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ONE

Between War and Refuge in Jammu and Kashmir

DISPLACEMENT, BORDERS, AND THE BOUNDARIES OF POLITICAL BELONGING

THE PRINCELY STATE OF JAMMU AND KASHMIR was formed by treaty agreement between the British Colonial Government of India and the Sikh governor of Jammu in 1846. The state was ruled by the Dogra Maharajas until 1947, when internal political and armed resistance and war between the new postcolonial nation-states of India and Pakistan ended monarchical rule. The Indian Princely States were not subject to the partition of the British territories in 1947; the accession of each principality was negotiated between the monarch of the State and the leaders of both the Indian National Congress and the Pakistan Muslim League—the political parties that ran the first postcolonial governments of India and Pakistan during the period of constitution formation. When the British Government of India transferred power to the independent postcolonial states of India and Pakistan on August 14, 1947, the monarch of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to neither India nor Pakistan. Within months of independence, India and Pakistan had troops on the ground in the Princely State’s Kashmir Province. This first war between India and Pakistan was ambiguously resolved with a United Nations–negotiated ceasefire in 1949. The state was functionally divided, and nearly a quarter of its people were displaced within the territories of the former Princely State or into India and Pakistan.

This politico-geographical division was supposed to be temporary, until a United Nations–recommended referendum could be carried out. There was, at first, no question of changing the terms of legal political belonging to the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. The people of the Indian Princely States were “state subjects,” not British colonial subjects; unless an Indian monarch had acceded to one or the other of the Dominions before the Partition, the ruler’s displaced subjects were not counted as refugees who would have to be rehabilitated. Both people who were displaced by political violence in the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir between 1947 and 1949 and relief administrators in Pakistan and India made an important distinction between those (Kashmiri) refugees who were to return to their homes and those (Partition) refugees who would be resettled as permanent immigrants; “hereditary state subjects” of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir were supposed to return to their homes, lands, and properties. By the time the matter of princely state subjects was negotiated in the Karachi Agreement of March 1949, the (former) Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir was a “disputed territory” and the subject of a UN resolution. Its refugees were a specifically named part of the dispute-resolution process. Practices of identifying, regulating, and documenting Kashmiri refugees developed historically in the context of regional and international concern for (and dispute over) a Jammu-and-Kashmir that is both a former and a not-yet or a never-to-be political entity. The Hereditary State Subject provisions were adopted by the provincial successor states of both Jammu and Kashmir State (in India) and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (administered by Pakistan) as the basis of their legal frameworks for recognizing citizen-subjects of the disputed former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir.

The 1949 UN Ceasefire Line—now called the LoC (military Line of Control)—simultaneously symbolizes and obscures the historical experiences of people who live in the divided regions of the former Princely State. On post-1949 maps of India and Pakistan, the LoC is a dotted line, representing its contested status. On the ground, it has been a permeable boundary without exact demarcation that has nonetheless shaped people’s apprehension of the political landscape. It forged a frontier through landscapes that people had previously experienced as contiguous, and these displaced people encountered the line not as a specific place but as a profound shift in the ways they experienced political power. Paradoxically, the LoC has had a more concrete presence when its physical location has been less certain—during periods of warfare. Thus, the line has had a cyclical as well as historical temporality; it has become more borderlike over time, but it has shifted in each war and has been serially revisited as a site of possible territorial settlement between India and Pakistan. This speculation has made it possible to envision the LoC gone or redrawn, even while it has become more entrenched. It has become an object of ideological struggle in daily life, even as the act of transgressing it has been criminalized by the state. The LoC becomes a real social object at the moment when people encounter new regimes of power, but it does not exclusively regulate the conception of either relatedness or political belonging. Instead, the social dynamics within bisected regions of the (former) Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir reveal the importance of cross-border alliances—including those that are interrupted—to the ongoing cultural construction of social relatedness. In this sense, the greater Kashmir region was, and remains, a borderland in which forms of social regulation contest rather than buttress the regulatory processes of the state.¹

The Kashmir Dispute is often called the “unfinished business of Partition.” Explanations of the dispute paradigmatically begin by recounting the origins of the territorial dispute between India and Pakistan.² The story I tell here is different, and it has a different history. The continuing conflict in the Kashmir region is fundamentally not a territorial dispute between states. It is a struggle by the ruled to establish limits on the sovereign power of their rulers. Social groups, political parties, and the regional successor states of the monarchical State of Jammu and Kashmir employ the symbolic territoriality inherent in categories of political identity to make claims on absent and lost geographic territories through the territory of the political body. In the context of unresolved political status, the Kashmir borderlands extend not only across the disputed LoC or into the “occupied” territories but also through the indeterminate sovereignty of the bodies of the borderlands’ subjects.

The background to this story is about the conflicts and contestations for political recognition that were happening at the time of decolonization, when Kashmiri peoples’ struggles for political rights were with the monarch of Jammu and Kashmir, not with the British colonial power or with the postcolonial nation-states of India and Pakistan.

THE PRINCELY STATE OF JAMMU AND KASHMIR AT THE END OF EMPIRE

The Partition of British India was a long process of creating political and cultural (rather than simply territorial) separations.³ In this process, the postcolonial states were formed not only by dividing colonial holdings but also by dissolving the borders of hundreds of tributary polities and integrating the semi-autonomous Indian Princely States and their peoples.⁴ The postcolonial historiography of India and Pakistan has highlighted the forms of modern collective politics that were prominent in British India, but the decolonization and partition process was also shaped by political forms that emerged in the Princely States and that disappeared after their integration.⁵ In the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, an articulation of subject peoples as rights-bearing subjects developed during the period when sovereignty was vested with the monarchical court. This idea of the distinct identity and rights of the people-of-the-state (awām-e-riyāsat) or people-of-Kashmir (awām-e-kashmīr) still underlies and competes with other postcolonial articulations of political and cultural belonging.

The Indian Princely States were governed by hereditary monarchs under relationships of suzerainty and paramountcy with the British colonial government of India. How autonomous these states really were is the subject of significant debate in the historiography of South Asia.⁶ One of the challenges in the historiography of the Indian States, specifically in evaluating their relative sovereignty, has been their vast differences in size and historical state formation. There were numerous small states that commanded little autonomy (on the scale of Jammu and Kashmir’s smaller jagīrs and much smaller than its internal wazārats).⁷ There were also much larger Indian States, like Jammu and Kashmir, with composite political structures, heterogeneous regional cultures, and transregional networks of relationships to other Princely States that exercised aspects of sovereign control over their subjects.⁸ The monarchs of these more autonomous states had to establish new forms of legitimate authority over their subjects as they centralized their power during the colonial period.⁹ The Treaty of Amritsar, signed in 1846, demarcated the territorial borders of a new Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir—the riyāsat-e-jammū-okashmīr. Unlike established Indian States with hereditary thrones, Jammu and Kashmir had not had a political center of historical state expansion, and sovereignty within the state was dispersed. Like other Indian Princes, the Maharajas’ political universe included limitations on their influence in matters outside their territorial boundaries, but they enjoyed considerable security at the treaty boundaries of the state. While the Maharajas of Jammu and Kashmir struggled with British attempts to influence the internal politics of the court, the real challenge of kingship in the Princely State was to centralize power and establish new relationships between the ruler and his subjects and between the state and its political community, which eliminated the intermediate forms of layered sovereignty within the treaty state.¹⁰

The first political movements in the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir developed out of demands for protections against arbitrary rule and guarantees of patronage and employment for its subjects . Out of those movements, the “hereditary state subject” emerged as the primary category of political identity for the State’s peoples, and the legal provisions for state subject recognition were codified and elaborated by the Maharaja’s government between 1912 and 1932.¹¹ Protections from arbitrary rule were linked with establishing and recognizing land-holding rights, both usufruct and proprietary, which created a distinction between the monarchy’s sovereignty over territory and its sovereignty over its subjects. The first articulation of this distinction emerged during the period of agrarian land reforms, and the category mulkī (the people of the land) emerged as a legal–administrative category in the Kashmiri Nationals’ Law of 1912. The Hereditary State Subject Order of 1927 (amended 1932) clearly distinguished between state subjects who had rights to government office and land use and ownership versus those (non-state subjects) who did not have such rights. The concept of the awām-e-kashmīr or awām-e-riyāsat became a political category through which it was possible to articulate new limits on princely sovereignty, and Jammu and Kashmir state subjects demanded further political recognition in the form of representation and franchise.

