India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act Bihar and Orissa, and sabre-rattling against minorities in both states. 151 As in 1950, an aging Nehru once more wrote a letter to Pakistan; as had happened then, Pakistan’s leader, now Ayub Khan, responded urging a joint settlement. Almost 14 years to the day after the Nehru–Liaquat Pact, the Home Ministers of both India and Pakistan issued a communique reiterating its proposals in Delhi. 152 The period 1965–71 saw significant changes in these practices. In April 1965, amidst fears of renewed Muslim migration into Assam, the Government of India finally restricted migration on the eastern frontier; people could no longer cross the border without documentation. 153 A few months later, India and Pakistan were at war. Diplomatic relations ceased completely for a year. Even when restored, they were severely restricted. This, along with a severely restricted visa policy, meant less practical scope for concern for minorities on both sides of the border. While both governments protested the draconian ‘enemy property’ legislation issued on both sides of the border in the wake of the war, joint negotiations, unlike in the evacuee property matter, were not attempted. By this time, Pakistan was grappling with other issues. Fault lines between East and West Pakistan, exacerbated by military rule, had made the union increasingly unsustainable. In 1970, Pakistan’s first national elections since Independence, coming in the wake of a devastating cyclone in East Pakistan, saw the Awami League win 160 of 162 seats in the East and an overall majority in the Parliament of Pakistan. The military regime responded with violence and this culminated in civil war. India’s intervention in the Bangladeshi civil war, justified officially as ‘humanitarian intervention’, was in part prompted by national outrage at Pakistani forces disproportionately targeting East Pakistan’s Hindu minority. By November 1971, over one-eighth of East Pakistan’s population — and 70% of its Hindu population — had migrated to India, particularly in West Bengal and the northeast. During this war, Indian army successes in Tharparkar and in Sindh, West Pakistan’s only Hindu-majority district (and incidentally, the one with the lowest Human Development Index ranking), saw about 90,000 Hindus emigrate to Rajasthan, where they were granted citizenship in 1978. 154 For India, Bangladesh’s separation, based on Bengali, rather than Islamic, nationalism, served many functions. Not only did it ‘cut Pakistan to size’, but it also marked a potential solution to the unending refugee inflow into India, given that most of Pakistan’s Hindus were now in Bangladesh, an avowedly ‘secular’ country. 155 Indira Gandhi’s repeated insistence, at a variety of international and national forums, that those who crossed the border would have to go back, marked 151 Nilanjana Chatterjee, ‘Interrogating Victimhood: East Bengali Refugee Narratives of 152 153 154 155 Communal Violence’ (Paper submitted to University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) <https://swadhinata.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/chatterjeeEastBengalRefugee.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1jsszqDLSm6x9Sq4ftMdDfulkjwmWpYGY2LrGfYLo1iQhXsaF80O-6xE>. An interesting fictional depiction of this is provided in Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (Ravi Dayal Publishers 1988). Joint Communique Issued On the Conclusion of Talks Between the Home Ministers of India and Pakistan, 11 April 1964, quoted in Bhasin (n 66) 7495–505. Memorandum From the Home Ministry to the State Governments of Assam, West Bengal and Tripura Regarding Enforcement of Entry Requirements For Persons From East Pakistan (Archived at 44/31/64 Pol(i), Ministry of Home, National Archives of India, 6 April 1965). Copy on hand with the author. See, eg, Farhana Ibrahim, ‘Defining a Border: Harijan Migrants and the State in Kachchh’ (2005) 40(16) Economic and Political Weekly 1623, 1623. To get a contemporaneous sense of the importance of secularism to Bangladesh’s national identity, please see Kabir Choudhury, ‘Secularism in Bangladesh’ in A Nation is Born (Calcutta University Press 1974) 62–67. 231