Abandoned again

KARACHI: Bisma Jahangir was born a thalassemia patient, which means she needs blood transfusion frequently.

Till November 2021, her transfusion sessions at a local non-profit foundation were going on smoothly when a person called her father, Jahangir. Later, personnel of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) came to their home in Federal B Area and took away Jahangir’s computerised national identity card (CNIC).

A few days later, Jahangir found out that his CNIC had been blocked by the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA). When he approached the NADRA centre of his area, he was told that his CNIC had been blocked on the recommendation of the FIA for doubts about his parents’ nationality who hailed from Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan).

While Jahangir has launched a legal battle for unblocking of his CNIC, the non-profit foundation has stopped blood transfusion of Bisma on the grounds that her father’s CNIC is required to continue the transfusion sessions. An emotionally broken Jahangir tells Bol News that now he has to take loans from wherever he could get to have blood transfusion of his daughter at private facilities.

Thousands of cases

There are thousands of such cases of blocking CNICs of the people belonging to the Bihari community living in Sindh, particularly in Karachi. The problem is rooted in the breakup of the country.

Reportedly, those who supported Pakistan during the 1971 war were forced to leave Bangladesh or live in camps in inhuman conditions, says Mumtaz Hussain Ansari.

Ansari runs an organisation named Muhibban-e-Pakistan Foundation, which is struggling to get Pakistan’s citizenship rights for those members of the Bihari community who had arrived there through an arrangement of repatriation or had entered the country through illegal channels from 1973 till the mid-1990s.

Ansari further said that under a repatriation agreement signed between Pakistan and India in August 1973, commonly known as Delhi Accord, Pakistanis stranded in Bangladesh and India were to be repatriated to their respective homelands.

The first batch of 140,000 such Pakistanis, known as Biharis, according to Hussain, were brought to Pakistan and settled in more than 20 districts of Punjab, five districts of KP and in Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur districts of Sindh.

After that, a few thousand members of the Bihari community were brought during former president Ziaul Haq’s regime in 1979 and the first tenure of Nawaz Sharif in 1993, added Hussain. “They were mostly settled in Punjab.”

He also said that fearing persecution from the government due to the war, thousands of members of the Bihari community reportedly crossed India and reached Pakistan through illegal border crossings. Such members of the Bihari community are mostly settled in Karachi where their relatives who had been legally repatriated were living.

Considering their ordeal and their loyalty to Pakistan, the successive governments treated them as citizens of the country and issued the manual national identity cards (old national ID cards), explained Ansari.

In October 1999, former president Pervez Musharraf took control of the country in a military coup. In 2000, NADRA was established by merging Directorate General of Registration Pakistan, a department created under the 1973 Constitution, with the National Database Organisation (NDO) established in 1998 as an attached department under the ministry of interior, for issuance of CNICs.

Ansari claims that all those members of the Bihari community who had got old national ID cards managed to get the new CNICs in the early 2000s.

However, after 2005, NADRA functionaries started raising objections on forms of the children of those members of the Bihari community who had already gotten CNICs stating that their parents’ citizenship status was ‘doubtful.’

Since 2015, NADRA had blocked CNICs of nearly 100,000 members of the Bihari community living in Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukkur, who were issued the cards in early 2000s. When they visit NADRA centres, they are told to bring documents as old as the ones issued in the 1950s or ’60s. An official of NADRA in Karachi told Bol News on the condition of anonymity that the National Alien Registration Authority (NARA), also established by the Musharraf regime, was merged into NADRA in 2015.

“Now the problem is that when the application of the children of those members of the Bihari community, who had got CNIC are verified in many cases, it was found that their parents had also registered themselves with NARA and for the same reason, not only their applications were rejected but NADRA had no option left but to block their parents’ CNICs to check how they had got such CNICs,” added the NADRA official.

Labelled as ‘foreigners’

However, Ansari did not agree with NADRA officials, saying Biharis could not agree to become “foreigners in their own country.”

He further said that a part of the state not only recognises the sacrifices rendered by the Bihari community during the 1971 war but also appreciates them, while the other part is not ready to recognise them as Pakistani citizens.

“When Bangladesh was celebrating 2021 as Golden Jubilee year of its independence, Pakistan Army decided to hold functions in recognition of the sacrifices and rewarded hundreds of Bihari members of the former East Pakistan Civil Armed Force who supported the Pakistan Army in 1971 war,” Ansari elaborated. He apprised that such events were held during November 2021 in Peshawar and Lahore garrisons and in December in Malir garrison in Karachi as well as in the Hyderabad garrison.

Advocate Usman Farooq who had filed dozens of cases of those members of the Bihari community whose CNICs had been blocked, stated that NADRA officials attending court hearing asked him why his clients do not accept NARA cards. “Holders of such cards are being offered to open bank accounts and enrol their children at private schools with other benefits.”

He added that when he seeks his clients’ opinion on such offers, they all have the same reply that they “would prefer to die instead of accepting the status of aliens in a country for which their elders sacrificed their lives.”

Ansari further said that many of the members of the Bihari community, who were given cash rewards by the Pakistan Army, reportedly could not withdraw their money from the bank because their CNICs had been blocked.

As the NADRA official puts it, what the Bihari community is suffering is not the fault of NADRA. “It is the policy of the government and NADRA is bound to work as per policy of the government.”