For August, I had one plan. Write a birthday message for my beloved Pakistan. Keep it light, the way you would write to someone you love even when they have given you cause enough to stop. My researcher brain would not leave it alone. Seventy-nine years of what, it asked. Existence? Entitlement, maybe. Apathy, Resilience, or something we still insist on calling a miracle? If you are going to wish it a birthday, at least wish it the right one.
So I started again.
West Pakistan turns 79 this August — for, technically, Quaid-e-Azam's Pakistan, the union of two wings, "ceased to exist" in 1971. What we call "Pakistan" today is West Pakistan, wearing the whole name. I had barely put the sentence down when the brain of the heart interrupted. Not a figure of speech, neuroscientists have mapped an actual intrinsic nervous system inside the heart, some 40,000 neurons capable of learning and remembering on their own, independent of the brain lodged in the skull. Mine asked: how could you not mention your abandoned community? You, of all people. On this of all anniversaries.
I have written about this community — my community — before, and I make no apology for returning to it and facing down my own disquiet. We commemorate 1947 as birth and 1971 as loss, compressed into a single date — December 16th, the day of surrender in Dhaka. But Pakistan, as an idea a pro-Pakistan Bihari mother in East Pakistan believed in and bled for, did not die on December 16th. It died earlier, more quietly, on March 23rd, 1971, the day the country could not even celebrate itself. That was Pakistan Day, marking the 1940 Lahore Resolution. In West Pakistan, flags went up as usual. In East Pakistan, by credible historical accounts, the Pakistani flag flew only over the Governor's House, the President's House and the cantonments of Dhaka; everywhere else flew the flag of a country not yet born, beside black flags of mourning. The state, symbolically, had already become a palimpsest of itself in its own eastern wing before a shot was fired.
I still mourn the unacknowledged losses of a community that chose Pakistan, was punished by Bengali nationalism for that choice, and was then abandoned by the very state it had chosen. Roughly 300,000 (this space is not to argue over data variance) non-Bengali, Urdu-speaking people were left in the "camps" of the newly born Bangladesh. Under the 1974 Tripartite Agreement, Pakistan accepted responsibility for those who could clear an exacting verification bar — documentary proof against Pakistan's official records, complete family records establishing a pre-1971 connection, no legal objection from the Government of Bangladesh. Around 170,000 were repatriated between 1974 and 1992. Hundreds of thousands were not. Some 150,000 descendants still remain in ghettoised camps like Geneva Camp in Mohammadpur, Dhaka, and in at least 14 other cities and towns of Bangladesh, conditions international reporting keeps describing as severely overcrowded, with inadequate sanitation and scarce clean water.
Dhaka's courts moved before Islamabad's conscience did — in 2003, ten Geneva Camp residents were granted citizenship and voting rights; in 2008 that recognition widened to those born after 1971 or minors at independence, though unevenly and inconsistently applied even then. Pakistan's own acceptance of these citizens-who-never-were has been shallow by comparison, and that is the larger irony.
A community that paid the heaviest price for its patriotism, that once shouted "Pakistan Zindabad" in the streets of Dhaka, was denied the basic right to return to Pakistan. It now relies on NGOs for the barest essentials — health, hygiene, sanitation, education, livelihood, paralegal help just to get an ID card or a passport. They are compelled to celebrate Bangladesh's Victory Day and seek Bangladeshi passports, issued by a state whose founding story includes the burning of their homes, the looting of their belongings, the demise of their dignity, the slaughter of their families. They were not merely left stateless. They were made complicit, by necessity, in erasing their own history to acquire the elemental rights of citizenship somewhere, anywhere.
Consider, too, the lexicon each side has settled on to keep this community at arm's length. Bangladeshi nationalist memory relabelled them overnight from citizens of Pakistan into "collaborators" or razakars, a word that still functions, decades later, as a character certificate no court ruling fully erases. Pakistani memory hardly has a vocabulary for them at all — not refugees, not returnees, not diaspora, just an absence, mentioned, if at all, as an afterthought to 1971. Two nationalisms that harmonize on almost nothing about what 1971 was have found consensus on one thing: neither wants to fully claim "these people."
