As vibrant and industrious as lifestyles are in Dhaka, the Urdu-speaking inhabitants of Mohammadpur's Geneva Camp, in the very centre of the city, live lives that change very little from day to day. Despite Geneva Camp having been dubbed the 'Paris' of Bangladesh's 116 Bihari refugee settlements by no less than Refugees International, the lives of the residents differ little from those of the 160,000 Urdu-speaking inhabitants throughout the rest of country's refugee camps. In the 36 years that have passed since Bangladesh's independence, these people have been in legal limbo: officially stateless, identified as "stranded Pakistanis" whether or not they think of themselves as such. But a new dawn may finally be on the horizon for many of these people, who will soon be able to call themselves Bangladeshis.
That is certainly what 46-year-old Mohammad Zahiruddin is hoping for. Long having lived in Geneva Camp but working as a carpenter outside, Mohammad has been continually frustrated by the belief that the life he is living is fake – and illegal. Many have given up living in the camps entirely, as Mohammad has also now done. If there are 160,000 Biharis living within the camps, a similar number live outside. While they are thereby able to more easily gain schooling and employment – something from which those living within the camps are legally excluded – they are only able to do so by counterfeiting new identities, as Bangladeshi citizens. For most Biharis, the majority born and brought up in Bangladesh, this identity has been all they have wanted for the past three and a half decades. "This government is now certifying our voting eligibility and nationality," Mohammad says ruefully. "But we have been deprived of them for all this time."
As a group, the Biharis are so named because their ancestry is traced back to Muslim communities living in pre-Independence Bihar. Following Partition, many of this Urdu-speaking group fled to East Pakistan. Because the official language at that time was Urdu, many Biharis subsequently held a large number of high-level jobs, which inevitably bred resentment among the Bengalis. A quarter-century later, most Biharis sided with West Pakistan during the 1971 War of Liberation, and they became 'exiles' as a community with the formation of Bangladesh. However, the Pakistani state waffled on taking in the 'stranded Pakistanis' left behind, with Islamabad policymakers worried that the influx of Biharis, seen as having little in common with the West Pakistanis, would be demographically unsettling.
Although a 1974 repatriation programme took around 124,000 Biharis to Pakistan, not much has progressed since then. Islamabad's official stance, meanwhile, has changed little, with Pakistani officials having to a great extent simply stopped talking about the issue altogether. Meanwhile, the Biharis have remained stateless – held in bitter disdain by the Bangladeshis for having supported West Pakistan during the war, and unable to legally integrate into their homeland, wherever they consider that to be.