Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan 1971-1974, by Ilyas Chatta, Cambridge University Press, 2025, 333 pages, $USD 120

A review by Irfan Chowdhury

As an adult one may often wonder about misconceptions they have had. Hearing my guardians speak of relatives who had been CSP officers, to inspire us for an esteemed career in civil service, I had always thought of the acronym as Civil Service of Pakistan. I learnt belatedly that it stands for Central Superior Services. My fufa was once a CSP officer and he along with his family were stranded in Pakistan following the war and liberation of Bangladesh 1971. 

However, apart from hearing vague anecdotes of their lives in West Pakistan, including their affinity with another CSP officer, Shafiul Azam, who is highlighted in this new book I am writing about, growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in Bangladesh I had never read literature on Bengalis stranded in Pakistan. While new scholarship on East Pakistan during the years leading up to the war exists, there is little research on the Bengalis stranded in then West Pakistan after the war broke out. 

In the bloody birth of Bangladesh in 1971, the world’s attention was focused on the atrocities committed in the east—the massacre of civilians, religious targeting within army actions, the crisis of the Buranganas, and the flight of millions of refugees to India. Yet, a mirror tragedy was unfolding a thousand miles away, in the western wing of a disintegrating Pakistan. There, thousands of Bengali civil servants, soldiers, and ordinary citizens found themselves transmogrified overnight from citizens into “traitors.”

In Citizens to Traitors, a recently published book by Ilyas Chattha, a historian at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (usually known as LUMS), performs a forensic excavation of this “non-event” in Pakistani historiography. Drawing on untapped archives, diplomatic cables, and harrowing oral histories, Mr Chattha reconstructs the machinery of a state that turned upon its own people, using them as human currency in a geopolitical poker game between Islamabad, Dhaka, and New Delhi. It is a chilling study of how easily the veneer of citizenship can be stripped away when the state feels threatened, leaving individuals in the precarious state of what Hannah Arendt called “mere life” . (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1968)

The book’s central thesis is a powerful one: the internment of Bengalis in Pakistan from 1971 to 1974 was not merely a logistical consequence of war, but a calculated political tool wielded in one of the largest cases of mass internment in South Asia. 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, raising questions about the political uses of the concept of “treason.”

Bangladeshi history books may highlight officers killed, for example, trying to bring Pakistan Army’s flights to Bangladesh, or who successfully left West Pakistan to join our liberation efforts, but Bengalis interned in West Pakistan are invisible from this narrative. 

Mr Chatta covers these events in detail in seven chapters and offers a piercing conclusion. The book’s structure goes beyond high-level geopolitics to a human-scale reconstruction of events, beginning with the ideological “Making of a Traitor”. Chattha explores how the long-simmering regional imbalances and political tensions that led to the war were transmuted into a nationalistic narrative of Bengali perfidy in the western wing of what was supposed to be a nation for Muslims. 

The architecture of suspicion

The introductory chapters draw on data points such as the unequal representation of Bengalis in the civil and military services, providing a statistical backdrop to the political alienation that would ultimately justify their mass detention. The narrative begins not with the war itself, but with the insidious creep of suspicion. Even before the first shots were fired in 1971, the Bengali in West Pakistan was a figure of ambivalence—racially stereotyped as “non-martial,” culturally suspect for their linguistic closeness to Hindu Bengal, and politically untrustworthy. Yet, they were integral to the state machinery. On the eve of the war, some 400,000 to 500,000 Bengalis lived in West Pakistan. They included judges, diplomats, soldiers, and civil servants in the Islamabad secretariat.

Mr Chattha details how the rupture of 1971 accelerated a process of “othering” that had been simmering since Partition. The decisive moment came with the fall of Dhaka in December 1971. As 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war (POWs) were marched into Indian camps, the Pakistani state, humiliated and truncated, turned its gaze inward. On January 1, 1972, a group of West Pakistani bureaucrats submitted a petition to the new president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, demanding the removal of all Bengali officials, labeling them a security risk and demanding their internment (p 109-112).

The state’s response was swift and bureaucratic. A “questionnaire” was circulated, ostensibly asking government employees where they wished to serve. Those who opted for “East Pakistan” (now Bangladesh)—an overwhelming majority motivated by family ties and nationalism—were immediately marked. They were dismissed from service, their bank accounts frozen, and their movements restricted. The “traitor” was no longer a theoretical construct; he was the man sitting at the next desk.

