labor) was by then a topic of debate among humanitarian practitioners.33 Taking serious inventory of the relationship between the category of the Kashmiri refugee and the classificatory system of the South Asian refugee regime, thus also renders visible the process of problem of regime change.
Refugee Regimes and Refugees in South Asia
Examining violence-related forced mass displacement in postcolonial South Asia within the rubric of refugee studies has long been a problem for the field. This is due in no small part to the emergence of a new “conventional” definition of a modern refugee during the Partition of colonial India. The final version of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defined a refugee as an individual who has crossed a national boundary and has a well-founded fear of persecution in the country of origin for reason of race, religion, nationality, or political opinion.34 Although it took several years to set this definition, in part because states’ representatives had serious disagreements about the principles of recognition that should be applied, the standards of categorization and management that developed became normative on a global scale, and this system is now commonly referred to as “the international refugee regime.”
The idea that refugees are people deprived of their nationality had the effect of excluding displaced people who could be argued to have multiple claims on nationality—particularly people displaced by decolonization processes. It became a generally accepted argument that Partition-era displacement was a mass migration in which Partition’s displaced did not lose the protection of their states and that therefore Partition “migrants” were not subject to United Nations (UN) refugee agreements.35 But as the historian Mark Mazower has argued about that formative period in the creation of the UN, “the origins of legal regimes lie in a set of cultural, political, and ideological struggles.”36 These legal regimes did not merely reflect an obvious distinction or institutionalize a preexisting agreement—it shaped them. In the words of B.S. Chimni, a legal scholar and former advisor to the United National High Commissioner for Refugees, “the problem of defining a refugee is a debate about the epistemological principles which inform its elaboration.”37 This epistemological ordering of displacement—the process of identifying a person as a refugee, or defining a group as a refugee population—is an inherently political project that orders international relations by categorizing migration and assigning different values to dislocation experiences.38
In the social sciences, political scientist Aristide Zolberg and anthropologist Liisa Malkki refocused the study of the international refugee regime; they approached it as a set of transnational expectations, provisions, and representations that constitute a symbolic system for ordering the material practices of refugee administration, including legal adjudication, security provision, and relief distribution.39 This regime analysis approach shifted the scholarly study of refugees away from purely legalistic consideration of juridical status to a focus on the symbolic as well as material practices that organize power relations through the care and administration of dislocated people. It also made it possible to examine other systems that developed to deal with modern mass dislocation and to coordinate refugee practices across nation-states.
One such system was the South Asian refugee regime, which developed to deal with the ten million to twelve million people who crossed the newly international borders of India and Pakistan between 1946 and 1951 as part of the Partition of the colonial provinces of Punjab and Bengal into East Punjab (India) and West Punjab (Pakistan) and East Bengal (Pakistan) and West Bengal (India).40 Partition is still too often approached as a historical event that produced an immediate and clear rupture between Pakistan and India. It is better understood as a long process of creating a new categorical and classificatory system that established political and cultural (rather than simply territorial) separations between the new nation-states.41 The identification, management, and rehabilitation of displaced people were a central part of this process, and India and Pakistan developed bilateral laws and practices that produced the “refugee” as a governmental and social category in postcolonial South Asia. The South Asian refugee regime was based on a political notion of what it means to be a person displaced in the world and has generated political power for the state. The identity category “Kashmiri refugee” developed within this regional refugee regime.
Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Depoliticization
The international refugee regime has changed over time, and it adopted and adapted symbolic and material practices from several world contexts.42 In the post–Cold War era, the refugee became a subject whose main reference is not the nation-state but the human rights of the individual.43 In the 1990s, Kashmiri refugees engaged in documenting their status as a certain kind of humanitarian subject—the human rights victim—for the international community, effectively claiming inclusion in what Jonathan Benthall has called the humanitarian narrative.44 The international refugee regime’s use of human rights and humanitarian discourses and practices emphasized the “victim” status of refugees in ways that challenged the historical construction of refugee subjectivity in the Kashmir region. Those claims were first made in the iconic “humanitarian” space of the refugee camp, but they became a part of wider rethinking of the relationship between being Kashmiri and having rights that depoliticized Kashmiri refugee identity. One effect was a new gendered distinction between female and male refugees that led to the depoliticization of refugee women and the militarization of refugee men in the 1990s.
The depoliticization of Kashmiri refugee women may have been facilitated by globally reinforced images of victimization, in which violence “is strongly sexualized, and the distinction between perpetrators and victims of violence is often represented as a gendered diff erence.”45 Still, it was striking given that practices of sexual violation of women in other armed conflicts in the same decade were explicitly theorized as a form of political violence characteristic of modern politico-territorial disputes.46 Feminist scholars have objected to the uncritical acceptance of the trope of women as victims as “a positioning [that treats] women as ‘objects’ [and that] denies their agency and voices.”47 Unfortunately, critical responses have often taken the form of efforts to recuperate women’s agency by finding counterexamples of women’s militant activism or subversions of hegemonic domination.48 Instead, I offer a perspective on the constitution of Kashmiri refugee women as victims that reveals the social value produced by people who can be recognized as victims by global political communities.
The shift away from the South Asian refugee regime toward the international refugee regime required a tremendous amount of social work, and it illustrates that depoliticization is an active process that produces its own political effects. The depoliticization of women in modern Muslim contexts cannot be explained by reference to globalization or renewed enforcement of a posited universal Islamic gender symbolism.49 And gendered depoliticization in postcolonial South Asia is not a product of the ideological reformulation of the domestic sphere by nationalist elites, making women a repository for a privileged sphere of “culture” or “tradition” that serves as a site for political claims based on cultural identity.50 Instead, we must look to the difficult social work required to produce certain kinds of experiences as “political” and other kinds of experiences as “cultural” or to fix the unruly boundaries between “the public” and “the domestic.”51
The transformation of Kashmiri refugee subjectivity thus brings to the forefront the question of what it means to live a “politically qualified life”—by which I mean not only the kinds of values that shape formal recognition of political belonging (like nationality or citizenship) but also the ways in which some experiences of the world are coded as “political.” Social processes and cultural categorization shape how people struggle to occupy, in Hannah Arendt’s still-cogent words, “a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective.”52
ON THE AZAD STATE OF JAMMU AND KASHMIR
Azad
