Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
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 Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) is a part of the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. In Pakistan, it is commonly referred to as Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir), although in India it is known as POK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir). It has a semiautonomous regional government and has been administered internationally by Pakistan since 1949, but it is not constitutionally a part of Pakistan and its people are not represented in the Pakistan National Assembly. Under the 1949 UN agreements on Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan was recognized as temporarily in charge of AJK’s international status. Successive governments of AJK have struggled to maintain their control as “local authorities,” in the UN treaty terminology, over AJK’s internal administrative structures and governance practices. Formally, AJK operates as a limited parliamentary democracy, as established in the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Interim Constitution Act, adopted in 1974. The territory of AJK comprises about five thousand square miles of the former State of Jammu and Kashmir, one of the largest Indian Princely States during British colonial rule in South Asia (see map 1). The borders with Pakistan’s Provinces of Punjab and Khyber Phaktunwa (formerly known as the NWFP, North West Frontier Provinces) determine its territorial boundaries to the west and south. The military Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan demarcates the eastern border. At the time I was doing field research, AJK was comprised of six administrative districts, all of which bordered the LoC (see map 2).53 To the north, another part of the former princely state known as the Northern Areas, until it was renamed Gilgit-Baltistan in 2010, has a separate governmental and administrative structure.54 It is governed directly through the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs and Gilgit-Baltistan in Islamabad.55
MAP 1. The Former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir (2012).
AJK’s political status within Pakistan is complex and widely misunderstood, because its internal governance is marked by a long history of tension between the formal structural limits on Pakistan’s power and the informal influence and coercion wielded by Pakistani bureaucrats and military personnel. Study of AJK politics has been dominated by a kind of proxy government theory, which explains political developments in AJK by analyzing the interests and influence of Pakistan.56 This perspective keeps the focus firmly on the international politics of the Kashmir Dispute and denies the political agency of Kashmiri peoples in producing the conditions of their own political lives. It also overemphasizes formal institutional politics and underestimates the role that Kashmiri politicians, administrators, and political society played in shaping political practices and institutions as they developed in the postcolonial period. As a result, a consensus opinion in the scholarly literature is that the institutionalization of refugee representation in the AJK government was a deliberate strategy through which Pakistan guaranteed itself representation in AJK internal politics.57