At the historical juncture of liberation struggles against monarchical rule and the dissolution of colonial India, the relationship between land rights and protection from arbitrary rule informed both elite and popular political mobilization in the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. Between 1947 and 1949, the “Azad Kashmir Government” based in the town of Pulandri, in the Poonch Jagir, maintained the state subject as its definition of Kashmiri political identity, as did the “Emergency Interim Government of Jammu and Kashmir State” based in the city of Srinagar, the summer capital of the Princely State. After 1950, both India and Pakistan began to integrate the regions of the former Princely State that were under their control. The Princely State’s own competing successor regimes—the Government of Azad Kashmir (in Pakistan-administered territory) and the Government of Jammu and Kashmir State (in Indian-administered territory)—struggled to maintain regional autonomy from the administrator states of India and Pakistan; they did this in part by maintaining the historical distinction between the subject-citizens of the former monarchical state and citizens of the new nation-states of Pakistan and India.

The Awām-e-Riyāsat: Making the State, Making Its Subjects

In 1846, the new Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir had been a unified polity only in name, and only at its borders. The Treaty of Amritsar, which set the state’s territorial borders, was part of the negotiated settlement that ended a war between the British and Sikh rulers of the Punjab and brought the Punjab under colonial control. Within the new state were numerous hereditary estates and chieftainships that had been awarded by the Sikh court at Lahore and by the Mughal, Afghan, and Tibetan monarchs who had once had feudatory arrangement with rulers within the treaty borders.¹² With the borders of the new state secure, but internal control uncertain, the Dogra Maharajas of Jammu and Kashmir focused on consolidating political and administrative authority.¹³

The eventual internal organization of the Princely State reflected localized sociopolitical alliances as well as the monarchs’ uneven consolidation of political power within the borders established by the Treaty of Amritsar—a process by no means complete in 1947. Jammu Province, Kashmir Province, and the Frontier Ilaquas (Frontier Areas) made up the state’s three large administrative units. The administrative hierarchy was most consolidated in Jammu and Kashmir Provinces; each was divided into districts that were in turn distinguished by taxation units called tehsils. Chenani Jagir and Poonch Jagir were incorporated into Jammu Province only in the 1930s. The Frontier Ilaquas consisted of the Ladakh Wazarat, the Gilgit Agency, the vassal states of Hunza and Nagar, and the tribal region of Chilas (which was never successfully surveyed by the monarchical state). These areas had a semi-autonomous feudatory status within the Princely State, which had limited administrative control.¹⁴

To establish their power, the Princely State’s first Maharajas (Gulab Singh and Ranbir Singh) began consolidating the dispersed jāgīrdārī system of land tenancy and revenue administration, in which the revenue of a territorial estate (jāgīr) and the responsibility of governing it accrued to an appointed official (jāgīrdār) who owed allegiance to the monarch.¹⁵ Establishing a consolidated administrative hierarchy involved bringing the semi-independent hereditary jāgīrs—such as Chenani Jagir and Poonch Jagir—into a subordinate relationship with the Maharaja’s court and enforcing the state’s claim that all land was government property (khālsah).¹⁶ The Maharajas also extended the system of containment and exit permits (rehdārī) that had been used by the Sikh governors of the Kashmir Valley to the whole of the Princely State, in an effort to prevent people who were subject to taxation in the form of compulsory corvee labor (bēgār) from leaving the state or migrating out of their taxation divisions.¹⁷

Identifying awām-e-riyāsat (people of the state) as a category of political belonging, administration, and governance first developed in the 1880s, during the agrarian land reforms of the jāgīrdārī system.¹⁸ During that period, famine and excessive bēgār led to large-scale migrations to the Punjab.¹⁹ The colonial administration of Punjab wanted a stable rural agricultural population; the British India Office considered migrations a security issue because the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir had become a frontier between the British colonial empire and Russian imperial projects in Central Asia.²⁰ The land-settlement assessments in the state began in 1887, carried out by an officer of the British colonial government. British colonial permanent settlement practices were associated with the introduction of capitalist revenue systems and gradually transformed occupancy rights into proprietary rights. However, in the Princely States, these settlements transferred usufruct rights but not proprietary rights, which remained instead with the monarch, albeit in attenuated form.²¹ In Jammu and Kashmir, land reforms focused on imposing limitations on bēgār by establishing taxation assessments in cash or as a share of agricultural product and by granting occupancy and usufruct rights to cultivators. The Jammu and Kashmir Land Settlement Act identified people—kashmīr mulkī—who had usufruct claims on land and who had rights to state patronage in the form of government employment. The legislation also articulated a category of people who did not have such rights—the gairmulkī (people not of the land).²²

After the permanent settlements in Kashmir Province and Jammu Province (1887–1905), successive Maharajas faced pressure to recruit only state subjects for employment in state administration. Populist demands to reserve “Kashmir for Kashmiris” erupted, and the state’s first political parties organized protests.²³ The Kashmir for Kashmiris demand required a clear definition of who a Kashmiri was, and Maharaja Pratap Singh first established a bureaucratic definition of Jammu and Kashmir nationality in 1912. That definition was based entirely on the conferment and recognition of land occupancy and proprietary rights, and it limited state patronage to those who possessed an ijāzatnāmah (document of permission [to hold land]) issued by the Maharaja’s Darbar, or the state administrative bureaucracy. The Maharaja had full discretion to confer state-owned community land; therefore, he was empowered to confer or to withhold subject status.²⁴ This popular demand for an articulation of state identity was at first primarily about patronage, but it became increasingly connected to rights claims through the franchise and antitaxation movements of the 1920s.

The 1912 nationals definition excluded nomads and migratory people such as the Gujars and Bakerwal herders, whose grazing lands were generally held as khālsah (government property).²⁵ It also excluded residents of Jammu and Kashmir’s internal feudatory dependencies (e.g., Poonch Jagir, Chenani Jagir, and the frontier chieftainships). In mass protest movements in the 1920s and 1930s, members of excluded groups demanded the benefits of recognition as state nationals. In 1927, Maharaja Pratap Singh instituted the Hereditary State Subject Order of 1984 (1927 C.E.),²⁶ which defined hereditary state subjects as “all persons born and residing in the State before the commencement of the reign of His Highness the late Maharaja Gulab Singh Sahib Bahadur (1846 C.E.) and also persons who settled therein before the commencement of Samvat 1942 (1888 C.E.).”²⁷ The 1927 state subject definition established that subjects of the monarchy had durable rights. By limiting the Maharaja’s ability to confer land rights and by restricting employment in government institutions to established state subjects, it also created a legal mechanism though which they could make claims on the Princely State. At the same time, state subjects also became the site of new forms of control, regulation, and political contestation. Whereas the regulatory acts of the nineteenth century had focused on the border, during the 1920s to 1940s, the Maharaja used the legal category “state subject” to exert claims over his subject nationals when they were in foreign territories. The category also facilitated the development of legal mechanisms to exclude foreigners and seditious (i.e., antimonarchist) ideas from the Princely State.²⁸

Demands on the Maharaja’s government for patronage and legal recognition of proprietary rights continued into 1931, culminating in riots at religious sites in the Kashmir Valley, Mirpur district, and the city of Jammu.²⁹ The subsequent Glancy Commission Report reflected British colonial anxieties about communal politics in British India. However, the commissioners’ recommendations reflected the emphasis within the state on legal and rights-based definitions of political belonging; the report recommended that government jobs be reserved for state subjects, that full proprietary rights be allocated to land occupants, that the state pay for all forms of labor services as a resolution to remaining bēgār taxation, and that state subjects participate in state government.

Between 1932 and 1936, Maharaja Hari Singh redefined the state subject and accepted the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution Act of 1996 (1934 C.E.),³⁰ which established the state’s first Legislative Assembly—the Praja Sabha. An amended Hereditary State Subject Order (1932) was drafted concurrently with the Constitution Act of 1934; it established three classes of state subjects and a hierarchy of rights firmly based on claims to immovable property and agricultural land, bureaucratic labor, and limitations on taxation.³¹ Although these rights were not directly linked to political representation, the Praja Sabha representatives (who were appointed by the Maharaja) used the recognition and distribution of land rights as a means of conferring political rights. The Praja Sabha passed a number of regulations that prevented the commodification of property and transferred some of the power of conferring political status from the Maharaja to the Legislative Assembly. Similarly, the Maharaja’s council used the connection between land rights and state subject status to extend its own administrative control in the many internal feudatories it did not fully control. Poonch Jagir, for example, was not represented in the first Praja Sabha because in 1934 it was still an independent jāgīr with its own hereditary Rajas. In 1939, the council brought the Poonch Jagir into the Princely State’s direct administrative structure—and more pointedly shifted the right of taxation to the Maharaja—by conferring land rights, and thus state-subject status and Praja Sabha representation, to residents of the Poonch Jagir.³²

In the late 1930s, political parties and subaltern movements began to argue for direct franchise rights for state subjects. The Praja Sabha allowed for only minimal direct popular participation and had only advisory power. Its formation, however, legalized political parties in the Princely State, and a number of regional and transregional parties developed after 1932. Political party development in Jammu and Kashmir was not a simple extension of anticolonial and nationalist movements in British India. Parties developed from networks of educational reading groups and religious associations that had been legally permitted formal associations before 1932. During the agitations of 1931, members of these groups, including the prominent leaders Ghulam Abbass, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, and Prem Nath Bazaz, met in the Maharaja’s prisons. They went on to found a number of parties, including the Praja Parishad, the Dogra Party, and the Kashmir Kisan Mazdoor Party, as well as the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference (AJKMC), which later split, forming a new AJKMC and the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (AJKNC).³³ After 1941, the AJKMC was generally referred to as “the Muslim Conference” and the AJKNC as “the National Conference.”

