As of 2020. The roughly 300,000 camp residents is an estimate from community organisations and NGO surveys in the 2010s; no official enumeration of the settlements has been published since, so the current figure is uncertain.
Urdu-speaking Muslims who migrated from Bihar and elsewhere in India to East Pakistan after 1947 were widely identified with the Pakistani state during the 1971 liberation war, and after Bangladesh's independence large numbers were dispossessed, killed in reprisals or driven into camps set up as temporary shelters by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Around 540,000 registered a wish to move to Pakistan; Pakistan accepted about 178,000 under agreements concluded in 1973, 1974 and 1992 and then effectively stopped, leaving the remainder in Bangladesh without citizenship of either country. For more than three decades they lived in overcrowded camps with insecure tenure, limited access to public services and to formal employment, and no passports. In 2008 the Bangladesh High Court ruled in the Sadaqat Khan case that Urdu-speakers born in Bangladesh or minors at independence are citizens entitled to voter registration, which ended their formal statelessness; most, however, remain in the same camps, and the settlements face periodic eviction and demolition, most seriously the 2014 Kalshi camp arson attack. Pakistan has continued to reject further repatriation.
Bangladesh and Pakistan left Urdu-speaking Biharis stateless in camps after the 1971 war
Estimates of the community in 1971 range from about 600,000 to 1 million; roughly 470,000 registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross for repatriation to Pakistan, of whom fewer than 180,000 were ever accepted. Around 300,000 people are commonly reported as living in some 116 settlements in Bangladesh, a figure that rests on community and NGO surveys rather than a census; a 2008 Bangladeshi High Court ruling granted citizenship to those born after 1971.
No reliable toll exists for reprisal killings of Biharis during and after the 1971 war; claims range from several thousand to over 100,000 in Pakistani accounts and are much lower in Bangladeshi ones. The camp period itself has not involved mass mortality, though camp fires and poor conditions have caused deaths.
UNHCR, Minority Rights Group and the Bangladesh High Court's 2008 judgment documented decades of statelessness, and human rights organisations recorded arson attacks and demolitions at the camps.
Bangladesh, Pakistan