In a move of calculated realpolitik, Pakistan held its former Bengali citizens hostage after the war’s conclusion. With a huge Pakistani Prisoner of War or POWs in Indian custody, the government in Islamabad responded by rounding up all Bengalis—military officers, civil servants, and their families—as leverage. It took a few agonising years for an exchange – they were finally repatriated in 1973-1974 in a tripartite negotiation. These were formerly Pakistani citizens, who were cast as ‘enemies within’.

The camp archipelago

From this foundation, the narrative shifts to the lived experience of internment. In fact, the core of Chattha’s research is the mapping of the internment infrastructure that sprang up across Pakistan. This was not a chaotic roundup but a methodical system of incarceration.

The book meticulously catalogues the diverse experiences of Bengalis, who were not a monolithic group but included military officers, civil servants, students, and ordinary labourers. Chapter 2, “Military Encampment,” and Chapter 3, “Civilian Internment”, details the distinctions between these experiences. Military personnel and high-ranking civil servants were often held in designated cantonment camps, while a broader civilian population, including many who were laid off from factories, found themselves in a more precarious state. 

The book identifies camps, ranging from repurposing colonial-era forts to desolate barrage colonies. The classification of these internees reveals the cold calculus of the state. Military personnel, deemed the highest security risk, faced the harshest conditions. The “bachelor” soldiers—those without families in the West—were herded into places like Shagai Fort in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). Perched on a rocky outcrop near the Afghan border, Shagai became a byword for misery. Internees lived in “primitive conditions,” battling extreme heat, malnutrition, and the psychological torment of indefinite detention.

By contrast, senior civil servants and high-ranking military officers were often interned in “family camps.” The Warsak Dam camp, near Peshawar, became a showcase facility. Here, senior bureaucrats like Shafiul Azam, the former chief secretary of East Pakistan, lived in better facilities. Yet they were prisoners nonetheless, their lives circumscribed by barbed wire and the whims of their guards.

Chattha’s typology of these camps—from the “hell holes” of Qadirabad (Mandi Bahauddin) to the relative stability of Warsak—nuances our understanding of internment. It was a system designed not just for containment but for leverage. The high profile internees were assets, preserved to be traded for the Pakistani generals held in India. The ordinary soldiers and civilians were mere ballast.

The book describes the squalid conditions of these camps, noting the “primitive conditions” and the psychological toll of being isolated and abandoned:

“The camps effectively served as ghettos, pushing so-called disloyal Bengali citizens out of sight, and reaffirmed an implicit notion that the rights of citizenship were not uniform across ethnic and regional lines. (p 143)

The barracks, which are supposed to house about 40 soldiers, number in the hundreds. Each group has ten to fifteen feet of space on each side, with a vertical road in the middle. (p 65)

For months, Wasi’s family in Bangladesh remained oblivious to his fate and well-being until he wrote to them from Kharian on 2 August 1973: ‘We are all well. Hope the same of you. Adapted ourselves to the situation, keeping ourselves fully occupied. Warm regards to all”. (p 67)

Lives in limbo

One of the book’s valuable contributions is its focus on what it terms “stranded Bengalis” outside the camps. This group, detailed in Chapter 5, were those who were not formally interned but were left destitute and vulnerable in cities like Karachi and Islamabad. The text describes how these individuals, often former employees who had been summarily dismissed, were plunged from positions of relative comfort into poverty. 

Pakistan did not officially recognise its Bengali population as refugees or as a detained community. Which hindered passage of international relief and support services through aid organisations like United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and International Committee of the Red Cross.’ (p 216)

They relied on “Langar Khana Scheme or gruel kitchens”, charity from sympathetic non-Bengalis, and the remarkable “grapevine communications network” they established among themselves. This network, and the creation of the Bengali Welfare and Repatriation Committee (BWRC), is a powerful example of what the book’s conclusion terms “defensive resistance”—a testament to the resilience and agency of a community under duress.