I was sitting with that sentence when the presser came on. At a security briefing on July 31st, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, DG ISPR, cited Article 5 of the Constitution — loyalty to the state and obedience to the law as a citizen's foremost duty, before any demand for rights. Then he added, with unusual candour for a serving officer, that Pakistan is unfortunately not yet a "hard state": one, he clarified, where the Constitution and law apply equally to everyone without elite privilege, where the armed forces don't run the country but merely uphold its legal framework. As a non-lawyer, but an advocate of human rights and anti-elitism, I started another round with myself.
Here is my deeper discomfort, the one I keep circling back to. Pakistan and Bangladesh, as states, are visibly reconciling. A Karachi–Dhaka air route is being revived after more than a decade. Defence engagement has expanded fast — army, navy and air force representatives exchanging visits, a Bangladeshi lady cadet passing out from PMA Kakul with a Commandant's medal, senior Bangladeshi officers visiting our National Defence University. Two states whose founding narratives directly contradict each other have found it possible to shake hands and call each other "brotherly."
If Pakistan can set aside the memory of Major Ziaur Rahman's rebellion and the killing of its own army officers and jawans in former East Pakistan; if it can today receive Begum Khaleda Zia and Tarique Rahman with diplomatic warmth; if it could embrace Sheikh Mujibur Rahman within two and a half years of the surrender — what exactly stops it from looking at its own citizens with the same grace? This space is too short to comment on the one-sided affection and attention a significant part of Pakistani academia and activism reserves for economic-migrant Bengalis in Karachi, and for Bengali nationalism itself — while offering almost nothing to its own cancelled kin.
I still mourn the unacknowledged losses of a community that chose Pakistan, was punished by Bengali nationalism for that choice, and was then abandoned by the very state it had chosen.
If Islamabad can reconcile with Dhaka, and Dhaka with Islamabad, why are the people who tried hardest to prevent that rupture still unreconciled with both? Why are those who wanted, more passionately than most, to keep Pakistan whole still living a liminal existence in 4x4, 7x7 "rooms," still stigmatised by a Bangladeshi nationalism that once branded them collaborators, still met with silence, not citizenship, by the Pakistani state they never stopped calling their own? States forgive each other's armies and governments with striking ease.
Remembering the ordinary people who paid for the quarrel is evidently much harder. Why does Pakistan's civil and military bureaucracy, so fluent today in the language of Article 5, loyalty and obligation, stay so obdurately incurious about a community whose loyalty was never once in doubt only its usefulness to anyone's current narrative?
There is a bitter legal irony sitting underneath all this, and I mean to say it outright. Article 5 binds "every citizen." The stranded Biharis were never, in law, citizens of Pakistan after 1971, the state that demanded their loyalty in 1971 disowned them the moment that loyalty was tested. Read strictly, Article 5 never obligated them at all. They kept faith with it anyway, more devotedly than many who actually held the citizenship denied to them. Pakistan reaches for Article 5 today to demand loyalty from citizens with grievances. It has never once reached for Article 5 to ask what recompense it owes the loyal people it refused to call its own.
I still meant to write a pleasant birthday message. I think I still have. I just cannot wish Pakistan a happy birthday without asking who it forgot to invite — a community that kept RSVPing "yes" for fifty-five years, to a country that stopped sending the invitation on the 23rd of March, 1971.
Maybe that is the birthday message. The kind that loves enough to keep interrupting itself. So, while celebrating the 14th of August 2026, might we also spare a moment of silence for these forgotten Pakistanis? The writer is an advocate for recognition of the ordeals and sacrifices, including genocide, endured by Pakistani Biharis in former East Pakistan, and a researcher and columnist working on statelessness and the stranded Bihari community in Bangladesh.