From Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971–1974By Ilyas ChatthaCambridge University PressISBN: 978-1009568241330pp.

At its core, From Citizens to Traitors advances a stark and unsettling argument: in the aftermath of Pakistan’s defeat and dismemberment in 1971, the Pakistani state systematically transformed tens of thousands of its own former citizens into rightless internal enemies through the bureaucratic machinery of mass internment.

Ilyas Chattha demonstrates that the incarceration of over 80,000 Bengalis in West Pakistan between 1971 and 1974 was not an administrative aberration or wartime excess, but a calculated exercise of sovereign power — one that suspended citizenship, criminalised ethnicity and instrumentalised human lives as diplomatic leverage. By foregrounding the internment of Bengalis as a constitutive, rather than marginal, episode of the 1971 crisis, Chattha compels a rethinking of state violence, belonging and postcolonial citizenship in South Asia.

The book intervenes in a historiographical landscape long structured by silences. While the Bangladesh Liberation War has been extensively examined through the lenses of genocide, nationalism and international diplomacy, the reciprocal captivity that followed — Pakistani prisoners of war in India and Bengali civilians in Pakistan — has remained largely absent from scholarly and public memory. Chattha identifies this absence not as accidental but as politically produced.

The internment of Bengalis became a “non-event” precisely because it destabilised foundational narratives in both successor states: Pakistan’s self-image as a Muslim homeland premised on unity, and Bangladesh’s liberation narrative centred on heroic resistance. By excavating this buried history, the book performs a dual task: it reconstructs a forgotten crisis of captivity and explains the conditions that rendered it historiographically invisible.

A book of rare........

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