This exploration has shown that the 1971 wartime experience of Bengalis residing in Pakistan as citizens remained rather distinct from the concepts of ‘mere life’ and ‘bare life’ theorised by Arendt and Agamben. Unlike Nazi Germany, which denationalised Jews before gassing them in concentration camps, the Pakistani government interned Bengalis as disenfranchised citizens. This distinguishes the Bengali experience of human rights alienability in the nation state system even when individuals have not ceased to be citizens of a state. The concept of human rights alienability hinges not on citizenship alone, but on a deeper sense of belonging within a political community – the right to have rights as Arendt puts it. Bengalis were still Pakistani citizens; the state did not rescind their citizenship, that is, they were not even stateless in a strictly legal sense. Nonetheless, they had devolved into rightless citizens, or mere bodies.

By labelling them as ghaddar because of their ethnolinguistic identity, the Pakistani state stripped them of their entitlement to a right-bearing political subjectivity as citizens, hence making it possible to subject them to violence. By invoking colonial-era laws for the DPRs, the state legally notified zones of exception in the form of an internment camp where the Bengalis were to be kept. In this way, the Bengali citizen was transformed into an internal other through the labelling of ghaddar, whose bodies had to be marked out both legally and socially as that of a traitor, after which they could be interned without any consequences. The legally calibrated disenfranchisement of citizens and their transformation into traitors was an act of retribution but a calculated move to secure the Pakistani POWs from India and personnel from Bangladesh. It was also tied to precluding the POWs from being tried for war crimes and to recognising Bangladesh as a sovereign state.