OVER the past two decades, the study of Pakistan’s post-independence history has grown considerably richer. As previously hidden or uncovered information sources and archives become available, and as intellectual tools to make sense of discrete events evolve, our understanding of the past grows both sharper and more complex. Within this growing repository of work, there are broadly two strands of scholarship. The first uses archives, cultural forms, and memory to reconstruct mainstream narratives of state-building, political and social change, and popular agency. This type of work is usually helpful in making sense of how the present came to be and in pushing back against homogenisation or linearity in the narration of the past. The second type of work is the uncovering of historical occurrence: events, trends, and happenings that have never been recorded because of historical amnesia and indifference or purposeful suppression. While this distinction is never neat, it is this second type that is on vivid display in historian Ilyas Chattha’s recently released book, Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan 1971-1974 . An outcome of a historian tugging at the thread of a chance, childhood encounter in central Punjab, Chattha’s work documents how ethnic Bengalis in (West) Pakistan were subjected to confinement for periods of up to three years in the aftermath of Bangladesh’s independence. As the title of the book suggests, this action was driven by heightened, paranoiac suspicion around the loyalty of ethnic Bengalis, given the ethnonationalist currents of the secessionist movement and a central state reeling from significant losses. Chattha documents that approximately 400,000 Bengalis were living in West Pakistan at the time of Bangladesh’s independence. While not all were detained, they were subjected to intense scrutiny under the Defence of Pakistan Rules, and reportedly more than 81,000 Bengalis, including military personnel, civil servants, and their families, were formally interned. This mass detention was hardly incidental, given how it formed part of a political strategy in the aftermath of the 1971 civil war. With 93,000 Pakistani POWs held in India, the state used Bengali internees as leverage in a triangular negotiation involving Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Chattha’s book provides careful documentation of the differentiated nature of internment. Military officers and senior civil servants, he writes, were confined in cantonment camps, while civilians, such as factory and service-sector workers suddenly dismissed from their jobs, were placed in overcrowded, unsanitary camps. By drawing on previously unseen personal correspondence and memory testimonies, the book details abject conditions and psychological trauma experienced by detainees now recast as ‘traitors’ in a country they had once served. Ilyas Chattha’s new book shows how formal ideals of citizenship run afoul of political exigencies and nationalist ideologies in modern states. Escape attempts form another critical historical layer of the book. Chattha records perilous journeys by land, sea, and air, often involving bribery, extortion, or death. High-profile escapes, such as those of singer Shahnaz Rahmatullah and Pakistan’s former Foreign Office official S.M. Yusuf, reflected the level of scrutiny and allowed for the mobilisation of international pressure. In fact, that last bit remains instrumental in how this episode was recovered from the margins of history. Families and well-wishers of those interned, residing abroad or in the newly independent state of Bangladesh, launched a global campaign to shed light on the situation, often taking out large adverts in international newspapers and magazines. That record was meticulously collected in the process of putting together this history. The deadlock ended only with the Tripartite Agreement of August 1973, enabling repatriation. By mid-1974, nearly 120,000 Bengalis had returned to Bangladesh. Yet their ordeal continued there: many were dismissed from service, stigmatised as collaborators, and marginalised within the new nation. It is this aspect that makes this new book not just about repression by the state, but also more broadly about how formal ideals of citizenship run afoul of political exigencies and nationalist ideologies in modern states. The Pakistani state cast one blanket of suspicion based on ethnic affiliation that led to the internment; and upon their repatriation, the Bangladeshi state cast another based on their geographic and occupational pasts. In both instances, though more in the former than the latter, standards of exception imposed by the sovereign (and supported by segments of society) created new forms of marginalisation and exclusion. While documentation for posterity’s sake is important, this new book also raises a more fundamental question: what is the point of retelling suppressed stories? There are two justifications that one can lean on in response. Firstly, state practices are never discrete occurrences. They carry histories and they possess futures. The practice of casting suspicion on a population and using that as an excuse to practise some form of collective punishment has a long history that stretches back into the colonial regime (from which our states directly derive). It was relived during the 1971 civil war, and is reflected even today in the existence of enforced disappearances and racialised regulations. Perhaps by documenting past trauma, society can be equipped to resist its repetition in the future. Secondly, there are social remnants of this particular past that still linger in Pakistan. Remnants that require immediate attention and rectification. A significant portion of the Bengali population remained outside formal camps and found themselves facing extreme precarity. These stranded Bengalis in Karachi, Islamabad, and other cities encountered social hostility, attacks from other ethnic groups, and economic dispossession. Many relied on charity kitchens and informal communication networks, especially in the absence of any infrastructure of support and care. To this day, they remain mired in difficult legal and socioeconomic conditions. One hopes that a retelling of the origins of this marginalisation will help bring attention to their plight and generate greater urgency to fix it. i X: @umairjav Published in Dawn, December 22nd, 2025