Party leaders were influenced by global anticolonial, nationalist, and socialist thinking, but political parties in Jammu and Kashmir took up the issues that were of particular concern to the subjects of the Princely State.³⁴ The Quit Kashmir protests, centered in the Kashmir Valley, and the armed Azad Kashmir insurrection, which began in Poonch, indicate how strongly the connection between land and rights influenced Kashmiri political identity and grounded political movements in the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir by the 1940s.

Azad Kashmir and the Quit Kashmir Movement

A working committee of the National Conference first articulated the concept of popular sovereignty as a right of Jammu and Kashmir state subjects in its Naya Kashmir (New Kashmir) Manifesto, which the party adopted in 1944.³⁵ The manifesto blended socialist land reform with sovereign rule by the people of the state, defined as “the people of the Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh and the frontier regions, including Poonch and Chenani Ilaquas.”³⁶ This notion of self-rule was extended in the call for āzād kashmīr (Liberted/Free Kashmir) at a meeting sponsored by the Kashmir Kisan Mazdoor Party in May 1946. Representatives of various state political parties from Kashmir Province, Jammu Province, and the former Poonch Jagir attended the meeting, including members of the National Conference, the Muslim Conference, the Dogra Party, and the Praja Parishad. The meetings concluded with a demand for the liberation of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir and the creation of a free state in which the “people of the state” would be sovereign.³⁷

Sheikh Abdullah, a politician educated at the modernist Aligarh University and well versed in European social and political theory, also demanded self-rule under the slogan “Quit Kashmir.” The Quit Kashmir Declaration of 1946 held that the “people of the state” henceforth abrogated the Treaty of Amritsar between the British and the Sikh princes, in which the people of the state has been ceded as well as the land itself.³⁸ In a telegram to the Cabinet Mission officials responsible for partitioning British India, which was printed in the Srinagar newspaper Khidmat, Sheikh Abdullah announced the Quit Kashmir Movement as the last stage of Kashmiri peoples’ struggle for self-rule.³⁹ This movement was led by Sheikh Abdullah and the AJKNC party, but it depended on multiple party affiliations and interregional networks. The movement’s popular appeals invoked a sovereignty based in the region’s previous land-rights movements and protests.

The AJKMC and other regional political parties did not initially endorse the Quit Kashmir statement, and the National Conference provided the public leadership of the movement. However, the involvement of the state’s various parties became clear as prominent party leaders were arrested by the Maharaja’s government in 1946 and 1947. By the end of 1946, supporters of the National Conference and of the Muslim Conference were engaged in a violent struggle for control of the Quit Kashmir movement. This so-called Sher-Bakra conflict resulted in the exodus of the National Conference’s political opponents from the Princely State, either as direct exiles from Srinagar or as political exiles from the Maharaja’s detention centers.⁴⁰ When the Maharaja, beset by internal revolt and external invasion, signed the Instrument of Accession to India in November 1947, the National Conference was the clearly dominant political party in Srinagar.

The Quit Kashmir movement began with a clearly articulated political ideology and organized, party-led protests. The armed Azad Kashmir movement coalesced around a tax protest in the Poonch Jagir, where the Maharaja’s government had been attempting to regularize and increase land-revenue assessments since 1940, when it had been integrated into the Princely State. In June 1947, the Kashmir State Dogra Army began to disarm Muslim peasants and redistribute the weapons to Hindu and Sikh landlords. Men from Poonch brought women and children to towns on the border of the Princely State and the NWFP, notably to the army cantonment towns of Murree and Abbottabad, and returned to Poonch with weapons that they smuggled across the Jhelum River into the Princely State.⁴¹ By late August, the tax protests had shifted to a full revolt against the Maharaja’s authority; armed fighting began between Kashmir State Dogra Army troops and protesters in Poonch who concurrently made demands for Azad Kashmir and ilhāq-e-pakistān (accession to Pakistan).⁴²

Political leaders in Poonch declared in August 1947 that they had overthrown the Maharaja’s government, and in October, they announced the establishment of what they called the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Azad Kashmir: “Maharaja Hari Singh’s title to rule has come to an end from August 15, 1947 and he has no constitutional or moral right to rule over the people of Kashmir against their will. He is consequently deposed with effect from October 4, 1947. All the Ministers and officials of the State will henceforth be duty-bound to carry out the orders of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. Anyone disobeying this duly constituted Government of the People of Kashmir or in any way abetting the Maharaja in his usurpation of the rule of Kashmir will be guilty of an act of high treason and will be dealt with accordingly.”⁴³ The Revolutionary Government described itself as a war council. It formed an army it called the “Azad Forces,” with three zones of military command—one in Kashmir Province, one in Jammu Province, and one in the former Poonch Jagir.

Several weeks later, prominent AJKMC leaders reconstituted the Provisional Revolutionary Government as the “Azad Kashmir Government,” run by the Central Committee of the Muslim Conference. This committee included leaders from the Kashmir and Jammu Provinces of the Princely State—such as Sardar Mohammad Ibrahim Khan (a Praja Sabha representative from Poonch), Ghulam Abbass (who had been recently released from Jammu Jail), and Yusaf Shah (the Mirwaiz of Kashmir, who was in exile from Srinagar). On the matter of political rights, the Azad Kashmir Government addressed India and Pakistan, not the Maharaja, whom it considered already deposed: “The Azad Government hopes that both Dominions [India and Pakistan] will sympathize with the people of Jammu and Kashmir in their efforts to exercise their birthright of political freedom. . . . The question of accession of Jammu and Kashmir to either dominion can only be decided by the free vote of the people in the form of referendum. . . .”⁴⁴ As Sardar Mohammad Ibrahim Khan, the president of the first Azad Kashmir Government, announced in November 1947: “Our Government is [a] Government of the people and has behind it a majority of the elected representatives in the Kashmir Assembly. Today the major portion of the State Territory is in our hands and we alone are the real government of Kashmir. . . . On the other hand, the despotic Maharaja has brought foreign aid [and] armies of occupation are pouring in from the Indian Union.”⁴⁵

In late October 1947, loosely organized lashkars (militias) of Pathans from the Northwest Frontier Provinces (NWFP) of Pakistan entered the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir at Muzaffarabad, the frontier administrative outpost of the Kashmir Province, and advanced along the Jhelum River road toward the capital of Srinagar.⁴⁶ Maharaja Hari Singh quickly signed an Instrument of Accession that conferred defense, foreign affairs, and communications to the Government of India. The accession agreement reserved all residual powers for the Princely State government, and the Maharaja ceded internal administration to the National Conference party.⁴⁷ In Srinagar, Sheikh Abdullah declared the National Conference to be the state’s “Emergency Interim Government,”⁴⁸ and he mobilized civil defense committees.⁴⁹ Indian Army forces joined the Kashmir State Dogra Army in fighting on the Jhelum road at Baramullah and in the Poonch region of Jammu. The government of Pakistan did not accept the Maharaja’s accession and sent in its own army troops to prevent the capture of Jammu and Kashmir by India. Thus, by mid-November 1947, the armies of the newly independent nation-states of India and Pakistan were fighting their first war in Jammu and Kashmir, and two different internal governments claimed to be the government of the entirety of the former Princely State and its state subjects.

