Muhajirs had outworn the welcome in Pakistan within a few years. The Muhajir political domination of the country ended with the assassination of Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, in 1951, although they remained firmly entrenched in the civil service, educational institutions, journalism, business and industry, and independent professions for at least another decade.
In order to establish citizenship by birth, most Muhajirs deliberately misrepresented themselves to the census enumerators to escape adverse consequences associated with being a Muhajir, sometimes contemptuously referred to by Sindhis as panahgirs, refuge-seekers. Within India, the act of migration to Pakistan by close relatives was rarely revealed publicly for fear of negative implications ... The loyalty of most Muslims became suspect. The Muslim minority communities in India were marooned at home and with the passage of time not quite welcome in Pakistan. To be known to the police and the authorities for having relatives in Pakistan was not a pleasant prospect for most Indian Muslims. For a Muhajir it made no practical sense to identify himself with the land of his birth in Pakistan, and the members of the residual relatives had relocated across the national border.
With the introduction of the passports between the two countries in 1953, it became possible for Indian Muslims to migrate to Pakistan legally. Given the relatively low level of education in areas that became Pakistan, that country still needed educated and skilled labour that could be absorbed in the expanding economy. As late as December 971, the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi was authorized to issue documents to educationally qualified Indians to migrate to Pakistan ...
Not all Indian Muslims who migrated to East Bengal were able to go to Pakistan. This was tragically demonstrated in 1971. During the Pakistani army's crackdown in East Bengal and the subsequent war ... the immigrant Urdu-speaking population collectively – though erroneously - known as Biharis supported the state against the Bengali majority. After the conclusion of the war, almost 500,000 Pakistanis, a great many of whom had immigrated from Bihar, were left in Bangladesh. Some 200,000 remain in Bangladeshi camps. They were Pakistanis before the war and continue to define themselves as "stranded Pakistanis" in Bangladesh. The successive Pakistani governments, whether military dictatorships or democratically elected loath to upset cthnic and political balances in Sindh and so refused to repatriate what are, by every definition, Pakistani citizens.
Thus the original critical question posed but never answered during the Pakistan movement – whether Pakistan was to be the homeland of all Indian Muslims or just another state where Islam would be the "official" religion - has been answered by the experience. It is not meant to accommodate all Muslims of the Sub-continent ... It may "officially", i.e. formally be an Islamic state but ... (for) record of ethnic conflict management ... hardly brings much honour to the Muslims of South Asia.
Migration Shrinks to a Trickle
The December 1971 ... war over Bangladesh was a watershed event in the history of modern South Asia. The perception of Pakistan as the homeland for Muslims of undivided India was finally shattered. The news about large scale killing of fellow Muslims in East Bengal by units of the Pakistan army horrified Indian Muslims ...
After 1971 very few Muslims went to Pakistan. Several factors are responsible for this change. First is the relative decline of anti-Muslim violence in India during the early 1970s ... Indian democracy acted as the safety valve for the resolution of ethnic conflicts. The second reason is the rise of ethnic nationalism and the improvement of education within Pakistan which made the migration prospects difficult. Tighter controls at the international borders made illegal migration hazardous ...Problems associated with legal travel with visa prevented frequent visits, thus weakening the kinship ties of divided families across the borders.
Psychologically, most middle class Muslims were reconciled to sink or swim within India by 1971 and stopped looking to Pakistan as a desirable destination. Fortunately, for many middle and lower class Muslims, the oil boom in the Middle East provided a tremendous alternative employment potential, whereto thousands have headed since the 1970s ... On June 18, 1995, Pakistan's Interior Minister, Naseerullah Babar, informed the National Assembly that during the period from 1973-1994, as many as 800,000 visitors came from India on valid travel documents. Of these only 3,393 stayed back. Granting that those entering illegally would not inform the authorities of their arrival, their numbers are in all likelihood not laree given the loss of pull factors within Pakistan. Intemarriages between Indian and Pakistani Muslims have declined sharply ...
Of those who left for Pakistan, most never came back; a minority, however, did. These include several thousand Mewati peasants, "8000 government servants", and other individuals who for one reason or another did not want to live in Pakistan. Among the intelligentsia these included Sayyid Sajjad Zaheer (1905-73), K.M. Ashraf (1903-62) both of the Communist Party of India, the poet Sahir Ludhianawi (1921-62), and Qurrat al-Ain Hyder (b: 1927), a leading novelist who left Pakistan in 1960. Unlike the well-connected members of the intelligentsia, many ordinary persons tried to come back, but many were expelled, others were harassed by the police in both countries, and some are still in limbo as late as 1998.
Leaving aside the exceptional case of Punjab ... the impact of Muslim migration from other areas on the residual Muslim population was felt in many ways; some immediate, some long-term. The first and immediate impact was the loss of political leadership, except in the southern parts of India, which was never replaced to the same extent as before 1947 due to the abolition of separate electorates. A second set of loss was that of role models in education, civil service and business as a result of migration of educated middle classes of urban areas and entrepreneurs of Bombay, Calcutta and elsewhere but not Madras ... A third loss was the emigration of some of the most productive writers and poets of Urdu, a number of creative journals and publishing houses, so much so that today the centres of Urdu publishing are not Hyderabad, Delhi, and Lucknow, but Karachi and Lahore. In the rural areas of the country, however, where most Muslims live, no drastic changes are discernible ...
