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
