Here again, as in other cases closer to home, we find that land scarcity was a major factor in ethnic conflict, reaffirming the connection between population pressure and land. The wounds still remain, many of them unhealed; the memories remain, many of them whole; the hatreds remain, many of them unforgiven.

Other such groups in the Rejected People’s list include the Muslim Rohingyas of Myanmar, who periodically escape a savage regime at home and settle near Chittagong port and Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. The first such exodus took place in 1978 when Myanmarese troops attacked Muslim villages and mosques; in 1992, a furious onslaught by Myanmarese troops sent an estimated quarter of a million refugees to Chittagong. Many were housed in camps supported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Several international aid groups also operate in these camps including the World Lutheran Organisation and OXFAM, organizing shelter, food programmes and medical assistance.

Despite an on-again, off-again repatriation programme, most of the refugees have returned barring about 20,000 who say they will not go back because they are threatened by an unforgiving military junta. The international agencies as well as Myanmar and Bangladesh are divided on the identity of these groups, their ideologies and the level of their popular representation.

Other groups which would fall in this list are the Sri Lankan Tamils who have fled the civil war in the north of the island to southern India, where they have lived in refugee camps set up by the Government of India in Tamilnadu state. Most of these camps have since closed after the Tamils were repatriated to their homes. But ethnic strife in that region continues to send floods of Tamil refugees and displacees to other parts of Sri Lanka.

Then there are the ‘Biharis’ of the former East Pakistan who live in squalid slums in the heart of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and other towns. There are sixteen such camps in the country and one of the best-known is Geneva camp, a fetid, fly-infested place, a place built of cardboard sheets and tarpaulin. Here live an estimated 10,000 people whose leaders once supported the former military regime in Pakistan during the 1970-71 crackdown against Bengali nationalists.

More than half a million were killed and not less than 100,000 women raped or molested in that slaughter. After the liberation of Bangladesh, this group, known as the Biharis because of their origins, were attacked, intimidated and finally herded into places such as Geneva Camp. Negotiations to get Pakistan to accept them have failed time and again; they remain a stateless people, despised in Bangladesh and unrecognized in Pakistan.