By Irfan Chowdhury / Sapan News
Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan 1971-1974
By Ilyas Chattha; Cambridge University Press, 2025
Growing up in the 1980s in Bangladesh, I had heard many stories of the 1971 war. I knew about the Bengalis working, for example, in the civil service of Pakistan, like my uncle who was stranded with his family until their repatriation in 1974. However, I had never heard much about Bengalis imprisoned in internment camps in Pakistan, or come across any literature about them. History books in Bangladesh highlight Bengali officers who joined the liberation efforts, but Bengali civilians interned in West Pakistan are invisible from this narrative.
Indeed, in the annals of Southasian history, few events are as freighted with silence and selective memory as the break-up of Pakistan in 1971. Ilyas Chatta’s recently published book Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971–1974 (Cambridge, 2025) fills this vacuum. The book has a powerful thesis: the internment of Bengalis in Pakistan from 1971 to 1974 was not merely a logistical consequence of war, but a calculated political tool used in one of the largest cases of mass internment in Southasia.
Double exclusion
Dr. Chattha’s scholarly work, an essential addition to the historiography of the conflict, excavates a story of state-sanctioned internment, betrayal, and the complex calculus of citizenship and nationhood that remains largely unknown.
This nonfiction book is a straightforward, somber and heart-wrenching account of human misery, that tells the story of how a postcolonial state in the throes of a profound identity crisis, wielded its power to ‘make and unmake’ citizens. It raises questions about the political uses of the concept of ‘treason’, humanised by stories of Bengali-Pakistani inter-marriage and individuals who invested their livelihood in the nation they thought was theirs, only to be reclassified overnight from citizens to traitors.
The story of wartime internment of Bengalis in West Pakistan is “long overdue” as Chatta argues. The “state-centred narrative” and focus on “national interest” caused a “double exclusion” for this group, making them invisible in popular memory and “denied a voice within their own community” – an effect described as “silences within silences” by the anthropologist Michel-RolphTrouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 2015).
The creation of Bangladesh from erstwhile East Pakistan is a story of brutal civil war and the rise of a new linguistic national identity. The broader narrative of military and diplomatic conflict has been well documented, but the fate of thousands of Bengalis trapped in West Pakistan in its aftermath has long remained a footnote.
It is a story of how a postcolonial state, in the throes of a profound identity crisis, wielded its power to ‘make and unmake’ citizens….Read more:
Irfan Chowdhury is a public-sector policy analyst and adviser from Bangladesh. He writes opinion columns for Bangladeshi dailies and online platforms, like The Daily Star, Dhaka Tribune, Alalodulal, bdnews24, and Sapan News.
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After the truth-shower 