Local Authorities and Successor States

During the war of 1947–1949, both the “Emergency Interim Government” based in Srinagar and the “Azad Kashmir Government” based in Palundri, claimed to function in place of the Praja Sabha (the state’s legislative assembly). International representatives and relief workers recognized both of these governments as “local authorities.” They negotiated with both administrations on pragmatic issues, such as entry into specific territories, and on humanitarian issues, such as refugee relief, protection of minorities, and prisoner exchanges.⁵⁰ The United Nations Commission on India and Pakistan (UNCIP) tacitly acknowledged both the Interim Government and the Azad Kashmir Government in Security Council resolutions on Kashmir. The resolutions distinguished the Azad Kashmir Government from the Government of Pakistan and the Interim Government from the Government of India, instructing the UN to work with local authorities in reestablishing law and order and arranging for a popular referendum to determine the political future of Jammu and Kashmir.⁵¹

Neither government recognized the authority of the other, however. The National Conference and Sheikh Abdullah (who represented Jammu and Kashmir at the UN in Geneva), claimed to be the local authority for the whole of the former Princely State.⁵² The Muslim Conference identified the Azad Kashmir Government as the government of both “territories of the State of Jammu and Kashmir which have been liberated by the people of that state” and of “the people of the state of Jammu and Kashmir” as a whole.⁵³ As soon as the 1949 ceasefire between India and Pakistan was established, this recognition of local authorities became a central problem for UN mediators, who were trying to carry out the Security Council resolutions by arranging a popular referendum on the future political status of the state. The Government of India and the National Conference’s Interim Government refused to recognize the Muslim Conference’s Azad Kashmir Government, suggesting instead that all officials in AJK territory be replaced with Kashmir State officials appointed by Sheikh Abdullah. They also insisted not only on the withdrawal of Pakistan Army troops but also on the complete disbanding of the Azad Forces and Azad Government Police Services, to be replaced by Kashmir State Troops. The British Commonwealth appointed mediators in 1950 and in 1951, both of whose proposals eventually failed, at least in part, over the question of recognizing the actual authority of the Azad Kashmir Government.⁵⁴ During these negotiations, refugees from Jammu and Kashmir were recognized as a nascent political constituency when the Government of India agreed to keeping civil armed forces in Azad Kashmir territories, provided that the troops consisted of “residents of the territories who were not followers of the Azad Government,” preferably refugees from the Kashmir Valley.⁵⁵

The National Conference’s Interim Government and the Muslim Conference’s Azad Kashmir Government each operated under the legal provisions and practices established by the Maharaja’s court.⁵⁶ Each government attempted to establish its legitimacy by claiming to represent displaced people who were dispersed across spaces not under the governments’ actual territorial control. By 1951, the definition of a “refugee of Jammu and Kashmir” had been firmly established through principles laid out in bilateral Inter-Dominion agreements between India and Pakistan and in the actual administrative practices of allocating temporary land and properties to people displaced from and unable to return to their homes and lands. A Kashmiri refugee was defined as a state subject of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir who was displaced from his or her home or who could not return as a result the war of 1947–1948.

Jammu and Kashmir State maintained a distinct “permanent resident” status that conferred separate state rights and privileges even after the Delhi Agreement (1952) gave Indian citizenship to Jammu and Kashmir state subjects.⁵⁷ This separate status was important for many reasons, not least because it recognized the continuing and uninterrupted status of displaced state subjects resident in Azad Kashmir territory and in Pakistan. In his address to the Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir on August 11, 1952, Sheikh Abdullah instructed the representatives to recognize the rights of “State Subject Evacuees [who were] living as refugees in [Pakistan and Azad Kashmir].”⁵⁸ The constitution that the assembly drafted based Jammu and Kashmir state “permanent resident” status on the 1932 Hereditary State Subject definition⁵⁹; the rights reserved for permanent residents of Jammu and Kashmir were the same as those granted state subjects under the Maharaja’s government. These included the exclusive right to acquire and hold property in the state, to stand for election or be employed by the government, and to receive any form of patronage, such as scholarships.⁶⁰ Adopted in 1956, the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir State defined the state as “all the territories which on the 15th day of August, 1947, were under the sovereignty or suzerainty of the Ruler of the State.”⁶¹ This included the territories actually controlled by the Azad Kashmir Government and by Pakistan, for which twenty-five seats in the new Legislative Assembly were reserved and held vacant for representatives from the “Pakistan-Occupied territories.”⁶²

Unlike Jammu and Kashmir State in India, Azad Jammu and Kashmir did not adopt a formal constitution until 1970; instead, a series of provisional orders defined the state’s administrative structure until the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Interim Constitution Act was ratified in 1974. In the 1960s, political leaders in AJK debated the transition to a democratic legislative system.⁶³ The Muslim Conference particularly resisted the transition to an electoral system on the grounds that “the institution of democracy would damage the freedom movement and that the area [AJK] would become a settled territory and not a base camp for the liberation of the State.”⁶⁴ Also unlike Jammu and Kashmir State in India, AJK is not represented in the federal Pakistan Legislative Assembly, and it maintains constitutional autonomy from Pakistan as an internationally disputed territory.

Successive administrations of the Azad Kashmir Government, like those of Jammu and Kashmir State (India), extended citizenship recognition to all hereditary state subjects. The Rules of Business of the Azad Kashmir Government of 1950 reserved state employment and property ownership for state subjects and recognized all displaced state subjects as Kashmiri refugees. Once franchise rights were made a part of an electoral process, all hereditary state subjects were guaranteed electoral representation, AJK political parties demanded that the 1932 Hereditary State Subject law be integrated into the constitutional definition of state citizenship when the first Interim Constitution Act was drafted in 1970.⁶⁵ The Azad Jammu and Kashmir Interim Constitution Act of 1974 structured the state as a parliamentary democracy, with an elected Legislative Assembly. The franchise was extended to “any state subject who left the Indian-occupied part of Jammu and Kashmir due to the “War of Liberation” and who was living in Azad Kashmir territory or in Pakistan⁶⁶ and to state subjects who left their homes after 1947 due to the “Indian occupation of the State.”⁶⁷ Under the Act, displaced state subjects (muhājarīn-e-riyāsat-e-jammū-o-kashmīr) living in Pakistan elect representatives to twelve seats in the Assembly. These seats are not linked to residential electoral areas but rather are allocated according to constituencies based on the last district of residence in the former Princely State. Six of the seats are allocated for refugees displaced from the Kashmir Province and six for refugees displaced from the Jammu Province.

The reservation of refugee seats carries an important representational force with lasting political effects. The equal division of AJK assembly seats does not proportionally represent the refugee electorate, since the overwhelming majority of refugees living in Pakistan were displaced from Jammu Province and most refugees from Kashmir Province are resettled in AJK territory. Instead, it represents the state’s territorial claims through the property claims of refugees in Pakistan. Their participation in AJK elections serves as a ritual that demonstrates the continuous and distinct identity of people from the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, and their registration by district of origin maintains the AJK government’s claims over territories that it does not administer.

LOCATING DISPLACEMENT: THE LINE OF CONTROL AND ITS REFUGEES

When the war between India and Pakistan ended with a UN-negotiated ceasefire on January 1, 1949, the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir had two successor political regimes, each of which claimed the legitimate right to rule over the whole state. The so-called UN Ceasefire Line divided the former Princely State’s Kashmir Province, Jammu Province, and the Frontier Areas into regions controlled by India and those controlled by Pakistan. It re-oriented historical regional routes of trade and travel such as the Jhelum River Road, which had connected Muzaffarabad city to Srinagar, to the silk route and the Central Asian cities of Kabul and Kashkar, to Leh and the Tibetan Plateau, and to the Punjabi cities of Lahore and Amritsar. It also restructured the former Princely State’s internal relationships among administrative districts, social networks, and political authority (see maps 3 and 4).⁶⁸ The decades after the 1949 division of the Princely State saw the Ceasefire Line become a frontier of political as well as military control. The Ceasefire Line moved with the front of military control during the 1965 and 1971 wars, and it was renamed the Line of Control (LoC) in the Simla Agreement of 1972 that ended the 1971 war. No plebiscite as envisioned by the original UN agreements was conducted in the former Princely State. In the absence of an internationally recognized political status for the territories under Indian and Pakistani control, the LoC became the de facto border between the semi-autonomous provincial states of Jammu and Kashmir State and the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Province (administered by India) and Azad Jammu and Kashmir and the Northern Areas (administered by Pakistan).

MAP 3. The Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir (1946).

Both the movement of people and the movement of borders created a population of refugees from the State of Jammu and Kashmir living in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. In 1947 and 1948 there were only military front lines that shifted, sometimes drastically. Some people found themselves on the same side of the line as their lands and properties; others found themselves not temporarily displaced but “refugees” only miles from their former homes. Many who became refugees did not know that there was an Azad Kashmir distinct from the Jammu and Kashmir where they had always lived; many had never heard of Pakistan, or if they had, did not know what or where it was. In 1949, seven hundred fifty thousand people were displaced, nearly twenty percent of the four million state subjects enumerated in the census of 1941.⁶⁹ More were displaced in the wars that followed the dissolution of the former Princely State. During the wars of 1965 and 1971, and during the armed conflict in the Indian Jammu and Kashmir State (1989–present), refugees crossed territories marked by the LoC. Some displaced people only came to know that they had migrated in retrospect, when the creation of a new border made returning to their homes impossible. For others, migration was planned and intentional. These latter refugees were acutely aware of the presence and location of borders and the competing claims of local, regional, and national centers of authority and power.

MAP 4. The Divided Territories of Jammu and Kashmir (after 1950).

