motives; one person brought me a collection of jihadist magazines so that I could better understand why jihād is a legitimate form of “resistance against a terrorist state [India],” and another brought me one of the same magazines so that I could see how it “exploits the uneducated [and has become] a terrorist business [which is] ruining Pakistani society.” Many people risked social or state disapproval to show me the truth as they understood it.
The ethnographic quotations in this book come from my transcripts of recorded interviews and from my own original field notes. To maintain the confidentiality of my interlocutors, I have identified people by a combination of fictive name and a general time frame for the interview. I don’t use specific identifying information except when the significance of the information cannot be conveyed without knowing that information. In the process of analyzing the life histories and narratives that refugees constructed for me, I tracked the different markers in the narratives that would make the speakers recognizable. I did this originally in order to obscure such markers, but in the process of doing so, I came to a much clearer perception of how Kashmiri refugees as historical subjects are implicated in multiple sites of power, both informal and institutional. Twice, I have attributed a quotation or a piece of a life story to a new speaker when in fact the narrator had already appeared in the text under another name. I did this because the information conveyed was so specific that to use the same name twice would have effectively revealed the actual identity of the person. However, none of the stories represent compilations of multiple accounts. I have selected narratives and accounts that are good examples of the personal experiences, sentiments, and concerns expressed by many people over the years. The selection of stories represents my own final understanding of the development and transformation of refugee political life in AJK and Pakistan.
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
Chapter 1 discusses the history and historicity of Kashmiri political subject formation in order to explain the apparent paradox of the Kashmiri refugee collective identification—that the very existence of the Kashmiri refugee as a politicolegal and sociocultural identity both underwrites and challenges the structural foundations of the postcolonial nation-state in South Asia. In the colonial-era Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, the first political movements produced a highly territorialized definition of political belonging in the greater Kashmir region. The historical patterns of dislocation in the region between 1947 and 2001 then created a dispersed population of people who became categorized as “refugees from the State of Jammu and Kashmir” living in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The identity category Kashmiri refugee emerged as a subject position, within a domain of rights claims, as the sovereign ground of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. For this reason, the state's territorial borders provide neither the empirical nor analytical language needed to express the relationship between being Kashmiri and political activism.
Chapter 2 delves into competing ideas about what it means to be a refugee in the Kashmir region, aided by life-history narratives of men and women, young and elderly, who have been forcibly displaced because of interstate wars or intrastate insurgency. In their lifetimes, displaced people can move between being muhājirs (refugees) and mujāhids (Islamic warriors). The chapter examines the Islamicate concepts of protective migration (hijarat) and struggle (jihād) to show how Muslim societies have used them to integrate suffering, social responsibility, and political activism in both historical and religio-moral terms. Community discussions of what it means to do hijarat or to participate in jihād show that both practices are continually debated and evaluated; even within communities and families, individuals often come to very different conclusions about the value of each practice.
Chapter 3 examines the national contexts in which Kashmiri refugees emerged as rights-bearing political subjects in the postcolonial period. After 1947, the dominant modes of interpreting what it means to “be a refugee” established Kashmiri refugees as active political subjects with rights claims over political institutions in Pakistan and in India, as well as in the province of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Within the South Asian refugee regime, Kashmiri refugees in AJK used their status of “difference” from Partition refugees and the “temporary” nature of their resettlement to enforce limits on the coercive power of the Pakistani state. The practices established in this period firmly ensconced a high cultural, social, and political value for hijarat as a model for political engagement.
Chapter 4 discusses the transformation of Kashmiri refugee political subjectivity as displaced Kashmiris renegotiated their multiple relationships with social and political sites of power to include the international community. This precipitated a fracturing of the previous sociopolitical consensus about the relationship between refugees and broader AJK society. For Kashmiri refugees in the 1990s, addressing the international community as “refugees” required the depoliticization of the Kashmiri refugee subject. This process of depoliticization was contested and remains incomplete, but it produced a new gendered distinction between female and male refugees. As it became progressively more difficult for men to claim the political and religious recognition of hijarat as a valued political practice, jihād acquired an enhanced social value as a model for political engagement.
Chapter 5 examines how “human rights” became a part of jihād discourses and practices in transnational Kashmiri communities. The Kashmir Jihad that emerged in Pakistan during the 1990s employed an Islamicate vocabulary but was not primarily defined by Islamic doctrine or Islamist ideology, and the process of drawing young men into militant organizations was not regulated by ideological education or bodily disciplining. Instead, as human rights discourses and practices localized in AJK, refugees drew on concepts of justice, rights and obligations to formulate a concept of jihād as a project legitimized by the need to protect the bodies of Muslim people against human rights violations. This articulation challenged both liberal humanist understandings of human rights and Islamist ideologues’ regulation of jihād. The personal narratives of young Kashmiri refugee men who were active members of militant organizations reveal that jihadist organizations (as opposed to political-party-based militant groups) proliferated in the mid-1990s because they accommodated Kashmiri refugees’ ideas how a Muslim person should respond to the experiences of violent transgression of the physical and social body.
Chapter 6 argues that for Kashmiri Muslim refugees, the family rather than the mosque or the religious school mediates entrance into Islamic militant organizations. Kashmiri mujāhids depend on the family for the social recognition of “discernment” (which one gains through sacrificing for others) and for the evaluation of “good intention” (which one gains through moral training in familiar and public domains); together, discernment and good intention established the armed struggle as an extension of an internal moral transformation linked to an awareness of mujāhids’ obligations to society. Yet, their close association with those who inspire strong personal attachments of love and physical desire, especially children and wives, produced a tension around issues of sexuality and sexual purity. The mujāhid in life and the “martyr” in death alike are enmeshed in social relationships and are subject to ongoing social evaluation about the meaning and value of their actions, including their use of violence.
The Conclusion describes the significance of the emergence of a social distinction between a mujāhid and a jihādī. The book ends with a brief Postscript. It describes the continuing negotiations over the meaning and significance of jihād in Azad Jammu and Kashmir’s political culture by discussing how the earthquake of 2005 led to the emergence of a practice that Kashmiri jihādīs call “humanitarian jihād,” which in turn is transforming how people there think about security, welfare, and their struggles for sovereignty.
PART ONE
Between Hijarat and Jihād in Azad Kashmir
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
