Ilyas Chattha - Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971–1974

This book talk examines the experiences of more than half a million Bengalis in (West) Pakistan who, in the aftermath of the 1971 Bangladesh War, were reclassified as ‘traitors’, interned, and stripped of their rights. Officially justified as a reciprocal measure following India's confinement of over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war, the internment transformed Bengali citizens into internal enemy subjects through extrajudicial punishment and disenfranchisement. Drawing on new archival records and material evidence from former internment camps, the talk recovers the experiences of those erased from dominant histories of 1971. In doing so, it demonstrates how political rupture enabled the postcolonial state to suspend legal protections and redefine the boundaries of citizenship, exposing the fragility of legal identity and belonging. More broadly, the talk interrogates the relationship between sovereign power, citizenship without belonging, and denaturalisation on suspicion of treason, offering new perspectives on the making and unmaking of citizens in modern South Asia. About the Speaker: Dr. Ilyas Chattha is a historian of modern South Asia specialising in postcolonial citizenship, displacement, collective violence, and the politics of belonging. Before joining LUMS, he has held affiliations with the Universities of Oxford, Southampton and Warwick. He is the author of the award-winning Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971–1974 (Cambridge, 2024), The Punjab Borderland: Mobility, Materiality and Militancy, 1947–1987 (Cambridge, 2022), and Partition and Locality: Violence, Migration, and Development in Gujranwala and Sialkot, 1947–1961 (Oxford, 2012). His current research examines the history of Enemy Property in South Asia, exploring the intersections of property, citizenship, and state formation across the 1947 Partition and the 1965 and 1971 wars. His work has been published in leading journals, including Modern Asian Studies, History Workshop Journal, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.