The history of Pakistan could well be written as the history of its refugees. The partition of British India saw the largest movement of people in the 20th century with nearly 14 million moving between the newly created nation states.
According to the 1951 census, over seven million Muslims migrated to Pakistan with a similar number of Hindus migrating to India. As is well known, most of the refugees migrating to Pakistan settled in Karachi and its adjoining areas. After the 1971 war, many Biharis who had supported West Pakistan in the conflict were left stranded in the newly formed nation of Bangladesh.
According to a report compiled by UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, in 2006 nearly 300,000 of these refugees continue to live in 66 intensely crowded and abjectly poor refugee camps in Dhaka and other parts of Bangladesh after having been refused repatriation to Pakistan.
The approaching end of the first decade of this new millennium has brought another refugee crisis to Pakistan. According to statistics compiled by the UN, nearly three million Pakistanis — or roughly one in every eight persons in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Fata — were forced to flee their homes in 2009. Most of these refugees originate from the tribal agencies and left because of fighting in their villages. Scattered in camps, the houses of distant relations or temporary slums, these refugees constitute the living human casualties of the war on terror.
According to a report released by Amnesty International, the camps set up for the IDPs have poor sanitation, limited health facilities and many families are often crowded together in small areas. Since the onset of the conflict efforts have focused on repatriating these refugees to their ancestral villages. With the decimation of local sources of livelihood, the continuation of security operations and drone attacks this task is proving to be difficult, if not impossible. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of people have been left without a permanent home.
When the first refugees came to Pakistan at partition, they were largely concentrated in one geographic area. Facing a new homeland where ethnic identity was inflexible and determinative, these migrants from India had to fashion themselves into a fifth ethnic group and the de facto label of being Urdu-speaking was applied to mark their landless status.
The bloody ethnic conflict that emerged in the late ’80s and early ’90s along the ethnic fault-line between the migrants in Karachi and Hyderabad and indigenous Sindhis in the rural areas was evidence of the inability of the new nation to absorb anyone that did not fit into pre-partition ethnic structures. The reasons given for failing to repatriate stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh following the 1971 war were similar: the ethnic balance in West Pakistan was believed to be too delicate and hence vulnerable to even more conflict if repatriated refugees that did not fit into the existing structure of feudal landholdings were added to the mix.
It is this last fact, the feudal structure of systems of kinship, landholdings and ultimately political power, that lies at the root of Pakistan’s inability to absorb refugees and create a concept of citizenship that means more than the sub-category of ethnic identity. The lessons of partition, the war of 1971 and the latest wave of unwanted refugees all point to this one governing narrative.
The continuation of feudal landholdings with their attached systems of patronage based on ethnicity control the bastions of political power in the country. When a crisis occurs, the underlying feudal basis of parliamentary politics dictates that the ethnic balances of electoral districts remain unaltered to retain hereditary constellations of power. Because of this, and the fact that large swathes of land continue to remain under the tutelage of a few, Pakistani citizenship means little when one is left without the protection bought by patronage to a local jagirdar or tribal elder.
While urban areas allow some minimal exception to the rule, the concentration of nearly all post-partition refugees in a single city and the lack of mixing of ethnic groups over nearly six decades, all point to the veracity of the fact that the country has failed to evolve from the paradigm of ethnically constructed identities.
This latest crisis that has produced hundreds of thousands of mostly Pakhtun refugees is no different. The existing structure of feudal landholdings means that no province is interested in absorbing the refugees who have little or nothing to return to.
Effectively, this means that people with few skills beyond farming and animal husbandry and who are used to rural lifestyles will be directed towards urban centres such as Karachi. Largely uneducated and with few means of earning a living in an urban environment, these refugees will be vulnerable to human trafficking and bonded labour. Many cases have already been reported of women and girls being forced into prostitution and small children becoming beggars and trash-pickers. In the meantime, no consideration by any governing authority is given to the idea that small farming schemes in non-conflict regions could easily avert the tragedy.
The sad legacy of the refugees points to a much deeper problem within Pakistan’s notions of citizenship and identity. While much is made about the inherent value of the current democratic government, the undeniable feudal basis of its construction illustrates the intractability of identity in Pakistan. It points also to the possibility that, once again, maintaining feudal structures will be given priority, even at the cost of fomenting terror.
Ironically, it is this very inability to respond to changes in ethnic demography that leaves the Pakistani youth so attracted to the empty promises of Islamist recruiters. With ethnic identity determining social status and the course of one’s life, the seemingly egalitarian rhetoric of jihad provides one way for rural youth to escape the accident of birth in a Pakistan that continues to be dominated by medieval power structures. As the refugees from Fata roam the country searching for a new home, their inability to find one reflects on how little Pakistani citizenship really means.
The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional history and political philosophy.
Mohammed Abbasi 