Revolt, Massacre, Incursion, and War (1947–1949)

In the Poonch district of Jammu Province, the first displacements were closely linked to the Azad Kashmir movement and the armed revolt against the Maharaja’s rule that began in August 1947 as an antimonarchical tax rebellion. The insurgency had a communal element, and between 1947 and 1948, members of minority religious communities were expelled from their homes and killed in areas held by both the Azad Kashmir Forces and by the Kashmir State Dogra Army.⁷⁰ After the Pakistani and Indian Armies became directly involved in the fighting, the front lines of engagement shifted dramatically in the lower mountains of the Jammu Province, often displacing the residents of entire villages. Minorities in each of the controlled territories were also collected at refugee transit camps, similar to those organized in the Punjab, and sent to territories held by the opposing armies.⁷¹

In other parts of Jammu Province, Muslim state subjects were forcibly displaced by the Kashmir State’s Dogra Army in a program of expulsion and murder carried out for three weeks in October–November 1947. In mid-October 1947, Kashmir State Dogra Army troops began forcibly expelling Muslim villagers from Jammu Province.⁷² The refugees were sent on foot toward West Punjab, where most were accommodated in refugee camps in the districts of Sialkot, Jhelum, Gujarat, and Rawalpindi that had been originally established to accommodate the large numbers of refugees arriving from East Punjab. The Pakistan Central Ministry of Refugees undertook the first census of refugees in Pakistan in March 1948. The census enumerated two hundred fifty thousand refugees from the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir in government-run camps in West Punjab.⁷³ Registration records from the Sialkot, Jhelum and Rawalpindi refugee ration depots confirm that these first arrivals came from the Jammu district.

The Muslims of Jammu City were instructed to congregate at the state grounds known as the Police Lines. There and at the city’s Rosin Factory, they joined people who had been displaced by fighting between insurgents and Kashmir State Dogra Army troops in Poonch. State soldiers secured the areas and the inmates were visited by state officials, who informed them that they were being deported to Pakistan. By the end of October, representatives of the Muslim Conference were sending repeated urgent telegrams to officials of the Pakistan government informing them that water and food supplies were being withheld from the approximately five thousand people collected in Jammu City, warning of impending violence and requesting intervention.⁷⁴ The “Jammu massacre” began on November 5. Kashmir State Dogra Army soldiers began an organized evacuation of the Muslims, but instead of taking them to Sialkot, the trucks drove into the forested hills of Rajouri District, where the evacuees were executed. The first news of these killings began circulating in Pakistan as individual survivors found their way to populated areas and were brought to established refugee camps in Punjab or to military hospitals and aid stations. Pakistani hospital and refugee camp personnel reported that of the five thousand people deported from the Jammu Police Lines Ground and Rosin Factory deportation centers, two hundred survivors arrived in Pakistan.⁷⁵

The patterns of violence and displacement in the Kashmir Province were profoundly different; mass displacement was caused by the incursion of Pathan lashkars (militias) along the Muzaffarabad–Srinagar road in October 1947, their subsequent retreat through the mountains, and the advance and retreat of the Indian and Pakistani armies during the war of 1947–1949. The lashkars entered the Princely State from Abbotabad, arriving at the settlement of Domel (now a part of the Muzaffarabad Municipal Corporation), at the confluence of the Jhelum and Neelum Rivers, and proceeded along the Jhelum River road toward Srinagar. As an unregimented and unsupplied military force, they supported their incursion by appropriating supplies from the local population. People fled from settlements directly on the Jhelum River Road, because the lashkars’ push toward Srinagar was relatively focused; villages on the other side of the river were mostly unaffected. The Pathans’s incursion into the Princely State stopped in Baramullah and Uri, where the lashkars looted the local population. Many people abandoned their villages for safer areas in the mountains around Baramullah. When Kashmir State Dogra Army Troops, first backed and then joined by the Indian Army, began pushing the lashkars out of the Princely State in November, the Pathans retreated, pushing through the mountain passes of upper Baramullah and Muzaffarabad districts as well as by the road route, confiscating wealth and women as they passed. They were followed by Indian Army troops advancing along the main road and by Pakistani and Indian military operations and aerial bombings in the mountains. People living along the paths of the advancing and retreating lashkars and then of the military operations vacated their homes and villages, temporarily depopulating areas that encompassed what became the Ceasefire Line in 1949.

In territory held by the Azad Kashmir Government, displaced people took refuge at shrines, were accommodated by local residents, or established squatter camps that grew in size, prompting local leaders to organize relief depots to supply the ad hoc camps. As the ground and air war intensified through 1948, ground fighting and aerial bombing forced approximately one hundred thousand people into refugee camps near the towns of Mansera and Abbottabad, just over the Princely State’s border in NWFP. In June 1949, six months after the UN Ceasefire Order that ended the first war between India and Pakistan, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) conducted a transregional survey of Jammu and Kashmir refugees. Its final report put the Kashmiri refugee population in India and in Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir State at 180,000 and in Pakistan at 535,000, of whom 155,000 were in Azad Kashmir territory.⁷⁶ In 1951, based on the ICRC survey, the AJK government estimated the total refugee population in AJK at two hundred thousand out of a total population of seven hundred thousand.⁷⁷

Displaced people moved between AJK and Pakistan and across the Ceasefire Line/LoC without border restriction between 1949 and 1953. Many moved in search of livelihood opportunities; others attempted to return to their home villages. Refugees who had spent most of the war in informal camps in Muzaffarabad district presumed that they could return to their home villages when the armies stopped fighting. But the road route turned out to be impenetrable, due to an Indian and Pakistani army presence, and those with young children did not try to make it back by using mountain routes and passes. Others successfully made their way to their home villages but found staying there untenable, often because of harassment by Indian Army troops or by neighbors who saw them as Pakistani sympathizers. They then returned to AJK, sometimes with family members previously left behind or from whom they had become separated. Refugees found it particularly difficult to establish themselves in the rural areas of Poonch district, and many who had initially taken refuge in those areas shifted to the refugee camps in northern Punjab, which already accommodated large numbers of refugees from the Jammu Province. Some refugees—especially those in NWFP refugee camps in Mansera and Abbottabad—moved back into AJK territories, and others who were not successful in establishing themselves in local communities in AJK moved into Pakistan.

Refugee movement slowed after 1954, when the government of AJK began making provisional allotments of evacuee property to Kashmiri refugees. In Pakistan, Kashmiri refugees remained in refugee camps into the early 1950s. Kashmiri political party leaders began advocating for provisional resettlement of refugees within Pakistan in 1951, and the official “temporary resettlement” of Kashmiri refugees began in 1954. Refugees who had been accommodated in West Punjab and NWFP refugee camps were settled in the cities of Sialkot, Gujarat, Rawalpindi, Abbottabad, and Mansera. In AJK, where relief administration had not been institutionalized, refugees had begun occupying rural and urban properties and cultivating the lands formally held by Sikh and Hindu landholders. The government of AJK began formally allocating properties after 1954 by surveying and legalizing these de facto holdings.

Border Evacuation and Political Persecution (1965–1971)

The wars of 1965 and 1971 brought 50,000 new refugees into Azad Jammu and Kashmir.⁷⁸ The greatest number of people displaced during the wars of 1965 and 1971 were from areas where the front lines of warfare altered the boundaries of military control, such as the former Jammu Province districts of Poonch, Rajouri, and Mirpur. Border villages on the Indian side of the LoC were under considerable pressure to evacuate as the Indian Army created an ever-widening security line, emptying areas of people who might become casualties of warfare or whose loyalties were considered questionable. On the Pakistan side, civilians were largely pressured not to evacuate, as their presence was considered an additional impediment to an Indian ground advance. In the Jammu Division of (Indian) Jammu and Kashmir State, many people who left their villages chose to evacuate east and south within the Indian-administered territories. Most of the people who crossed the LoC knew they would not be able to return to their homes after the fighting ended. They came to AJK in family groups and chose to settle in areas where they had kinship connections.

In the high mountain regions of Muzaffarabad, Kupwara, and Baramullah districts, the LoC did not shift a great deal. In these areas, many people who crossed into AJK were young men, unaccompanied by family. Many were young male residents of border villages where they were under heavy pressure from security personnel, who suspected them of facilitating an invasion from Pakistan. Others came from towns farther from the LoC, especially from the strongly pro-Pakistan neighborhoods of Srinagar. Many of these refugees spoke the Kashmiri language, had close ties with pro-Pakistan political parties, and were advocates of Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan. Identified as pro-Pakistan activists, they left their homes to escape persecution. Such refugees were not resettled through government programs; most entered into negotiated alliances with local residents, such as through marriage. These marriages were arranged by families through cross-border kinship connections or by the leaders of political parties who, in addition to mediating such marriage alliances, secured government jobs for the refugees.

