Citizens to traitors: Bengali internment in Pakistan, 1971–1974

This talk explains an overlooked aspect of the 1971 Bangladesh War by focusing on the mass internment of Bengali civilians in West Pakistan.

It considers how hundreds of thousands of Bengalis were recast as internal enemies, and how suspicions of treason redefined citizenship without belonging and legitimised mass nonjudicial punishment through internment. By engaging these themes, the talk examines how wartime governance reshapes the boundaries of citizenship and sovereignty, explaining how states mobilise suspicion to redefine inclusion and exclusion during periods of political upheaval.

Meet our speakers and chair

Ilyas Chattha teaches History at LUMS and is the author of Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971–1974 (Cambridge, 2025); The Punjab Borderland (Cambridge, 2022); and Partition and Locality (Oxford, 2012); his upcoming project is on the Evacuee & Enemy Property in South Asia.

Nayanika Mookherjee is a Professor of Political Anthropology in Durham University and Co-Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies. She was awarded the 2025 Rivers Memorial Medal for outstanding contributions to anthropology, with an emphasis on fieldwork and a significant body of theoretical literature. Her recent publication includes the edited book "On Irreconciliation" (2022) and she was invited to deliver the 2023 Firth lecture on this theme at the ASA nnual conference. Based on her widely-reviewed and acclaimed book The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories and the Bangladesh War of 1971, in 2019 she co-authored a graphic novel and animation film: Birangona and ethical testimonies of sexual violence during conflict (funded by ESRC) and received the 2019 Praxis Award. She has published extensively on anthropology of violence, ethics, memorialisation and aesthetics and research on gendered violence during wars, debates on irreconciliation and transnational adoption. Her work on Irreconciliation has been extended by scholars to various theoretical frameworks of that of repair, climate change, mental health, adoption and studies of various forms of authoritarianisms and post-authoritarianisms. Drawing on her research on memorialisation, she is co-leading a project on Durham’s Black History, which has developed a walking tour in collaboration with Durham Cathedral. It explores the relationship between Durham’s history of enslavement, mining and imperialism. She is finalising her manuscript Arts of Irreconciliation and continuing her research on transnational adoption and the Bangladesh War.

Dina M. Siddiqi is Clinical Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University. A cultural anthropologist by training, her research puts into conversation critical development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of Islam and labor. She has published extensively on garment supply chains and the cultural politics of Islam, gender, and nationalism in Bangladesh. Her publications are available on https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dina-Siddiqi. Siddiqi sits on the editorial boards of Contemporary South Asia, Dialectical Anthropology, Asian Anthropology, and the Journal of Bangladesh Studies. She is on the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS), and an Advisory Council member of the South Asian feminist network, Sangat. Until recently, she served on the board of Sakhi for South Asian Survivors. She has frequently collaborated with Bangladeshi human rights organizations including Ain o Salish Kendra, Nagorik Uddyog, and Bangladesh Legal and Services Trust (BLAST). Siddiqi is currently working on a book provisionally entitled Garment Nation: Muslim Women, Industrial Labor, and the Intimacies of Capital in Bangladesh.

Mahvish Ahmad is an Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics. Before joining LSE, she was an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cambridge. Earlier, Mahvish was a journalist covering military and insurgent violence in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, and co-founded the bilingual Urdu/English magazine Tanqeed with Madiha Tahir.

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