On the morning of Pakistan Day, a young Bangladeshi journalist sent me a WhatsApp message. “Warm greetings on Pakistan National Day. Wishing peace, progress, and prosperity to the people of Pakistan.” I replied with a photograph: mishti doi from Emaan Dhaka Sweets in Islamabad, a Pakistan flag sticker on the container.
I added one line: “Thank you. To the people #peacewithempathy.” I have been thinking about that exchange since. A young man in Bangladesh, reaching across a history his country and mine have never fully resolved, to wish my country well on its national day. A woman in Islamabad is eating Bengali sweets and sticking a flag on the lid. Two people doing, privately and without ceremony, what fifty-four years of official policy has failed to do: recognising each other.
That is where I want to begin. Not with statistics or diplomacy, but with mishti doi and a flag sticker, because that small act contains the larger argument I have spent thirty years making. March in Pakistan is a month of ceremony: International Women’s Day, Pakistan Day, and then the twenty-fifth anniversary of Operation Searchlight in 1971 passes in silence. Not the silence of reflection, but of omission. Each year, the stranded Pakistanis of Bangladesh remain outside the frame of national memory.
I have spent three decades working in human rights, and fifteen years writing on this issue. I learned early that silence is never neutral. It protects something, and it costs someone. In this case, it has cost generations. The community I am writing about — the stranded Pakistanis, often called Biharis — are descendants of Urdu-speaking Muslims who migrated to East Pakistan after 1947, aligned with the Pakistani state, and were left in limbo after 1971.
They were not fully absorbed by Bangladesh. They were not repatriated by Pakistan. They were placed in squalid camps, where many remain to this day. Even their numbers are uncertain. Estimates range widely because no authoritative census has ever been conducted. That absence is not administrative; it is political. To count is to acknowledge. To acknowledge is to accept responsibility. For over fifty years, that first step has not been taken.
Among them are women who have lived entire lives in these conditions, raising families, enduring layered forms of exclusion, and remaining largely invisible to the very rights frameworks that claim universality.
The invisibility of stranded Pakistanis is not accidental. It is the result of choices made, repeated, and sustained over decades
To address this, I have developed what I call the 4R Framework — not as rhetoric, but as a practical sequence. Recognition comes first: a formal acknowledgement by Pakistan that the suffering of stranded Pakistanis is a legitimate national concern. Not an apology, not a legal admission, simply the act of naming what has long been ignored.
Repatriation follows: creating a pathway for those who wish to return to Pakistan, voluntarily and with dignity. No coercion, no erasure of lives built elsewhere — only the restoration of choice where none currently exists.
Restorative Justice applies to those who remain in Bangladesh: a shift away from adversarial narratives towards dignity, rights, and equitable treatment. Finally, Restoration of Dignity and Honour: an honest reckoning with the memory of those who defended Pakistan’s unity in 1971, civilian and military alike.
These are not abstract ideals. They are actionable steps and, crucially, the first of them, Recognition, requires no external approval. Pakistan can begin on its own.
There are precedents. Past negotiations between Pakistan and Bangladesh show that humanitarian arrangements are possible when political will exists. Bangladesh’s own legal decisions have opened partial pathways to citizenship. The foundation is there.
What is missing is follow-through. What has also been missing, painfully so, is sustained engagement from Pakistan’s human rights community. This absence is not accidental. It reflects entrenched narratives, institutional priorities, and the discomfort of complicating a settled version of history.
Over the years, I have spoken where I was invited, and often where I was not. Platforms have been limited. Conversations selective. This is not a grievance; it is part of the record. There is a term for it: marginalisation — a “minus-stakeholder approach”, where those closest to an issue are kept at the edges of its discussion.
That distance, however, has never been an obstacle to the work. If anything, it has made it necessary. The question of objectivity inevitably arises. My answer is simple: proximity is not the opposite of rigour. In many cases, it is the reason the work exists at all. What matters is not distance, but evidence — and I have invited scrutiny of mine at every stage.
The invisibility of stranded Pakistanis is not accidental. It is the result of choices made, repeated, and sustained over decades. Each year of inaction extends that choice into another generation. Pakistan today is engaged in important regional and international conversations. These are necessary directions.
However, credibility is shaped not only by what a country says beyond its borders, but by what it is willing to acknowledge within them. The question of the stranded Pakistanis remains an unfinished responsibility — one that sits unkindly alongside these aspirations.
March will pass again. There will be flags, speeches, and carefully curated memories, and once again, an entire community will remain unmentioned. Somewhere in Islamabad, there is a sweet shop that sells mishti doi. On Pakistan Day, I ate some, placed a flag sticker on the container, and sent a reply across a border shaped by history but not confined by it.
Small gestures do not resolve structural injustice, but they reveal something essential: recognition is always possible. The 4R Framework is, at its core, an attempt to scale that recognition into policy — not a demand for the impossible, only for a beginning. The case has long been made. What remains is whether we are finally prepared to see what we have chosen not to.