‘Enemies within’: How Pakistan rounded up Bengalis into interment camps as leverage after 1971

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.

Chatta'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.

With 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war in Indian custody after the war, the Pakistani state made a move of calculated realpolitik. It rounded up over 81,000 of its former Bengali citizens – civil and military personnel along with their families – into camps as leverage.

According to Chatta's research, there were estimated to be about 400,000 Bengalis in erstwhile West Pakistan after 1971. While ordinary Bengalis were not interned, they faced strict scrutiny. The war intensified patriotic sentiment in Pakistan. Bengalis were immediately suspected and could be arrested and detained under the Defense of Pakistan Rules.

It took a few agonising years for an exchange to take place. The Bengalis stranded in Pakistan, cast as “enemies within”, were finally repatriated in 1974 in a tripartite negotiation.

Organised in seven aptly named chapters, the book offers a piercing conclusion. It goes beyond high-level geopolitics to a human-scale reconstruction of events.

The first chapter, “Making of a Traitor”, shows how the real reasons for the war – like longstanding regional and political inequality – were recast into a national story in West Pakistan, portraying the Bengalis as villains who acted against the country that was supposed to unite Indian Muslims.

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.

From this foundation, the narrative shifts to the lived experience of internment. The author meticulously catalogues the diverse experiences of Bengalis – not a monolithic group but including military staff, civil servants, students, and workers.

Chapters on “Military Encampment” and “Civilian Internment” detail the distinctions between these experiences. Military personnel and high-ranking civil servants were held in designated cantonment camps, while a broader civilian population, including those laid off from factories, found themselves in squalid camps. The author describes the ‘primitive conditions' and the psychological toll of being isolated and abandoned.

One of the book's most valuable contributions is its focus on the “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.

They were also the target of attacks from members of the Jamiat-Islami and Biharis who arrived from erstwhile East Pakistan and spearheaded public mobilisation against them. As the Bengalis were forced out or fled West Pakistan, Biharis were resettled in their abandoned homes and properties.

These Bengalis, many summarily dismissed from jobs, were quickly plunged from relative comfort into poverty. They relied on the “Langar Khana” or gruel kitchen, charity, and a crucial “grapevine communications network”.

This network exemplifies what Chatta terms ‘defensive resistance,' highlighting the community's resilience under duress. They also established a Bengali Welfare and Repatriation Committee and a Free Medical Scheme, a private health service hailed as a major achievement by Bengali doctors. While not in “captivity” in internment camps, these physicians, unable to leave West Pakistan, established 13 clinics and 10 dispensaries across 10 of their neighbourhoods in Karachi.

As the author notes, Pakistan's refusal to officially recognise its Bengali population as refugees or as a detained community hindered passage of international relief and support services through aid organisations like United Nations Children's Fund and International Committee of the Red Cross.

The chapter “Escape or Die” outlines grueling, desperate escape attempts by Bengalis by air, sea, land, mountains, and deserts when it became clear that repatriation was distant and existing in Pakistan, amidst social animosity, was difficult.

Pakistani authorities offered cash rewards for apprehending escapees and punished those who aided them. Some perished or lost their savings. One account tells of 50 Bengalis paying Rs. 1000 each for a 500-mile truck trip from Karachi to Quetta. Their Pathan agent bribed officials to cross into Afghanistan, but the driver subsequently robbed them of their remaining money and valuables.

A few notable high-profile Bengalis also escaped, like Shahnaz Rahmatullah Begum (1952-2019), a renowned Bengali singer whose Urdu songs were also popular in Pakistan, including patriotic favourites Sohni Dharti and Jeevay Pakistan. She “fled on the very day she was due to appear at a charity concert to raise funds for the POWs in January 1973. Only two weeks earlier, President Bhutto had joined her on stage at a local auditorium to sing the latest patriotic pop song in duet”.

