A study of laws in East Pakistan and Bangladesh which controlled ‘enemy property and firms,’ i.e. properties of Indians and then of Pakistanis who had left the country and vested powers in the national government to act as the custodian of such properties, showed that these have been extensively abused to pressure Hindus and force them to sell their lands at cheap prices or stop them from acquiring new land.24 ‘About 30 per cent of all Hindu households, or 10 out of 34 Hindu households, have been adversely affected by these laws,’ it added.25

Guhathakurta, quoting this review of such laws, said, ‘If there were no out-migration of Hindus from East Pakistan and Bangladesh during 1961-1991, there would have been 16.5 million Hindus in Bangladesh instead of the official figure of 11.2 million in the Bangladesh census of 1991. According to our calculation, a total of 5.3 million Hindus, i.e. on average 200,000 per year have gone “missing” during 1964-1991.’26 The 200,000 figure seems to match with an Indian estimate, but the latter is for those crossing the border into West Bengal. Thus, it is likely to be an underestimate because it does not cover migrating Muslims.

In 1990, the Border Security Force detained more than 56,000 Bangladeshis trying to enter West Bengal. The rule of thumb for such outflows and seizures, say seasoned security officials and diplomats, is that for every illegal person caught, four get through.27 Their path is made easier if they are Hindu, or they pay a reasonable bribe to either side. There are other statistics too which give us an idea of the complexity of the problem as well as its scale.

Take Kurigram district which was a humble sub-division until the early 1980s. Its population has grown in a rather novel fashion. After registering a growth rate of nearly 80 per cent for the years 1961 to 1974, when its population soared from 4,80,903 to 1,291,325, it went up to 1,307,824, or a rate of barely 9 per cent for the period 1974 to 1981. Between 1981 and 1991, the numbers rose to 1,603,034, or a healthier 22.57 per cent.

If Kurigram had continued to grow at the rate of the 1960s, it should have had, in 1991, not less than 2,400,000 people, or about 800,000 people more than reported in the 1991 census. Of course, it lost substantial numbers to Lalmonihaat and Gaibanda which were hived off as separate districts. These statistics are not available to me, but interviews in Kurigram confirmed the view that many people migrated out of the area, into India and to other parts of Bangladesh, during the 1974 famine which was felt most severely there. This outflow continues to take place as we have seen earlier.

No wonder, even Bangladeshi academics such as Imtiaz Ahmed estimate the number of those crossing into India as substantial, no matter what the government at Dhaka says. Ahmed has estimated that 1.72 million people crossed illegally into India between 1961 and 1971, another half a million between 1971 and 1981 while not less than 600,000 crossed into Assam between 1981–1991.28