666 Arif movement of Muslims into the newly created province of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).12 It was estimated that 96 per cent of those refugees came from the East Indian states of Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Orissa, Nagaland, Manipur, Tripura and Sikkim.13 Since 1947, around 40 million people have crossed international borders in the South Asia region as displaced persons or refugees.14 In 1947, two historic events took place, the partition of India and creation of Pakistan, and the mass migration of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities.15 The partition resulted in the migration of Hindus and Sikhs from the new state of Pakistan to India, and Muslims from India to Pakistan (both East and West Pakistan).16 The movement of the Bihari community to East Pakistan was due to a desire to escape from communal bloodshed and ‘to preserve their Islamic way of life’.17 They supported the adoption of Urdu as the official language in East Pakistan, where the language of the majority was Bengali, and opposed the Bengali Language Movement18 in 1952.19 The Bihari community never assimilated into the local people of East Pakistan, and maintained an alliance with the West Pakistani regime against the interests of the Bengali people.20 During the Liberation War in Bangladesh, the Bihari community was active in East Pakistan. They were 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Sumit Sen, ‘Stateless Refugees and Right to Return: The Bihari Refugees in South Asia– Part 1’, 11 International Journal of Refugee Law (1999) p. 625. Chowdhury R. Abrar, ‘Issues and Constraints in the Repatriation/Rehabilitation of the Rohingya and Chakma Refugees and the Bharis’, Paper presented to the Conference of Scholars and other Professionals Working on Refugees and the Displaced Persons in South Asia, Dhaka, Bangladesh on 9–11 February 1998, <repository.forcedmigration.org/ pdf/?pid=fmo:1808>, visited on 2 June 2017. Nafees Ahmed, ‘The Right to Nationality and the Reduction of Statelessness–The Responses of the International Migration Law Framework’, 5 Groningen Journal of International Law (2017) p. 16. Khalid Hussain, ‘Association of Young generation of Urdu Speaking Community and Council of Minorities’, Bangladesh Universal Periodic Review (2012), <lib.ohchr.org/ HRBodies/UPR/Documents/Session16/BD/JS5_UPR_BGD_S16_2013_Jointsubmission5_E .pdf>, visited on 2 June 2017. Abrar, supra note 13. Farzana, supra note 7. This movement ultimately ended in the adoption of Bengali as one of the state languages of Pakistan. However, the movement was not isolated to this as it sowed the seeds for the independence movement of the Bangladeshi people which resulted in the liberation of Bangladesh as an independent state in 1971. See further Language Movement, <en.banglapedia.org/index.php?title=Language_Movement>, visited on 5 January 2018. Papiya Ghosh, ‘The Changing Discourse of the Muhajirs’, 28 India International Centre Quarterly (2001) p. 57. Ibid. international journal on minority and group rights 25 (2018) 664-678 This content downloaded from 147.188.245.205 on Wed, 25 Oct 2023 15:43:57 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms <UN>