One of the most remarkable achievements of Bengali doctors in captivity was the establishment of an entire private health service called Free Medical Scheme (FMS) – a courageous enterprise. The BWRC divided the FMS into ten different Bengali neighbourhoods in Karachi, establishing thirteen clinics and ten dispensaries where eighteen doctors sat. (p 212) 

The book shines brightest when it moves beyond the official archives to the lived experiences of the internees. Mr Chattha has gathered an impressive collection of memoirs, diaries, and interviews that give voice to this silenced population. We meet people like Lieutenant Commander Abu Zahir Nizam, whose correspondence (p 64) with a West Pakistani friend reveals the desperate longing for news of home. We read of the absurdities of camp life, where senior officers tried to maintain a semblance of hierarchy and dignity while arguing over sweepers’ duties. The “ethos of solidarity” described by the author is moving; in camps like Qadirabad, internees organised schools for their children, set up clinics using dismissed Bengali doctors, and even staged cultural performances to keep morale afloat.

Yet, the suffering was acute. The uncertainty was perhaps the cruelest torture. Families were separated; letters were censored or lost. The fear of reprisals was constant, fueled by the rhetoric of the Pakistani press, which painted every Bengali as a fifth columnist responsible for the breakup of the country. The “Free Medical Scheme” established by Bengali doctors in Karachi to serve their destitute community—after being barred from government hospitals—stands as a testament to their resilience in the face of state apathy.

Mr Chattha included exaggerations on all sides – propaganda cartoons and clips from newspapers in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. 

The government also prepared a short film, Ghaddar (Traitors), based on the ‘white paper’, which had to be played in cinemas before any feature film by law. Audiences watched stories of heinous crimes by Bengalis, including rape and sexual exploitation of Bihari women in East Pakistan. (p 47)

Indeed, besides the Pakistan government, the Jamiat-Islami and Biharis who arrived from East Pakistan, following its independence spearheaded public mobilisation against Bengalis. 

For the Bengalis in Karachi, security became the paramount need of the hour. The uprooting of Bengalis saw the resettlement of Biharis on their property and houses throughout the year. (p 48)

Escapes 

In Chapter 6, “Escape or Die”, that reads like a thriller, Chattha describes perilous escape routes – by air, sea, land, mountains and deserts – adopted by desperate Bengalis as it was becoming apparent that repatriation settlements would take a long while. Living, merely existing, in Pakistan amid wide social animosity, was becoming very difficult. There were chatters of putting them on trial, if Pakistani POWs face war crime trials. As in other human tragic tales, this chapter captures some gruelling tales of escapes, while the Pakistani authorities offered cash rewards and punishment to those (who were aiding Bengalis to cross different borders) to stop this escapade, rather successfully. 

Some perished, some lost their lifesavings in attempts to escape: 

One escapee from Barisal described his 500 miles travel by truck with fifty other Bengalis from Karachi to Quetta: 

Pathan agent who arranged the transportation to Afghanistan paid Pakistani officials along the route and at the border to let the truck pass. But after the truck entered the hills of lawless tribal territory on the Afghan side, the driver stopped it, ordered his passengers to line up and seized their money and valuables. [We] paid Rs. 1000 for the truck journey. (p 236)

A few notable high-profile Bengalis also escaped. For example:

Shahnaz Rahmatullah Begum (1952–2019), the famous Bengali singer who enjoyed fame in Pakistan, fled on the very day she was due to appear at a charity concert to raise funds for the POWs in January 1973… Her example proved to Bengalis who worried that they might be forgotten that escape offered heroic acclaim. (p 252)    

Triangular hostage game 

The internment of Bengalis cannot be understood in isolation. Chapter 7, “The Politics of Triangular Repatriation”, delves into the complex politics of repatriation. The internment of Bengalis was directly linked to the Pakistani POWs held in India. This created a political triangle of Pakistan, India, and the newly formed Bangladesh, each with a different set of demands and priorities.

Mr Chattha’s analysis exposes how this human misery was exploited as a bargaining chip. The Pakistani state used the POWs’ plight to inflame nationalistic passions, with politicians offering to trade their own sons for the return of the soldiers. At the same time, the Pakistani government threatened to put the interned Bengalis on trial if Bangladesh pursued war crimes charges against the Pakistani soldiers.

At stake was also the recognition of Bangladesh by Pakistan and Arab nations and subsequently at the UN. This diplomatic high-stakes poker game is presented not just as a matter of statecraft, but as a deeply human drama, one that prolonged the suffering of tens of thousands.