The changing contours of the preexisting LoC made for some displacement predicaments. For example, in 1965, residents of several villages in AJK’s Poonch district found their villages on the Indian side at the end of the war. When they left their homes and crossed the front lines into Pakistan-held territory, they found that they were not eligible for rehabilitation as refugees because they had been previously acknowledged as residents of AJK. Although these people no longer had access to their properties, the AJK government considered their villages “occupied by” India but not “in” Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir State.

Insurgency and Counterinsurgency (1989–2001)

In January 1990, refugees from Jammu and Kashmir State began crossing the LoC once again. This time, the context was a militant insurgency in the valley of Kashmir. The government of AJK provided relief supplies to 35,000 registered refugees between 1990 and 2004, of whom 17,000 constituted a permanent camp-resident population.⁷⁹ Unlike refugees from the previous periods of intrastate conflict, the AJK government did not grant them rehabilitation allotments or recognize their right to own land. The people who came to AJK after 1990 lived in temporary tent camps until October 2005, when a severe earthquake forced relocation of all established refugee camps.

The first refugees during this period entered AJK’s Muzaffarabad district from the Kupwara and Baramullah districts of Jammu and Kashmir State’s Kashmir Division. Indian military and security force activity in border regions kept residents under constant pressure from the military forces, who suspected local people of aiding militants, and from insurgents, who suspected local residents of collaborating with the Indian military. Indian military and security forces used interrogation, torture, and harassment against those suspected of activities or sympathies that supported pro-Independence or pro-Pakistan insurgents.⁸⁰ In situations in which a suspected militant could not be located, his male relatives were likely to be detained for interrogation. His female relatives were often subjected to severe public mistreatment. Thus, most refugees who crossed the LoC into AJK came in family groups, and the residents of several border villages migrated to AJK together.

In addition, there have been periods of intense military engagement at the LoC in the form of heavy artillery fire and border skirmishes. These were pronounced after the bilateral nuclear test of 1998; the Jammu districts of Jammu and Kashmir State saw an increase in fighting and a corresponding increase in the numbers of people who crossed into the AJK districts of Kotli, Bagh, and Rawalakot. During the (undeclared) Kargil War of 1999, large numbers of people were displaced from AJK and the Northern Areas into Pakistan. Many people from border villages were repeatedly displaced, and others have not been able to return to their villages since the summer of 1998. The Government of AJK provided canvas tents, but they did not register these people as refugees or make relief provisions. The AJK government estimates that more than three hundred seventy thousand residents have been displaced within AJK and Pakistan due to LoC firing since 1990. However, as the AJK Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation explained to me during our first meeting in 1999, this number is compiled from the records of military checkpoints within the Security Zone, and it likely reflects people who evacuated from their homes on multiple occasions.

The Line of Control and Its Disputed Territory

For much of its history, the LoC had neither the absolute place nor the solid materiality that its representation on maps of Jammu and Kashmir suggests. The Indian military began planning a boundary fence known as the Indian Kashmir Barrier in the mid-1990s, but for decades there was no boundary line marking the place in a stream or on a hillside that ceased to be (Pakistan-administered) Azad Jammu and Kashmir and became (Indian-administered) Jammu and Kashmir State.⁸¹ Indian and Pakistani Army posts faced each other across mountain ridges, marking the LoC’s contours, but in many places its specific location was in doubt. Occasionally people wandered across the LoC by mistake, something they had perhaps done many times, until the day they encountered an army patrol and discovered that they were carrying the wrong identity cards. Sometimes such people said they were collecting fruit from a tree that had been in the family for years, claiming that it was the army patrol that had wandered across the line.

As a social boundary, the LoC was permeable, often fluid, and sometimes irrelevant. Many people traversed the line in the first decades after its establishment. Most of these crossings had nothing, overtly, to do with politics. Villages near the LoC had close links with villages and communities on the other side. Families and social groups were divided across the India- and Pakistan-administered regions, and people continued to reaffirm their kinship ties. Residents of villages on the line crossed it to attend important ritual events like weddings and funerals. The reinforcement of kinship ties through marriage and the continued participation in exchanges of ritual labor were particularly important for refugees as an expression of their social commitment to the idea of return. Refugees who thought of themselves as temporarily resettled sought to reinforce their social networks in the villages from which they had been displaced.

It became progressively more difficult and dangerous to make such crossings after 1971, when both India and Pakistan began treating the LoC like a border. Parts of the LoC were mined, and people caught crossing it were subject to arrest, investigation, and imprisonment. In other places, people experienced the LoC as an absence, a place across which contact with family members ceased. For divided families, the LoC marks where social interaction has become circumscribed and restricted and where interaction with “the other” places a person at risk.

Ideologically, the LoC marks a clear boundary. India has always regarded the events of October 1947 as a military invasion of Jammu and Kashmir orchestrated by Pakistan; it claims that the monarch of Jammu and Kashmir legally joined India in 1947, that the territory currently administered by Pakistan is therefore illegitimately and illegally occupied, and that the entirety of the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir—including Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK)—is an integral part of India. Indian officials regularly accuse the government of Pakistan of attempting to internationalize the Kashmir issue, but in Pakistan the Kashmir Dispute has historically been viewed as an inherently international problem.⁸² Pakistan had no Instrument of Accession for Jammu and Kashmir, disputed or otherwise, but it claimed that the Maharaja’s accession to India was illegitimate and illegal and that interim constitution formation and elections did not invalidate the UN resolution calling for a general referendum. In Pakistan, people call AJK Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir) and refer to Jammu and Kashmir State in India as muqbūza kashmīr (Occupied Kashmir) or Indian Held Kashmir.

The process of legitimizing India’s claim in domestic political discourse involved linking the dispute to the central concerns of Indian national political culture, and Jammu and Kashmir came to represent the secular claims of Indian democracy. As Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, argued several years after the Partition, “the Kashmir dispute [is] symbolic for us as it has far-reaching consequences in India. Kashmir is symbolic as it illustrates that we are a secular state.”⁸³ This symbolic relationship’s asserted importance to the stability and security of the Indian Union is now fully validated in policy analysis and academic studies of the Kashmir Dispute.⁸⁴ In this formulation, the Kashmir Dispute is not just a conflict between India and Pakistan; it is a struggle to secure a modern secular state in South Asia.

In Pakistan, political thinking on the Kashmir Dispute focused on state security issues, on the illegitimacy of the electoral process and constitution formation in Indian-administered Kashmir, and on the imperative of international intervention to enforce the UN resolutions until the 1970s.⁸⁵ After 1972, the two-nation theory underwent crisis with the secession of East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1971, and Islamist parties acquired influence in Pakistan’s national politics.⁸⁶ New slogans such as “Kashmir is the jugular vein of Pakistan” (kashmīr shāhrag-e-pakistān hai) and “Kashmir will become Pakistan” (kashmīr pakistān banegā) emphasized the purported common (Islamic) cultural identity of Kashmiris and Pakistanis and the “natural” relationship between Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan. In this formulation, the Kashmir Dispute “concerns the life and the destiny of a people who have been historically and culturally an integral part of the nation that achieved sovereignty through the establishment of Pakistan.”⁸⁷ In short, the Kashmir Dispute was reconceived as nothing less than a struggle for the very existence of Pakistan as a viable nation-state.

India and Pakistan now consider border crossers of all kinds national security risks. Residents of border villages and nomadic herders, who have a reputation as potential crossing guides, are subject to surveillance and suspicion by all sides in the conflict. In tracing family life histories, it was evident to me that marriages connecting families across the LoC continue, but people are now taciturn in discussing the movement of marriage parties. To talk about clandestine LoC crossings now is to admit to an activity that is associated with either terrorism or spying. For many people living in the Kashmir borderlands, cross-LoC alliances represented a continuation of old patterns of social, economic, and political alliances. Over time, it became more difficult to maintain these connections and more important to forge and solidify social bonds that connected people to networks in the broader postcolonial national contexts. Therefore, it was primarily refugee families who were committed to continuing these trans-LoC alliances, especially if they maintained a hope of return to their predisplacement homes.

The Kashmir Problem and the Line of Control

India and Pakistan consider the Kashmir Dispute a territorial dispute but Kashmiri refugees living in Pakistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir refer instead to the mas’alah-e-kashmīr (Kashmir Problem) to talk about the border in Jammu and Kashmir and its impact on their lives. The mas’alah-e-kashmīr is not a territorial dispute between states but a problem of the incomplete realization of the rights of the people (haqūq-e-awām).

