The memo announcing that the “stranded, abandoned, forgotten Pakistani Bihari” question was settled. That nobody really wants to return to Pakistan. That the passage of time has somehow converted an unresolved question of human rights into an inconvenient historical footnote. That, after fifty-five years, we should stop asking. Perhaps it was circulated among the people who matter: governments, diplomats, opinion-makers, the custodians of national memory. Perhaps it was discussed in drawing rooms and diplomatic corridors, amplified by media silences, and eventually accepted as common sense. But I did not get it.
I was in Islamabad, watching One Hundred Years of Solitude on Netflix, with autumn rain falling outside. Gabriel García Márquez had once again taken me to Macondo, where memory, violence and official denial become entangled, where the past refuses to remain past. I was enjoying the luxury of literature, the pleasure of a story beautifully told. And then, as happens with certain books and certain histories, the distance between fiction and life disappeared. I thought of Dhaka. Of Geneva Camp. Of voices I have carried for decades.
Khalid Hussain, officially the first Bihari Bangladeshi, was born in 1981 in Dhaka’s Geneva Camp. Today he is a prominent Bangladeshi human rights lawyer and the founder of the Council of Minorities. He was among the activists who helped challenge the statelessness imposed on the Urdu-speaking Bihari community, a struggle that culminated in the landmark 2008 court ruling recognising their right to Bangladeshi citizenship. I recently interviewed him for my YouTube channel, Kafe Kaam, as I once did Mohammad Hasan, another Urdu-speaking man from the camps whose journey to citizenship also involved the courts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY1SctMNIrI
Hasan, originally from Uttar Pradesh, was born in the 1980s and pushed into the camps as a young child. Both are now established lawyers. These were not distant encounters with a historical subject. I listened to men who had lived the consequences of a history they had not chosen. Khalid’s story is extraordinary, but I do not want to turn it into a neat tale of individual triumph. His achievements do not absolve the structures that made his struggle necessary. Nor does citizenship automatically end social exclusion, discrimination or the deprivation associated with camp life. Their lives have taken them far beyond the places in which they grew up, but their memories hold a chapter that no professional achievement can erase.
While recalling my fifteen-plus years of solo struggle to build empathy for this community, and how much I suffered while creating a digital archive of my subaltern community (I do not claim it is the first, but it is definitely unfunded and unsupported by any individual or institution)I remember the many voices I have heard: shaken, trembling, malnourished, sleepless people, my people, we the subalterns, saying: “Hum tou Bangladeshi hain. Yehi hamara mulk hai, watan hai, magar Pakistan ne chhor diya.”We are Bangladeshis. This is our country, our homeland, but Pakistan abandoned us. I have paraphrased the ache, but I cannot forget its meaning.
Outside, the rain continued. I could walk through it and let nobody see my tears. But how does one unsee another person’s tears? How does one unhear a voice once it has entered one’s conscience? For years I have been writing about double marginalisation, structural silencing and much more in relation to Bihari history, repatriation and the unfinished business of 1971. I have repeatedly argued that repatriation to Pakistan is a moral, legal, political and technical right; that provincial autonomy should not destroy a patriot’s claim to citizenship; and that such a claim deserves serious consideration, not dismissal through a convenient public narrative and complex legal arguments.
I have also argued that those who wish to remain in Bangladesh must be afforded equal rights and a secure future, with citizenship claims and documentary proof considered fairly. These positions are not contradictory. They recognise that a community is not a single person with a single desire. People have different circumstances, attachments, fears and aspirations. Justice must make room for those differences.Yet public discussion repeatedly returns to a familiar assertion: nobody wants to go back.
Who has established this? Whose voices have been heard? Who has been asked, under what conditions, and with what assurance that an answer will lead to a meaningful choice? And why should the absence of a successful political outcome be treated as proof that the underlying claim lacks merit? Lawyers sometimes win cases because of a combination of factors: the evidence available, the rules of procedure, the quality of representation, the interpretation of law and the institutional circumstances in which a case is heard. Winning does not automatically make a lawyer right about everything, and losing does not automatically make the opposing claim unjust.
If it is not contempt, allow me to write that court decisions are most often merely written, and justice is seldom served. Why do we find this distinction so difficult to apply to the Biharis? A political position can prevail without resolving the moral question beneath it. A diplomatic pause can become a permanent arrangement. A media narrative can acquire the appearance of truth simply because competing accounts are rarely allowed equal space. I am not suggesting that every individual in the “camps” of Bangladesh wants repatriation, or that every legal and practical question has an easy answer. I am asking why these claims so rarely receive the sustained, humane scrutiny they deserve. Why should demographic anxieties, nationalistic sentiment, inherited prejudice and calculations of political convenience be allowed to outweigh the human beings at the centre of this history?
