saidpur to Orangi in the following words: “The first blow to the head, even if it is mild, feels as if it is very intense. The second blow to the head, even if it feels intense, you’d say the pain feels comparatively mild. When the third blow strikes the head, strong as it may be, you’d say you don’t even know what it is.”

Such histories and stories are a much-needed reminder and point of reflection for how we construct and constitute borders, visible and otherwise. It is a testament to the failures and shortcomings of political imaginations in South Asia. As South Asian states continue to confront protracted refugee crises and urban development and planning that continues to build and sustain silos, ethnic enclaves, ghettos, slums and camps, history can help us revisit the way we imagine cities and living with communities marked and defined as refugees, stateless, aliens, etc.

They remind us that borders and fences constructed in seemingly faraway lands can pierce the realities and fabrics of our lives and the ontology and definitions of people and communities. They remind us of the urgent need to relinquish the notion of exile and estrangement and to think of belonging as the task of our political imaginations.

The contemporary and present landscape of Pakistan and the wider globe begs us to revisit the histories of the present. It is a present that reeks of exclusion, where the other, alien, refugee, is inscribed upon to carve out borders — in search of a belonging in exclusion and estrangement.

By scrutinising our own lived realities and stories, such as Naushad sahib’s, the task of inclusion requires us to softly confront and understand the ‘other’ we have built in our cities, media and lived realities. This is globally and locally proving to be an exigency of our time.

The writer is a graduate student of history at the Arizona State University, US. She can be reached at harmainahmer@gmail.com and hahmer@asu.edu

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 28th, 2024

Header image: Biharis pictured at the Mohammadpur refugee camp in Dhaka, Bangladesh on December 22, 1971: around 16 million people were internally displaced in Bangladesh following the events of the 1971 war | AP