Book review: The great Bihari tragedy —by Khaled Ahmed

Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent

By Papiya Ghosh
Routledge 2007
Pp285; Price Rs 650 Indian
Available in bookstores in Pakistan

The writer of this review, during what he thought was his sympathetic account of the Bihari diaspora in a seminar, was once reprimanded by late Eqbal Ahmad for being ignorant. Today this remarkable book, written by late Papiya Ghosh as her last project, has proved Eqbal Ahmad right. We all need to know a lot more about the Bihari Muslim community than just as a group on the wrong side of the ethnic divide in Sindh.

Biharis were the first workers in a peasant India after iron ore was discovered in Bihar and the steel industry came up there together with the manufacturing headquarters of the railways. After 1947, the Bihari Muslims had to migrate to East Pakistan, a rural-agricultural region with an economy in the deficit and great public indebtedness. After 1971, they had to flee to West Pakistan, to Sindh, another deficit region with a downtrodden local population trying hard to graduate from farm workers under a tough feudal system to jobs in the cities.

The Muslim consciousness of ‘identity’ arose in the three provinces of UP, Bihar and Bombay. If in UP the Muslims were 14.2 percent of the population, in Bihar they were 10.3 percent. The focus shifted in the 1940s to the Muslim majority provinces of Punjab (55.2 percent) and Bengal (54.6 percent). When Pakistan loomed on the horizon, UP leader Hosain Imam thought the populations would stay put under the ‘hostage theory’: that the Hindus will not harm Muslims for fear that Hindus would be harmed in Pakistan (p.xxiii).

But migration actually happened, affecting 12 million people moving in opposite directions, suffering a million deaths in the process. In Bihar, communal riots claimed 50,000 thousand Muslims killed in October-November 1946. Biharis stayed put at first but then police searches into their houses began to look for arms and that triggered migration, transforming the Muslims of Bihar into the world’s most neglected and persecuted refugees. In February 1947, Jinnah went on record, as telling the Bihari refugees in Karachi that Pakistan became imperative because of the sufferings of the Muslims of Bihar (p.3).

It was the massacre of Bihar which prompted Jinnah to order immediate exchange of populations. But the call for exchange of populations would have been ignored by Biharis before the massacres of 1956. Violence pushed them out to East Pakistan, a land linguistically alien to them. Only the well-heeled were able to get to West Pakistan. Nearly 300,000 entered East Pakistan and were welcomed by the province’s leading politician, Suhrawardi. By 1951, 6.6 million refugees had moved into West Pakistan and nearly 800,000 into East Pakistan, out of whom 66 percent were from West Bengal and only 15 percent from Bihar.

East Pakistan was Muslim but its nationalism was language-based, which accounted for the assimilation of the West Bengali Muslims and relative non-assimilation of the Urdu-speaking Biharis. Stories of neglect of the wandering Biharis abounded in the East Pakistani press. Discrimination was strong but only those with resource could flee this new non-homeland. There was a steady trickle that fled across India into Sindh but it died off when India and Pakistan got into conflict with each other over Kashmir. In East Pakistan, Biharis became the inhabitants of hundreds of refugee camps that sprang up all across the province.

In West Pakistan, there were 100,623 refugee families without shelter in Karachi by the late fifties. The largest number was from UP and the 682 families from Bihar came only after Bombay and CP Muslims. Bihar Colony and Sher Shah Colony slums became the homes of those who had fled Bihar; but the language was not a barrier, except with Sindhis who lived mostly in the rural areas but deserved to graduate to the cities of Sindh. Like the Bengalis, Sindhis too conceived their nationalism in linguistic terms. In Sindh, the muhajir label never came off; in East Pakistan, only the Biharis suffered this plight.

