Shunned and stigmatised in Pakistan, and psychologically as well as politically stranded in Bangladesh, there exists a community rendered stateless by history rather than by choice. More than half a century later, their story remains indistinct and peripheral to South Asian scholarship, to national security priorities and to the overall moral compass of our politics.

The Biharis, an umbrella term encompassing other non-Bengali Urdu-speaking Muslims who had migrated to East Pakistan after 1947, have seen their identity repeatedly redefined: from citizens of Pakistan to "collaborators" or razakars, and finally to collateral victims of a "war " they neither initiated nor controlled. This is only a simplified rendering of a complex and blood-soaked saga that began with the violent and betrayed partition of Pakistan in 1971.

I have detected that "Second Partition" is widely used in Indian and some Western scholarship influencing many Pakistanis as well, to describe 1971 as a "natural" or "inevitable" separation which subtly normalises it and dilutes the sense of betrayal and trauma that many Pakistanis (and especially Urdu-speaking Biharis) experienced.

If anti-Pakistan Bengalis faced an alleged genocide in 1971, their suffering ended with the creation of Bangladesh. The Biharis' sufferings, by contrast, did not end in 1971; they continue, quietly but cruelly, across four and even five generations, confined to nearly seventy inhumane camps spread across thirteen/fourteen cities and towns of Bangladesh. Thousands from my community found themselves trapped between the vengeance of Bangladeshi nationalism and the apathy of West Pakistani elites.........

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