The Bengalis in Pakistan are starving…. One in ten is suffering from an absolute shortage of food. Twice that have protein and vitamin deficiencies, including women and children…. Harassment and discrimination have become part of everyday life…. The great impact has been to upper-class Bengalis, who are now treated as ‘niggers,’ or lower class…. But the small amount of additional discrimination to the lower classes affects many more people already at the edge of the cliff….

These are the observations of Jack Smith's report ‘Stranded Bengalis in Pakistan: The Winter 1972’, which provides ordinary Bengalis’ post-war experiences in Pakistan, detailing the despair the community faced and its response to it, from resilience to resistance. Even though most ordinary Bengalis were not interned, they were still under strict surveillance by the Pakistani government. They were not only subjected to curfews, censorship and exclusion from sensitive areas, but were also barred from leaving the country. Their experiences remain outside mainstream historiography. This chapter examines the internment experiences of Bengalis beyond camps and their discursive efforts to establish self-support networks while maintaining connections to their motherland, Bangladesh. It examines how the Bengalis responded to their wartime adversity by building a self-sustaining support system in captivity through a proliferation of Bengali associations, particularly through the actions of the Bengali governing body of the BWRC.

This chapter shows how the Bengalis drew upon their own meagre resources for a time and organised a rich array of assistance projects, such as free kitchens, schools, loan schemes and medical facilities, for those who needed help during the long post-wartime captivity, 1971–1974.