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