The silence is structural, and in my eyes, as an advocate of this cause, it is criminal too. It is not simply a matter of somebody refusing to publish an article or invite a speaker.
It operates when a community is discussed but its members are not heard; when a population is reduced to a diplomatic problem; when its political loyalties are remembered but its subsequent abandonment is treated as an awkward complication; when the absence of visibility is mistaken for the absence of a claim. It operates when the media blackout becomes so ordinary that we stop noticing it, and when the vocabulary of national security and demographic anxiety makes compassion appear naïve. It operates when people who speak for a community are expected to demonstrate their usefulness to powerful constituencies before their testimony is considered credible. And it operates when those who have influence choose the safety of silence.
I have often wondered what might have happened had influential people within our own community, including Fatmi Sahib, been able to rise above competing interests and use their standing more decisively for this cause. I have wondered the same about successive versions of the MQM and other political actors who could, in my view, have done considerably more. These are uncomfortable questions, but they belong to us. A community’s abandonment cannot be explained entirely through the failures of others; we must also examine the limits of our own leadership and the opportunities we failed to use.
The burden of that disappointment, though, must not be transferred to ordinary people who have already paid so heavy a price. Hasan and Khalid told me about an opportunity, created through the foresight and goodwill of a few people, to attend a Bengali-medium school outside the camp. It was a chance at education and a possible bridge into the society around them. But entry into that classroom did not mean entry into acceptance. Their Bengali classmates bullied them at first, seeing them as traitors and opponents of the liberation struggle. Imagine being a child whose identity has already been decided by history before you have had the chance to understand it for yourself. And then there was the national anthem.
They could hear Amar Shonar Bangla, the song of the country in which they were born, but they could not sing it. I have returned to that moment repeatedly. What does it mean to grow up in a country whose national anthem you cannot sing, not because you do not wish to belong, but because the language of belonging has not been made available to you? And what does it mean to carry the memory of another anthem, Pak Sarzameen, associated with a country that once represented your political hopes but later failed to bring you home?
I wish Pakistan could understand the journey between these two songs, and the human cost borne by Urdu-speaking, pro-Pakistan Biharis in the aftermath of 1971. This is not an invitation to rank historical suffering or to deny the pain of pro-liberation Bangladeshis. It is a plea to recognise that the consequences of war do not always end when the flags change and the new borders become internationally accepted.
Reconciliation between Pakistan and Bangladesh is welcome. Friendship is welcome. Renewed diplomatic engagement is welcome. But friendship cannot require the selective editing of memory, and it cannot be built on the assumption that a community’s unwelcome history will disappear if sufficiently few people mention it. On 16 December 2026, fifty-five years will have passed since 16 December 1971: 20,089 days. As I write, the countdown has begun. I know what such arithmetic can do. Years sound abstract. Days suggest waiting. Generations suggest lives lived under conditions their parents might have believed temporary.
This is not a countdown to a ceremonial anniversary. It leads to another occasion on which we might remember the war, the dead, the liberation, the political decisions and the competing national narratives, while still failing to ask what justice requires of the living. I am tired of making this argument, but I am not persuaded that I should stop. I am tired of explaining that the demand for repatriation is not hostility towards Bangladesh. I am equally tired of insisting that those who wish to stay in Bangladesh must not be condemned to unequal rights or permanent uncertainty. And I am tired of the idea that one must choose between these claims to be considered reasonable.
Perhaps this is what it means to speak from the subaltern position: to keep speaking even when the terms of public conversation have already decided which voices are relevant. The difficulty is not always a lack of words, evidence or argument. Sometimes the listener has already decided what can be heard. And so I return to the rain. In Macondo, rain can become an event so prolonged that people must learn to live around it. In Islamabad, autumn rain is a pleasure, a mood, a reason to pause. But the rain I associate with the Bihari experience is more than atmospheric. It is the accumulated weight of memory, denial, displacement and waiting.
I can turn off the television. I can close a book. I can leave my desk and walk in the rain until my tears are no longer visible. What I cannot do is make myself forget Hasan and Khalid, or the voices from Geneva Camp, or the generations whose lives have unfolded in the shadow of a political problem that other people have repeatedly declared too difficult to resolve. I did not get the memo. And even if it was sent, I would not have accepted its terms. Fifty-five years after 1971, the question is whether either country can imagine a future in which inconvenient people are still entitled to justice, whatever their place in the national stories Pakistan and Bangladesh tell about themselves.
It is still raining.