When Kashmiri politicians, public intellectuals, or refugees use the term mas’alah-e-kashmīr, they place the Kashmir conflict in the context of a freedom movement (taharīk-e-āzādī) that began as a struggle to force the Maharaja to recognize the sovereignty of the people and that has become a struggle for the same recognition against the postcolonial state and in the international system of states.⁸⁸ None of the UN resolutions envisioned the option of a third independent state in South Asia, but in the 1970s, Jammu and Kashmir nationalist thinkers introduced the possibility of an independent (unified) state to the popular understanding of the options that the promised referendum would present. They argued that the plebiscite (rāyeshumārī) called for in the 1949 UN resolutions referred to the right of self-determination (haqq-e-khudirādīyat), which they linked to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).⁸⁹ Contemporary discourse on the politics of the mas’alah-e-kashmīr has established a firm link between the promised future of haqq-e-khudirādīyat, the historical haqūq-e-awām, and the continuing integrity of the dispersed awām-e-riyāsat, or awām-e-kashmīr (people of the state of Jammu and Kashmir).

Arshad Sohail was working as a Central Committee member of the Organization for the Rehabilitation (Settlement) of Unsettled Refugees of Jammu and Kashmir when I met him in an unofficial refugee settlement colony in Rawalpindi in 2001. It was a chance meeting, and he greeted me warmly, recalling that we had met in passing at a social gathering in Murree, a hill station in the northern Punjab. I didn’t remember meeting him, as I had spent most of the day with the women guests, but I did remember that the gathering had been to remember the death of a family member of the hosts—a young man who had been a member of the militant wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). Arshad Sohail said that he had been a district organizer for the JKLF’s political wing and told me about his own history as a refugee displaced from Baramullah in 1971.

His recollection caught my attention because I knew that the family I was visiting were registered members of the AJKMC (although likely with Kashmiri nationalist sympathies because they had a picture of Maqbool Bhat—an iconic nationalist martyr—hanging on the wall of their shack). I also knew that the Organization for the Rehabilitation (Settlement) of Unsettled Refugees drew its membership primarily from Jammu and Kashmir refugees living in Pakistan, where the AJKMC had a large base of support. Refugees from Jammu and Kashmir are often members of multiple political parties, because these multiple alliances express different political ideologies, aspirations for the future, and investments in networks of patronage in the places where they live and work. They might be members of one political party that was effective in “getting it done” in their daily lives and another that connected them to the places from which they had been displaced, and to where they hoped to return. It is important to pay attention to this multiplicity of affiliations, because often the organizations to which Jammu and Kashmir refugees belong espouse contradictory political ideologies. It is impossible to deduce people’s political proclivities or to predict their behavior from their political affiliations. However, I was interested to know how Arshad Sohail had become a Central Committee member for an organization that not only served members of a different political party than his own but also primarily served people who had been displaced from the Jammu region.⁹⁰

He explained that his standing in the Kashmiri refugee community derived in part from his role in organizing refugee participation in a 1992 protest march from Muzaffarabad toward Srinagar, which was intended to meet marchers from Srinagar at Chakothi/Uri and thus “break” the LoC. The refugees he organized were all registered with the Organization for the Rehabilitation (Settlement) of Unsettled Refugees living in Rawalpindi, and they were also members and supporters of a variety of different political parties in AJK and Pakistan. In fact, he said, although the 1992 march had been a JKLF initiative, the first organized attempt to break the Ceasefire Line had been in 1958 by activists of the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Liberation League. During the years of Muslim Conference party rule in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, successive party leaders and AJK presidents had led public marches to break the LoC.⁹¹ Kashmiri refugees living in Pakistan always participated in these marches, Arshad Sohail said, because the LoC needed to be revealed as an irrelevant boundary and made visibly permeable to Jammu and Kashmir state subjects:

We are all Kashmiri. When this mas’alah-e-kashmīr is resolved then one day we will return to our homes, but even now this LoC– it does not apply to us. The LoC was an agreement between India and Pakistan, but the UN never said to awām-e-kashmīr, “this is your LoC.” The haqq-e-khudirādīyat is a political right that we were promised, but some conditions were not met and we are still waiting—and by the grace of God if the UN does not give it to us then we will grasp it ourselves.

Being Kashmiri, according to Arshad Sohail, cannot be interpreted within a worldview that privileges the territorial division of Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan. He continued:

That LoC? Well, that is a thing which Pakistan must know and India must know, but I do not know any LoC. I am a muhājir in Pakistan, but if I accept this LoC between my home and my family and my own self, then I will be a refugee in the whole world and I will have no home.

BEING KASHMIRI, THE BORDERLAND OF THE BODY, AND THE TERRITORY OF THE STATE

The existence of the muhājir-e-jammū-o-kashmīr (Kashmiri refugee) as a politico-legal and sociocultural identity both underwrites and challenges the foundational narratives that legitimate the postcolonial nation-states of Pakistan and India. It challenges citizenship categories and destabilizes a major material line of separation and identity—the border. For this reason, the border does not provide the language that can illuminate the relationships between ways of “being Kashmiri” and the “Kashmir” to which they correspond.

Despite the guarded maintenance of the predivision Jammu and Kashmiri hereditary state-subject status as the basis for recognizing Kashmiri state subjects on both sides of the LoC, arguments about the proper use of the term erupt regularly in daily life. Three cases illustrate the constant work required to maintain the category Kashmiri as a political identity. In each of these cases, political organizers, appointed delegates, and elected representatives disputed the limits of inclusion in the community of Kashmiris and deployed the designation Kashmir in very different ways when they were speaking in formal political contexts versus when they used the word in casual interpersonal speech. Each, in speech not circumscribed as political, used the word to describe a sense of cultural difference and the speaker’s affective attachment to that difference.

Farida Begum criticized a political rival for implying that anyone within the borders of the state (as they had been in 1947) could possibly be a refugee. Her objection to the use of the term muhājir highlighted the utility of the term Kashmiri to reject a political distinction between hereditary residents (qaumī bāshindah) and resettled refugees (muhājirs) that might delimit a differential evaluation of rights based on the current divisions of territory. Yet, in private discussions with me, Farida Begum was very interested in drawing distinctions between “this and that Kashmiri” in the domain of culture and language. Likewise, as an official diplomatic representative, Arif Obaid maintained a similar although apparently inverse distinction to the one made by Farida Begum—that the same relationship to territory that makes people “refugees” also secures their identity as “Kashmiri.” In personal conversation, however, Arif Obaid expressed his interest in refugees from the cultural center of the Indian Kashmir Valley; while he had a political obligation to the “mountain people” as a representative of a transnational Kashmiri political party, he clearly did not feel an affinity with them. In Islamabad, the residents of one squatters’ colony so effectively mobilized their claims to be “Kashmiri refugees” against the government of Pakistan that their colony, located within view of the parliament, was one of the last kacchī ābādīs remaining in the capital of Islamabad after residents of other such settlements had been forcibly relocated to the outskirts of the city. Their representative to the AJK Legislative Assembly, however, denied their requests for patronage, because the government of AJK, concerned primarily with tracing the contours of displacement across the LoC, was uninterested or unwilling to take up issues particular to the condition of people displaced from the other Pakistan-administered areas into Pakistan.

In AJK and Pakistan, not all people who self-identify as Kashmiri garner recognition from others in all domains; informal, casual slippages often belie formal political speech, revealing rifts of cultural attachment and social ambivalence. In speaking to and about each other, Kashmiris sometimes become vexed by the multiple possible references of the designation, and these disagreements reveal the ambiguous and contingent quality of the term.

“Not Refugees in Their Own Homeland”

The municipality of Murree has historically been an important crossroads between the NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), the Punjab, and the Jammu and Kashmir territories. The town has had a resident community of Kashmiri refugees since 1947. In 1946, it was a hill station retreat for the colonial administrators of British India and a military outpost for the British Colonial Army. Organizers of the tax rebellion in the Poonch region in 1946–1947 smuggled weapons into the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir from Murree and brought their families to the town in order to protect them from the Maharaja’s army. In 1948, refugees arrived in Murree from the other areas in Jammu District that were most profoundly affected by frontline fighting between India and Pakistan. In the same period, prominent political supporters of the Muslim Conference from the Kashmir Valley came to Murree after being forced out of Srinagar during the violent political party contests between National Conference supporters and the AJKMC. This community of political elites from the Kashmir Valley made Murree a hospitable resettlement community for other exiles who supported the pro-Pakistan movements during the Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971 and had to leave Indian Kashmir because of later political retaliation. Murree is now a center for the constituency of one of the six KV (Kashmir Valley) seats and for one of the six JC (Jammu City) seats that are reserved for muhājir-ekashmīr (Kashmiri refugees) in the Legislative Assembly of AJK.

