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Living a life of contradictions

Zyma Islam and Shaheen Mollah
The Kurmitola Bihari Camp branch office of the Stranded Pakistanis General Repatriation
Committee has a picture of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, hung inside a room painted glaringly in red and green.
When asked why the room had been painted in red and green, some members of the organisation explained it away as a representation of the reality before them. In other words, they seem to be caught between a country they and their ancestors left behind or have never been to and their connection with the only soil they have known as home.
Media reports suggest that the refugees or their earlier generations migrated from the Indian state of Bihar to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) at the time of Partition in 1947. But the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 left them in a state of turmoil over their identity, for they wished to be Pakistanis.
However, Pakistan has not yet offered them citizenship. Despite innumerable promises of citizenship made by successive Pakistani governments since the early 1970s, vast numbers of Biharis were ignored by Islamabad, with the result that they virtually turned into people without a country. The Biharis' plight in Bangladesh has to do with the overt pro-Pakistani role an earlier generation of them played in Bangladesh's War of Liberation, when the Pakistan army remained engaged in a genocide of Bangalis.
The Kurmitola camp is situated on either side of
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Kurmitola road in the capital, with 1,152 houses on one side and 582 on the other.
Neat rows, each having 24 green and blue one-roomed houses, constitute a "temporary shelter" for the community. The camp was set up in 1972 with 41 tin-shed houses and later extended to accommodate Biharis coming here from different parts of the country.
The refugees have seen at least their third generation living here and so many of them have eventually developed a sense of identity with Bangladesh.
Jahangir Alam, a relative of the family burnt alive in an arson attack on Saturday, does not want to leave Bangladesh even after witnessing the horrifying deaths of his dear ones.
"I have been given a home here. The state is taking care of me. I have a job as a private car driver, and because of that I can send my daughters to school. Pakistan holds no attraction forme."
To Jahangir life will not be any better elsewhere.
He is currently nursing his niece, Farzana, 15, a survivor of the arson attack, as she recuperates at the burn unit of Dhaka Medical College I lospital.
Many of the camp inhabitants make a living by doing embroidery and stone embellishment work or assisting weavers of the nearby Benarasi Palli. Others do menial jobs like pulling rickshaws, or vans or working as domestic help.
Despite their lives of hardship, many of them cannot think of leaving this country because they receive at least some state benefits here, which are helping them to come out of poverty, or because this is the only place they have been in since their birth.
A High Court ruling in 2008 granted Bangladeshi citizenship to Biharis who were minors at the time of the Liberation War, or were born after 1971.
"My entire extended family lives in Pakistan. But I was brought here at an early age and I have no recollection of my life earlier," said Mohammad Akram, 46, a resident of the camp.
He just wishes that he had a passport so that he could travel to Pakistan and meet his relatives.
He has a national identification card and so he can vote like any other adult citizens. But when he went to the passport office, he was refused a passport because he is a resident of the Bihari camp, Akram
said.
None of the refugees in Bangladesh can get a passport since they live in Bihari camps, said Mohammad Munnu Hossain, secretary of the Kurmitola Bihari camp branch office of the Stranded Pakistanis Repatriation Committee.
However, most of the Kurmitola camp residents chose to hold national identity cards identifying them as Bangladeshi citizens, he added.
The rest hold on to an old piece of paper called a red slip, a receipt they got during a survey conducted in the 1990s to ascertain if the refugees wanted to stay back or be repatriated to Pakistan, Munnu said.
Mohammad Nizam Uddin, a septuagenarian with glassy eyes blurred by age and cataracts, refused to accept a national identity card, and has doggedly held on to his red slip.
He wants to be taken back to Pakistan before his death.
Speaking in Bangla slightly tinged with an Urdu accent, he described fondly how his relatives were faring well in Pakistan.
"My younger brothers live there. They went back before 1971. I talk to them by phone, but I have not seen them in over thirty years," Nizam said.