However, “the biggest blow to Pakistan”, notes Chatta, “was the escape of its foreign secretary and veteran loyalist, S. M. Yusuf (1966-1972), who left Islamabad on the night of 19 January and emerged in Kabul in February, from where he flew to New Delhi and then Dacca. His escape was more damaging for the state than any other.”

“The Politics of Triangular Repatriation” outlined in Chapter 7 delves into the complex politics of repatriation. The internment of Bengalis was directly linked to the Pakistani POWs in India. This created a political triangle of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, each with a different set of demands and priorities.

Chatta's analysis exposes how this human misery was exploited as a bargaining chip. All three sides exaggerated and tried to paint others as villains and reason for the tragic impasse. The book includes propaganda cartoons and clips from newspapers in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.

The Pakistani state used the POWs' plight to inflame nationalistic passions – politicians offered to trade their own sons in return for the imprisoned soldiers. They also threatened to put the interned Bengalis on trial if Bangladesh pursued war crimes charges against the Pakistani soldiers for war crimes.

At stake was also the recognition of Bangladesh, by Pakistan, the Arab nations and the UN. The author presents this diplomatic, high-stakes poker game 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 emerged in August 1973 with the signing of a tripartite agreement. Pakistan would repatriate its Bengali internees in exchange for its POWs in India. By mid-1974, nearly 120,000 Bengalis had returned home. But their ordeal was far from over.

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.

A moving foreword, “Ora Fire Elo”, by the US-based Bangladeshi historian Naeem Mohaiemen, describes the ordeal, disappointment and hostility faced by Bengalis returning from Pakistan. These included Mohaiemen's father, a physician in the Army Medical Corps who had been honoured by Pakistan for his service on the frontlines of the 1965 India-Pakistan war.

After 1971, Major Mohaiemen was detained with his wife and son Naeem, then two years old, in Fort Sandeman Camp in Baluchistan. Mohaiemen recounts their breakneck speed drive to the airport after their release, in fear that Pakistan would reverse its decision and cancel flights to Dhaka.

Mohaiemen poignantly describes how, even in post-liberation Bangladesh, these former internees were not seen as returning heroes. Unlike “ninety percent” of those returning who “would be satisfied with two basic meals a day (and) blend in with the hungry masses of Bangladesh”, this “remaining ‘ten percent' could become a national problem”.

In Pakistan, the official discourse has simply erased the internments altogether, a form of “necessary silencing” for a nation that had to reconfigure its identity after a traumatic loss.

In the end, estimates the author, more than three million “stateless” people were left in Dhaka's Geneva Camp and Karachi's Machar Colony, making them massive slums of undocumented people in Southasia.

Chatta has painstakingly dredged through government records and documents for this book, including intelligence records such as Daily Situation Report prepared by Special Intelligence Branch along with other archival and personal information via interviews.

While researching for the project (2015-2023), Chatta faced myriad challenges and discouragement, including from academics. Many advised him to protect the interest of the Pakistan state and its narrative.

Admirably, he persisted because, “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,” as he comments in the concluding chapter.

Ultimately, the book's greatest achievement is how it breaks through the “political forgetting” that has long characterized the region and its post-colonial conflicts. By gathering unused archival sources, literary accounts, and personal testimonies, the author 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.

After a long hiatus, as both nations again attempt to improve relations and people-to-people connections, various factors continue to be at play, like war crimes, the Bihari issue, the proximity of both countries to India, and geopolitics. Meanwhile, ordinary people in both places continue to yearn for freedom from suppression and improved economic opportunities.

The book reflects the eternal, simultaneous struggle of good and evil; once unleashed, evil is hard to contain, causing widespread suffering. Yet, the history recorded here also shows the human spirit's ability to overcome adversity.

This is an essential read for understanding the enduring legacies of the 1971 war beyond the diplomatic corridors of power, focusing on the memory and trauma of those who lived through its aftermath.

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.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature.

Source: Scroll
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