Farida Begum was my hostess for several days while I stayed in the town, meeting with Kashmiri refugees. Her husband had been a Member of the AJK Legislative Assembly on several occasions, elected to one of the town’s refugee seats. She herself had been a close partner in his campaigns, advocating his candidacy in women’s circles and household networks. My hostess had lived in Srinagar until she was a young woman when her family arranged her marriage to the son of a friend who was living as a refugee in Pakistan. Her own closest connections were to other Kashmiri-speaking refugees from Srinagar who traced family connections through several generations and several villages and urban neighborhoods on both sides of the LoC. Farida Begum was eager to talk about the importance for muhājirs (refugees) from the Kashmir Valley to maintain their language and traditions; she said that it was more difficult for them than for refugees from Poonch or Jammu, where the regional languages were closer to the Hinko and Punjabi their neighbors spoke in town and to the Urdu their children spoke at school. She and her husband spoke only the Kashmiri language (Koshûr) to their children, and she hoped to give her daughter in marriage to a Srinagar family so that her family’s connection to Srinagar would remain strong until they could all return to their proper homes.

One day, we were invited to the home of the former president of the other major political party that represented the town’s refugee community. We were graciously received, and we waited a short time in the formal guest receiving room, where there were many photographs of the political leader. He had served several terms as the Prime Minister of AJK, and the photographs showed him shaking hands with several of the Prime Ministers and Military Administrators of Pakistan, including Nawaz Sharif, who was then in office. Our hostess, the politician’s sister, received us with tea and refreshments and discussed the specific history of her family’s contribution to founding AJK and establishing a place for Kashmiri refugees in its territory and within its government.

As she spoke, Farida Begum became increasingly agitated. At last she interrupted our hostess: “We are all Kashmiri, there is no difference that you can name to draw a distinction between this Kashmiri and that Kashmiri. Is it not so?” Our hostess agreed by inclining her head slightly to the side, but it seemed like a polite acquiescence to me, the kind a hostess might extend to a guest. Apparently Farida Begum was not satisfied, because she interjected again:

Then what is this that you are speaking of muhājirīn [refugees] in Poonch? Yes, it is fine, you may call me this, a muhājir, and you may even call yourself a muhājir, since you are now in Pakistan and not in Poonch. But how can you call a muhājir those people who are living in their own country? They have not crossed any border that you should call them muhājir. It is all our one Jammu and Kashmir, and they are not refugees in their own homeland!

The lady of the house agreed, but in a way that suggested that she was loathe to contradict, and she resumed answering my questions and talking about her family’s history. But she found it difficult to tell her story without using the words that upset my companion.

Soon Farida Begum turned to me and suggested that we ask to be excused. We began the long walk back to the center of town, and I noticed how very angry she was. Her lips pursed slightly and she walked quickly. She had pulled her veil briskly about her face and the broad cloth draped her shoulders and torso, but I could see the rigid set of her shoulders, and on the busy streets and narrow alleys, men pulled slightly aside to let her pass. I struggled to keep pace with her as we wound our way through the steep back alleys of the Pakistani hill town. When we arrived at her house, I tried to beg her pardon for asking her to accompany me to the home of a political rival. She dismissed my concern:

I campaign for my husband, she campaigns for her brother, that’s just politics. Didn’t you notice how well she received us for tea? After all, we are all Kashmiri. But she should not call them muhājirs when they are in their very own homeland!

“Just Mountain People”

On a hot summer Afternoon, I arrived at the Islamabad offices of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference (APHC), where the five members of the executive committee greeted me. The chairman represented the party that held the chair on the executive committee APHC in Srinagar, and he introduced each of the other delegates, each appointed by their respective political parties. He and his colleagues were used to meeting with diplomats and government officials, representatives of nongovernmental organizations, journalists, and scholars, and he presented the APHC’s official position on the Kashmir Problem succinctly: the current struggle in the valley of Kashmir is an indigenous liberation struggle of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, who are fighting for their right to exercise their right of self-determination, a basic human right according to the UN charter and, moreover, a specific right that was promised to the people of Jammu and Kashmir in 1949 by the United Nations. I listened to his presentation and then asked him to explain the APHC’s policy on refugee return.

He explained that the APHC, while cognizant of the refugee issue, did not have a specific unified position on the refugee question. He gave two reasons for this. First, he said, the right of refugees to return to their homes and reclaim their properties was a principle of state law. Second, Kashmiri refugees would not be able to return to their homes until the end of armed fighting and abuses of civilians on the Indian side of the LoC. At that point, the issue would be moot, because refugees and all the people of Jammu and Kashmir would participate in the UN-mandated plebiscite and express their preferences for the future status of Jammu and Kashmir—accession to Pakistan, accession to India, or an independent state. The chairman said that he was himself personally worried about the provisions for future refugee return, but he emphasized, “Kashmiri refugees are Kashmiri people”; the parties represented in the APHC had many refugee members and organizers, as the group’s only requirement for participation was that members be Jammu and Kashmir state subjects.

It was a long meeting, and after the official presentation the APHC members spoke openly about their own circumstances as exiles from the valley of Kashmir. While they each traveled extensively around the world, either on APHC or party work, none of them could return to their homes on the Indian side of the LoC because their prominent political work and human rights advocacy had made them targets of the Indian security forces. As we talked, it became clear that each of them had been appointed to their positions because they had already been in danger in the Valley for their political activities.

At the end of the afternoon, Arif Obaid, one of the APHC representatives, offered to drop me at my residence on his way home, and we had a chance to speak more as we traveled. He asked me to tell him more about the refugees in the camps in Muzaffarabad. I began to list names of the towns and villages outside the towns of Kupwara, Handwara, and Uri that I had heard mentioned most often in the camps when I asked people where they had lived before coming to AJK. He sighed and said disappointedly,

Oh, I thought you said that they were kashmīrī refugees, but they are just pahārī lōg [mountain people].

“Not of Concern to the Government of Azad Jammu and Kashmir”

During the monsoon season of 2001, a flash flood washed through the city of Rawalpindi. In some neighborhoods, buildings were flooded to the third story, and less sturdy homes, livestock, and people were swept away with the rushing waters. In the lowest-lying neighborhoods, families lost all of their possessions and counted themselves lucky not to have lost loved ones. The AJK Legislative elections had just announced returns, and Sabur Qadir had won election to a refugee seat from the Rawalpindi constituency expected to receive a Ministry assignment in the formation of the new government in Muzaffarabad. In the days after the flood, he was busy visiting Kashmiri refugees in neighborhoods around Rawalpindi, where he informed himself of their condition and compiled a list of families who suffered losses. He also promised to advocate for relief funds from the AJK government on his next trip to Muzaffarabad.

I accompanied him for several days on his rounds. Hanging on the remains of several houses we visited were the tattered election campaign posters of his rival, but Sabur Qadir was recognized and welcomed at each house. At each, he spoke with the head of the house, and his secretary made an entry in an account book. Privately, he expressed concern that he would not be successful, or at least not very successful, in securing relief for the flood victims. The damage was extensive; entire neighborhoods had become structurally unsound. In many cases what people needed were new homes. The biggest problem, in his view, was that the Kashmiri residents of Rawalpindi were widely distributed across different parts of the city, and there was thus little that the government of AJK could do to provide relief to Kashmiris as a group. Sabur Qadir said that he also found it personally very difficult to visit Kashmiri refugee families in their urban neighborhoods and to walk past their neighbors, who were just as profoundly affected. He found it extremely difficult that, while he might do little more than write the name, address, and an estimate of losses suffered by the Kashmiri residents, for the others he could not even do that much.

One day I did not accompany him and went instead to the kacchī ābādī (squatter settlement) on the outskirts of Islamabad, where I had spent a great deal of time during earlier fieldwork. One of several kacchī ābādīs in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the colony had begun as a labor camp during the building of the capital of Islamabad in the 1960s. Over the years, the laborers living there had built mud and stone shacks, but the state power and water agencies refused to provide services to illegal habitations; the laborers hijacked electricity from main lines but had no water or sewer connections, although they lived within view of the Pakistan parliament and the official hostels for legislators that many of them had helped build. The Pakistan government had tried on several occasions to forcibly dislodge the inhabitants and destroy the slum. Unlike other kacchī ābādīs around the capital, however, 80 percent of the residents of this labor colony were Kashmiri.⁹² They had successfully prevented the Islamabad Central Development Authority from bulldozing their homes, and they attributed their success to having threatened to publicize the government’s “lack of concern for Kashmiri refugees.” The oldest residents, who claimed to have lived there since the capital was being built, were from Gujar or Bakerwal families who had had their winter camps in the Poonch and Rajouri regions and were displaced by the wars of 1965 and 1971. Over the years the colony had grown; it attracted people from AJK because the other Kashmiris living there helped them find work, build a shack, and bring their families. The labor colony expanded and became more densely populated in the 1990s, when LoC firing brought more people from border villages in search of wage work to supplement their disrupted agricultural production. After 1996, Shina-speaking refugees from Kargil (on the Indian side of the LoC) and Baltistan (on the Pakistan side) moved there, and such a significant number of people had moved to the colony from the Northern Areas during the Kargil War in 1999 that the Imam of the Shi’ia mosque had become the colony’s recognized spokesperson.