In the spring of 1972, the Ennals Mission, led by David Ennals, a British MP, visited Pakistan. The mission was informed by some members of the ‘stranded Bengali community’ in Pakistan that ‘a large number of senior Pakistani officers [have sought] to stop the Bengali officers for coming to the offices. They threatened action against the Bengali officials, if Government did not accept their demand.’1 Picking up from the previous chapter and offering a counterpart to the story of the capture and internment of the Bengali military personnel, this chapter explores the wartime experience of the Bengali civil servants. It traces their journey from being citizens and serving officials/officers of the Pakistani state to becoming marked collectively as a potential ‘traitor’ community, a threat to national security. Their situation highlights an important dimension of the idea of citizenship and the making of disenfranchised citizens of a nation state in a wartime-like situation. Some of the most detailed accounts of internment come from these servicemen who belonged to the privileged classes of Pakistan's Bengali community and were to be used as hostages in the international negotiations to free the captured Pakistani POWs. This chapter seeks to explain how and why.

The Bengali civil servants were interned in two stages: first, in their homes during and immediately after the Pakistan army surrendered in December 1971; second, in different camps after the Bangladeshi government announced the ‘trial of war crimes’ of the Pakistani POWs in early 1973. The chapter begins by explaining the Bengali servicemen's dismissal from government services before moving on to tracing their mass internment.