The breakup of Pakistan in 1971—marked by a bloody civil war and military defeat by India—remains shrouded in layers of silence, making it difficult to ferret out the truth from the mistruths. The war ended with over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war (POWs) captured in East Pakistan-turned-Bangladesh, who were then transferred to Indian custody. Pakistan responded by interning roughly the same number of Bengali co-religionists in West Pakistan as leverage for the return of its captured POWs. Neither group would return home immediately in what arguably became one of the most significant cases of mutual mass internment post-1945. Over half a century after the 1971 war, the internment of Bengalis remains a non-event in the most significant political crisis in Pakistan’s history. Drawing on a wide range of untapped sources, this talk traces the trajectory of this crisis of captivity in which the Bengalis found themselves as rightless citizens with ‘traitor’ and ‘enemy’ status after the war.
Educated at the universities of Warwick and Southampton, Ilyas Chattha is Associate Professor of History at LUMS. Before this, he was based at the University of Southampton where he completed his PhD in 2009. He is the author of ‘They Called Us Traitors’: The Hidden History of Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971-1974 (Cambridge, 2025), The Punjab Borderland (Cambridge, 2022), and Partition and Locality (Oxford, 2012). His work has also appeared in Modern Asian Studies, History Workshop Journal, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Contemporary South Asia, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and International Journal of the History of Sport, as well as several edited volumes. His current research focuses on the legacies of the 1971 War and Enemy Property in South Asia.