A diplomatic solution finally came in August 1973 with the signing of a tripartite agreement. Pakistan consented to repatriate its Bengali internees in exchange for the release of its prisoners of war from India. By mid-1974, nearly 120,000 Bengalis had returned home. But their ordeal was far from over.

Second exile

In Bangladesh, their return was met not with celebration, but with suspicion and scorn. Branded as collaborators and dismissed from service, many were denied promotions and cruelly labelled “bastard repatriates.” Shafiul Azam, East Pakistan’s former chief secretary, was blacklisted for appearing in a Pakistani documentary. Tabarak Hussain, a senior foreign service officer, was demoted upon his return for having “stayed behind” to protect his family.

These repatriates faced a new kind of exile. They were seen as tainted, carrying a “Pakistani mentality” incompatible with the spirit of the new nation. Their suffering was not heroic; it was inconvenient. It was a silent story, a wound unacknowledged by official history. For their children, the stigma of having a “repatriated father” was a social and psychological burden.

“Ora Fire Elo,” a moving foreword to Mr Chattha’s book written by Bangladeshi historian Naeem Mohaiemen, describes the ordeals, disappointment and hostility faced by Bengalis returning from Pakistan. Among these were Mohaiemen’s own father who was a surgeon in the Army Medical Corps, and had been posted to a West Pakistan hospital. Dr Mohaiemen became captive with his son and wife in Fort Sandeman Camp in Baluchistan. In the final paragraph of the foreword Mohaiemen recounts a breakneck speed drive to the airport, in a fear that at any moment, the Pakistan government would reverse decisions and cancel all flights to Dhaka. 

Mohaiemen’s foreword poignantly describes how, even in post-liberation Bangladesh, the memory of these internees was a source of discomfort. They were not seen as returning heroes, but, to quote Bichitra, as a “national problem”— the officers and civil servants whose expectations of a warm welcome were unmet, while the majority of subaltern returnees faded back into anonymity. 

Legacy (of silence)

Why has this story remained untold for so long? History is written by the victors, the saying goes; but it is curated by the survivors, and often redacted by the state. In Pakistan, the state’s official discourse has simply erased the internment altogether, a form of “necessary silencing” for a nation that had to reconfigure its identity after a traumatic loss. 

In the end, the book estimates, over 3 million “stateless” people lived in Dhaka (Geneva Camp) and Karachi (Machar informal settlements) making them a big slums and communities of undocumented people in South Asia. (p 293) 

In the concluding chapter Mr Chattha remarks: 

What we have in place of history is a shelf full of memoirs of generals and bureaucrats, who have written self-serving books about their involvement in events that led to the most significant political crisis in Pakistan’s history. (p 302)

In Bangladesh, too, there has been a reluctance to center this narrative. The history focuses on the freedom fighters (Mukti Bahini) and the victims of the genocide. The repatriated officials, often viewed with suspicion for having been in the West wing during the war, occupy an uneasy place in the national pantheon. They were often demoted or sidelined, tagged with the pejorative label of “repatriates.”

Half a century on, the story of these forgotten hostages remains largely untold. The internment of Bengalis remains a moral wound— unhealed, unspoken, and unseen.

Thus, ultimately, the book’s greatest achievement lies in its ability to break through the “political forgetting” that has long characterised the subcontinent and its post-colonial conflicts. By gathering unused archival sources, literary accounts, and personal testimonies, Mr Chattha has not only written a history of a forgotten internment. He has provided a sobering lesson on the fragility of citizenship, the state’s capacity for violence against its own people, and the ways in which historical trauma can be consciously or unconsciously suppressed. 

Citizens to Traitors is a dense, rigorously researched academic work, but it retains a deep humanity. It is not merely a catalogue of misery but a documentation of resilience. The image of human suffering  haunts the reader long after the book is closed.

Mr Chattha has done a great service to South Asian history. He has recovered the voices of those who were doubly silenced—first by the prisons of Pakistan, and then by the selective memory of their own liberated nation. For anyone seeking to understand the deep scars of 1971, and the cynical machinery of post-colonial statecraft, this book is essential reading. 

It is a stark reminder that in the calculus of nations, the citizen is often the first casualty.

Dr. Ilyas Chattha is a Fellow at Oxford University and Professor of History at Department of History, Lahore University of Management Sciences. 

Irfan Chowdhury is an opinion writer.