Non-absorption into East Pakistan inclined Biharis to join the West Pakistani elite in opposing the Bengali reaction. When the Bengali worker protested against West Pakistani owners the Bihari workers did not join. In some cases they joined the anti-Bengali riots in Khulna, Narayanganj, Dhaka and Chittagong (p.23). When the autonomy movement began in East Pakistan, the Biharis did not join it but instead supported the Ayub regime. This happened after years of discrimination and forced remigration out of East Pakistan, at times back to Bihar and mostly to West Pakistan through indirect international routes. Attacks on their properties in East Pakistan became frequent.

In 1971, thousands of Biharis were killed in Chittagong, Jessore, Khulna, Mymensingh, Rangpur and Saidpur by the Bangladeshi nationalists much before the military action, although only a handful of Biharis had joined the militias like Al Shams raised by the Pakistani authorities. Seeing this, the Congress chief minister of Bihar got a resolution passed in the state assembly to repatriate all the Biharis of East Pakistan, but the central government disapproved of his initiative and removed him from the job. By 1973, all Biharis were huddled together in colonies and camps in a dozen towns where at times they had to go without food for weeks on end. Stragglers still managed to visit Bihar as a kind of relief from the hardships of Bangladesh.

Under the Simla and Delhi agreements of 1973 and 1974 Pakistan agreed to accept certain categories of Biharis in Bangladesh who declared themselves Pakistani citizens. Out of the total Bihari population in BD, 70 percent or 780,000 persons declared themselves Pakistanis. Out of them 534,792 applied for repatriation to Pakistan. Under the categories — state servants, divided families and ‘hardship cases’ — Pakistan accepted only 118,866. By 1979, Pakistan had repatriated 121,212 Biharis. Counting other modes of entry into Pakistan, 163,072 Biharis made it to Pakistan by 1982. The remaining Biharis in Bangladesh were 258,028 by the late 1980s and they were living in 66 camps (p.40).

One can say Pakistan ended up getting half the Biharis from Bangladesh and the leftover half was not accepted as Bangladeshi citizens and had to survive in Red Cross ‘Geneva camps’ where life was tough. Meanwhile in Pakistan, the target province Sindh was reacting with an intense anti-immigration politics, both internal and external, and the Biharis got caught up in that. A flip-flop of policy alternated between the Muslim League and the PPP at the centre, the former soft on the Biharis, the latter hard because of the Sindhi reaction. Unfortunately, Punjab, which could have absorbed the Bihari immigrants, was not as good at offering jobs as Karachi, and most Biharis supposed to be settled in Punjab invariably trickled down to Karachi.

Rabita Alam Islami, the charity set up by Saudi Arabia, took up the task of providing the money to move the Biharis to Pakistan. But as violence increased against the identity of ‘muhajir’ (migrant) in Sindh, Islamabad probably got Rabita to back off from the job. In 1986, Rabita announced it had $270 million for the Biharis but in fact it was money collected by the London-based Resettlement Trust run by Lord Ennals. This could have the moment everyone was waiting for but at this stage Pakistan backed off, saying it will deal only with Rabita (p.77). In 1988 Lord Ennals got General Zia to agree to taking 250,000 Biharis but he died that year and Zia’s successors didn’t respect the commitment. In 1993, when 323 Biharis landed in Sindh, 13 of them were killed in a bomb blast.

Can the Biharis be blamed for what happened to them? No. In fact they were the best Muslims of the subcontinent in terms of social consciousness. Their annihilation, more than that their ‘statelessness’, has deprived Pakistan of the good citizens it needed. Late Papiya Ghosh must be celebrated together with some great living Indian women writers — Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin — who have arisen above the nationalist narrative to examine the sufferings of the common people of South Asia. Perhaps it was for this reason that someone murdered Ghosh in 2006.

Postscript: Daily Times reported on January 3, 2009: Pakistan is a village on Bihar’s border with West Bengal whose Muslims had migrated to East Pakistan in 1947. In their memory the local non-Muslim inhabitants had named the village Pakistan. There is not a single Muslim living there now but despite tensions between India and Pakistan the villagers have not changed the name of their village.