The break-up of Pakistan in 1971, following a bloody civil war and military defeat at the hands of India, remains shrouded in silence, distortion, and selective remembrance. The war ended with more than 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war captured in East Pakistan, soon to become Bangladesh, and transferred to Indian custody. In response, Pakistan interned a roughly equivalent number of Bengalis in West Pakistan, using them as leverage in negotiations over the repatriation of its POWs. Neither group returned home immediately, making this one of the largest cases of mutual mass internment in the post-1945 world. Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped sources, this book reconstructs that crisis of captivity and foregrounds the experience of Bengalis who, in the aftermath of the Bangladesh War, were rendered rightless citizens marked simultaneously as traitors and enemies. More than fifty years later, their internment remains largely absent from accounts of the most consequential political rupture in Pakistan’s history. This book examines both the history of that internment and the conditions that produced its historiographical erasure. The book offers a broader account of citizenship and political belonging in the postcolonial state, contributes to scholarship on internment and encampment in situations of conflict, and engages with the conceptual vocabularies of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, particularly the ideas of “mere life” and “bare life.”

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Author

Ilyas Chattha 

Professor Ilyas Chattha teaches History at LUMS University. 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). He has also published extensively in reputed academic journals, including Modern Asian Studies, History Workshop Journal, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Indian Economic and Social History Review, as well as in numerous edited volumes. His upcoming project is on the Evacuee & Enemy Property in South Asia.

Chair

Professor Humeira Iqtidar

Humeira is a Professor of Politics at King's College London. Her research bring together postcolonial theory, comparative political theory and Islamic thought with a focus on modern South Asia. Thematically, her research has been concerned with questions of justice and tolerance, the place of religion in contemporary political imagination, the politics of knowledge, and the legacies of colonialism. Methodologically, she has argued for greater interdisciplinary and cross disciplinary research.