For over five decades, a community that once stood firmly with Pakistan has lived stateless in the ghettos of Bangladesh. Their story rarely enters our official conversations.

If we truly wish to build trust and empathy between Pakistan and Bangladesh, we must begin by acknowledging these forgotten people — the stranded Pakistanis.
Here are a few practical and humane steps:

1. Recognition & Repatriation

Create a clear pathway for those who wish to return to Pakistan.

At the very least, acknowledge their identity and right to belong somewhere.

2. Media & Awareness

Promote a joint media effort that moves away from diplomatic photo-ops and focuses instead on the human side of this forgotten story.

3. Joint Working Group

Form a small, active Pakistan–Bangladesh working group devoted solely to the issue of the stranded and stateless.

Give it clear timelines and specific responsibilities instead of indefinite “discussions.”

Include genuine stakeholders and individuals known for professional integrity — not the usual suspects.

4. Health & Dignity

Hold regular health camps inside these settlements.

Issue health cards so that camp dwellers can be admitted to hospitals when needed.

No one should be denied medical care because of statelessness.

5. Education & Empowerment

Launch scholarships and skill-building programmes for young people from this community so that memory is linked with opportunity, not despair.

6. Documentation & Truth

Support a fact-finding mission and publish the findings.

Record testimonies before they disappear.

This is not about reopening wounds; it is about restoring dignity.

7. Direct Dialogue

When engaging with the community, meet ordinary families — not only the self-declared “leaders” who often speak for personal gain.

Talk to the women, the youth, the teachers, and the elders who actually live in the camps.

Ensure that women and girls are included in every consultation. Their stories are often the truest and the most painful.

8. Database

Prepare an accurate and transparent database of all stateless persons living in nearly 79–80 camps across 13–14 cities and towns of Bangladesh.
Without data, there can be no policy or accountability.

9. Confiscated Properties

Work toward the return or compensation of confiscated “enemy properties” to their rightful heirs still living in the camps.

10. Family Reunification

Facilitate and support the uniting of divided families the Biharis and non-Bengali Urdu speakers still confined to makeshift camps in Bangladesh with their relatives already settled in Pakistan.

No reconciliation can be complete while families remain separated by borders and bureaucracy.

11. Healing Historical Narratives

Encourage the dismantling or recontextualization of war museums and exhibits that perpetuate hostility — particularly those displaying demeaning or inflammatory imagery of Pakistani soldiers.

Let both nations move from blame to understanding, and from propaganda to peace.

12. Youth Friendship & Cultural Exchange

Promote sustained youth friendship programmes between Pakistan and Bangladesh — not limited to elites, but including young people from the camps.

These exchanges can become living bridges of empathy, correcting inherited biases and nurturing a shared future of respect and harmony.

Without acknowledging the unhealed wounds of 1971, and without addressing the silent suffering of those cast aside, our cooperation will always remain incomplete.
I hope that any meetings being scheduled across the borders to accelerate friendship between Pakistan and Bangladesh will become more than exchanges of polite ideas and diplomatic smiles.

They must evolve into genuine spaces for listening, recognition, and simple human action grounded in empathy and an accurate, not popular, understanding of history.

Author of “The Abandoned Pakistanis: 1971, Betrayal and Statelessness”