On one occasion, as I walked into an informal housing area of inner Karachi with closely-packed homes and bustling with hawkers to conduct an interview, my ‘guide’ Mukhtar** told me, “Nearly everyone here is Bengali. Some people have moved recently for economic reasons, to get jobs, and others have been here since the 1970s.” We paused for a while before going into the house of Mukhtar’s family’s friends, who have been living in Karachi since 1971. In the house I sat down to interview Shahnaz, a woman in her 30s, and her younger sisters. As I asked Shahnaz about life in the city and getting access to everyday goods – water, education, employment – Shahnaz told me: “At least Afghans have some form of identity cards, we do not even have any document to say who we are – we are nobody.”
In another interview in the same area, 32-year-old Noorulain repeated this sentiment as she told me her story:
Our family was living across the borders when the [1971] war happened, my father was here [in Karachi] and then afterwards my mother joined him, and slowly we moved across [from Dhaka] as well – we had to move. I was born here, I went to school here. My children go to school here. But the government does not recognise us. Nor does any organisation. We are nobody.
My curiosity about this topic grew through the conversations I had. Bangladeshis in Pakistan, as a ‘non-existent’ group, are vulnerable to excesses of state and non-state actors because there is no one who speaks up for them. As literature on the informal political economy in urban Pakistan increasingly shows, these people are reliant on the ever-growing presence of middlemen, fixers, and the like. According to one GOP official I interviewed:
The Bengalis, as the most insecure population, are often robbed of their possessions by the police. The National Aliens Registration Authority [a government organisation established to register illegal migrants] is a half-working scheme and has only been launched in Karachi. They [the Bangladeshis] have no identity cards and documents and the state requires greater support to address this issue.
The neglect that Bangladeshis face is, in part, related to unresolved issues from the 1971 War, in which hundreds of thousands of Pakistani Biharis were left stranded in Bangladesh by the GOP, remaining there today. “If the Pakistani government recognises the Bangladeshis in Pakistan, the state will have to accept responsibility for the Biharis,” a human rights lawyer in Karachi told me. In other cases the line between political and economic migrant blurs as many Bangladeshis have migrated in search of jobs and income rather than political persecution.
Geopolitics matters
As I continued my work on Afghans, discovering the intense ways in which they are enumerated and managed in Pakistan, another more glaring explanation for the differences in international and Pakistani attention towards Bangladeshis versus Afghans was revealed. Geopolitics, it appears, matters greatly. Massive attention has been paid to Afghans in Pakistan; they have been constructed as refugees in need of help in order to support the ‘hearts and minds’ public relations campaigns of the US and its allies, Saudi Arabia, and the GOP, to legitimise conflicts against the Soviet Union or Taliban. Or more recently, in the context of the GWOT, Afghans have been constructed as dangerous, threats that need to be monitored, enumerated, and quantified, by the US and its allies, in order to ensure a successful counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. Bangladeshis, on the other hand, are less ‘useful’ in geopolitical terms. Firstly, the conflict between Bangladesh and Pakistan was over relatively quickly in the 1970s. Secondly, after 1971 Bangladesh was not an immediate territorial border concern for the (West) Pakistani state dominated by the Punjab, as was the case with Afghanistan. And thirdly, it was not an internationalised conflict involving global superpowers as the wars in Afghanistan have been.
International institutions such as the UNHCR are influenced by hegemonic superpowers via funding. The separation between humanitarianism, counterinsurgency strategies, and wider geopolitical pressures is thin. The international migration regime via seemingly neutral organisations such as the UNHCR and, more recently, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), are complicit with, or at least vulnerable to, the wider political goals of global superpowers. Again, they are not necessarily concerned with the ‘humanitarianism’ to which they lay claim. In this scenario then, Bangladeshis in Pakistan are – alongside others – quite simply geopolitically irrelevant.
Critically, however, this does not mean that Afghans are currently having a ‘great time’ in Pakistan. After the Afghan state was blamed for sheltering the perpetrators of the September 2001 attacks, and Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf promptly joined the US-led GWOT, the Pakistani military-political leadership was keen on making clear the distinction between the ‘Bad Muslim’ Afghan state and the ‘Good Muslim’ Pakistani state, which included their people. This has meant that whilst Afghans in Pakistan have been enumerated and given identity cards, this has been done to encourage Afghan repatriation back to Afghanistan, both voluntarily and coercively since the 2000s. It has also meant that whilst during the 1980s all Afghans were classified as ‘refugees’, the Afghan legal status has now moved to ‘Afghan citizens in Pakistan’ (via biometric identity cards) with ‘temporary residency’, or simply ‘illegal migrants’ (undocumented workers). Indeed throughout my work, Afghans were all too aware that the increased insecurity they were experiencing in Pakistan was the result of changing foreign policy goals of the GOP and the USA and its allies.