Historiography has come of age in Pakistan. I find the writings of Ilyas Chattha, Ali Qasmi’s Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan (2023), and Tahir Kamran’s Chequered Past, Uncertain Future: The History of Pakistan (2024) refreshing, stimulating, strongly interpretive, and inviting of critical thinking in the broader context of Pakistan Studies. More importantly, these historians are raising issues of fundamental importance: who is a citizen? Are our citizens aware of their rights and responsibilities? What happens when the state-citizen relationship is broken?

What are the state's obligations to its citizens, and how may a narrative on national identity be constructed? These are complex issues with deep historical, cultural, ethnic, and religious overlaps and demand deliberation, dialogue, and serious reflection among scholars, policymakers, and proponents of civil society across Pakistan.

Given this context, in my assessment, Ilyas Chattha's Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971–74 has three outstanding features. First, it is trailblazing research on a sensitive and under-the-rug topic, which disentangles state behaviour, conduct, and the story of the breakup. Second, it has uncovered substantive new data, an original contribution; he has dug into and used intelligence and police sources with utmost care, academic rigour, and assiduousness.

Earlier research that I can recall, which used similar sources, was a study by British historian Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (1997), who used declassified intelligence files and provided a provocative account of the process of Indian independence and the partition of British India. Third, Chattha has drawn attention to an issue of pivotal significance: what happens when the state-citizen relationship is broken?

He has traced the frequency and casualness with which the term traitor or ghaddar is used by the Pakistani state and becomes part of the societal narrative (in his book, Ali Qasmi addresses this issue systematically in the broader Pakistani historical perspective).

The central argument of Ilyas Chattha's Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971–74 is that the Pakistani state, confronted with the collapse of national unity in 1971, redefined a segment of its own citizens, the Bengalis of East Pakistan, into a category of suspect people who were collectively treated as “traitors” or ghaddar.

Through internment, surveillance, and restrictions on movement, citizenship was effectively suspended. The book is therefore not merely a history of Bengali internees; it is a study of how states redefine citizenship, loyalty, and belonging during times of political crisis.

The state collectively categorised Bengalis as “traitors” and unreliable citizens, yet it simultaneously distinguished among them according to rank, profession, and usefulness

The state collectively categorised Bengalis as “traitors” and unreliable citizens, yet it simultaneously distinguished among them according to rank, profession, and usefulness

Drawing on the work of Sharika Thiranagama and Tobias Kelly, Chattha argues that “traitor” is not simply a legal category but a political construction. Thus, the critical question is not who actually committed treason, but who possesses the power to define others as traitors.

To illustrate who has the power to define who is........

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