Have you ever heard of concentration camps in Pakistan? Let me take you to the horrifying camps where citizens were subjected to rape, murder, unlawful detainment, torture, mass starvation, and severe racialization, driven by a superiority complex and state narcissism. Professor Ilyas Chattha’s book, From Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971-74, published in 2025, leads us into one of the darkest and most silenced corridors of national history: the systematic internment of Bengali citizens by the Pakistani state following the secession of East Pakistan.

More than 81,000 Bengalis were interned across West Pakistan, punished for their ethnicity, not their actions.

More than 81,000 Bengalis, including civil servants, military officers, professionals, day laborers, and innocent children, were detained in dozens of internment camps across West Pakistan. They were not criminals. They were former citizens of the same state. Being Bengali transformed them into “traitors” or ghaddars, and “enemy agents.”

The camps were established in Kohat, Mianwali, Harappa, Qadirabad, Zhob, Fort Sandeman, Shaghai, and Chak Daulat, where Bengali families lived in poor, overcrowded, and filthy conditions. Diseases like cholera, dysentery, and chickenpox were rampant. The author shows that the state’s aim was not simply hostage-taking but humiliation, leverage, and erasure.

The scenes from Qadirabad Colony near Gujranwala are striking: internees describe “scorpion-infested huts” and the use of steel trunks as birthing beds to avoid venomous bites. At the Harappa school camp, rooms meant for cattle were used for family quarters. In Fort Sandeman, pregnant women gave birth under torchlight in open fields. One account recounts that women used tissue paper to hide their faces while defecating in the open.

Chattha unearths a 1972 government directive that framed Bengali civil servants as state assets to be retained “as bargaining leverage” in negotiations over Pakistani prisoners of war held by India. How could POWs be exchanged for innocent civilians? Civil servants were categorized into “white,” “grey,” or “black.” A questionnaire was circulated, asking whether Bengalis wanted to serve in East or West Pakistan. A “yes” for East meant dismissal from service and forced exit from the country. In essence, they became stateless hostages in the nation they once helped administer.

Among the most heartbreaking images in the book are those of malnourished children—kids holding a pen, pleading for the release of their parents. These images, drawn from newspaper archives and Red Cross reports, pierce through the bureaucracy of state violence.

State documents prove Bengali civil servants were held as “bargaining leverage” for POW exchanges.

The author lists numerous Bengali civil servants who were interned; over 20 camps were spread across Pakistan. In 1972, 43 Bengali Class I officers were intercepted while trying to flee through Balochistan. Guards were instructed to open fire on anyone who attempted to flee. Some escaped, others were arrested, and many bribed their way out. One Bengali, when caught, said that if he were to die in his region, he would be buried according to rituals, but if he died in Pakistan, his body would be served to dogs.

If the Pakistani state criminalized Bengalis through silence and suspicion, the Bangladeshi state received them with ambivalence and betrayal. When the exchange began in late 1973, facilitated by the Red Cross and international organizations, many returnees were greeted with indifference or hostility. A 1972 editorial in Bichitrai voiced concern that “the ten percent” of returning Bengalis, professionals and officers, would disrupt the civil-military balance. It predicted that “the rest would soon disappear into the hungry masses.” It was a prophecy of oblivion.

Kazi Shahed Ahmed, a repatriated military officer, wrote in his memoir that there was no welcome, no recognition, not even a place to stay. He was told, “You are a repatriate, not a freedom fighter.” He was later branded a “bastard” for refusing to take an oath of allegiance under humiliating conditions. Many other officers were denied promotions, pensions, or postings.

The cruelty was systemically designed. In one internal memo, General Bhutto warned that if any Biharis were harmed in Bangladesh, “not one Bengali will go back from here alive.” Chattha quotes Abdul Mohaiemen, a military doctor, who later accepted a position in Libya to escape the stigma of being a POW returnee.

What makes Chattha’s book a must-read is not just its archival diligence but its clarity about the ethical stakes. These were not blunders. They were deliberately state-crafted actions through internment. The Pakistani state, desperate to recover its soldiers and preserve its image, converted its citizens into pawns.

The camps institutionalized racial violence under bureaucratic logic, stripping former citizens of all legal protections.

Further, the stories of women in the camps are harrowing. Rita recalls that a group of people came to her home in Karachi and forcibly took her away while her father helplessly looked on. She was placed in a jeep and brought to a camp, where she found girls like herself. Day after day, they:

took us away in the evening and fetched us in the morning. Several girls committed suicide. They were not even buried, but their bodies were burned with acid. And those who became pregnant died before childbirth… I, too, have conceived. But what can we do? It was a great mistake to have been born a Bengali girl. Despite all this, I am still alive, although I am half dead.

From Citizens to Traitors is one of the most important South Asian history books in recent memory. It pushes us to ask: What happens to those who live between national categories? It exposes the dark features of the modern state. It is the state that decides the criteria for being a loyal or disloyal citizen. What does it mean to be a “traitor” in a state founded on arbitrary exclusions?

Chattha’s work shatters the silence around South Asia’s ghost citizens, exposing how nations erase their undesirables.

And what is the afterlife of an individual when both your homeland and your adopted nation refuse to claim you? Does the fate of these ghost citizens not expose homeland, nationality, and identity as modern myths, arbitrarily bestowed and brutally withdrawn? In recovering these ghost citizens, Ilyas Chattha has not only produced avant-garde scholarship, but he has also opened a wound that refuses to heal.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not represent the views, beliefs, or policies of the Stratheia.