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
