Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971-1974

Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971-1974

The dissolution of Pakistan in 1971—precipitated by civil war and military defeat—remains obscured by silences and contested historiographies. The conflict concluded with the capture of over 90,000 Pakistani POWs in newly independent Bangladesh and their subsequent transfer to Indian custody. Pakistan responded by interning a comparable number of Bengalis in West Pakistan, producing one of the most consequential episodes of reciprocal mass internment in the post–World War II era. Despite its scale, the internment of Bengalis from 1971 to 1974 remains marginal within dominant state and scholarly narratives. This talk explains this episode as a 'crisis of captivity', tracing how exceptional measures rendered Bengalis rightless citizens and recast them as internal 'enemies' and 'traitors.'

Ilyas Chattha is a Professor of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He is the author of Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971–1974 (Cambridge, 2025); The Punjab Borderland (Cambridge, 2022) and Partition and Locality(Oxford, 2012); His upcoming project is on Evacuee and Enemy Property in Pakistan.