Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
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 between the British Colonial Government of India and the Sikh governor of Jammu in 1846. The state was ruled by the Dogra Maharajas until 1947, when internal political and armed resistance and war between the new postcolonial nation-states of India and Pakistan ended monarchical rule. The Indian Princely States were not subject to the partition of the British territories in 1947; the accession of each principality was negotiated between the monarch of the State and the leaders of both the Indian National Congress and the Pakistan Muslim League—the political parties that ran the first postcolonial governments of India and Pakistan during the period of constitution formation. When the British Government of India transferred power to the independent postcolonial states of India and Pakistan on August 14, 1947, the monarch of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to neither India nor Pakistan. Within months of independence, India and Pakistan had troops on the ground in the Princely State’s Kashmir Province. This first war between India and Pakistan was ambiguously resolved with a United Nations–negotiated ceasefire in 1949. The state was functionally divided, and nearly a quarter of its people were displaced within the territories of the former Princely State or into India and Pakistan.
This politico-geographical division was supposed to be temporary, until a United Nations–recommended referendum could be carried out. There was, at first, no question of changing the terms of legal political belonging to the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. The people of the Indian Princely States were “state subjects,” not British colonial subjects; unless an Indian monarch had acceded to one or the other of the Dominions before the Partition, the ruler’s displaced subjects were not counted as refugees who would have to be rehabilitated. Both people who were displaced by political violence in the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir between 1947 and 1949 and relief administrators in Pakistan and India made an important distinction between those (Kashmiri) refugees who were to return to their homes and those (Partition) refugees who would be resettled as permanent immigrants; “hereditary state subjects” of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir were supposed to return to their homes, lands, and properties. By the time the matter of princely state subjects was negotiated in the Karachi Agreement of March 1949, the (former) Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir was a “disputed territory” and the subject of a UN resolution. Its refugees were a specifically named part of the dispute-resolution process. Practices of identifying, regulating, and documenting Kashmiri refugees developed historically in the context of regional and international concern for (and dispute over) a Jammu-and-Kashmir that is both a former and a not-yet or a never-to-be political entity. The Hereditary State Subject provisions were adopted by the provincial successor states of both Jammu and Kashmir State (in India) and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (administered by Pakistan) as the basis of their legal frameworks for recognizing citizen-subjects of the disputed former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir.
The 1949 UN Ceasefire Line—now called the LoC (military Line of Control)—simultaneously symbolizes and obscures the historical experiences of people who live in the divided regions of the former Princely State. On post-1949 maps of India and Pakistan, the LoC is a dotted line, representing its contested status. On the ground, it has been a permeable boundary without exact demarcation that has nonetheless shaped people’s apprehension of the political landscape. It forged a frontier through landscapes that people had previously experienced as contiguous, and these displaced people encountered the line not as a specific place but as a profound shift in the ways they experienced political power. Paradoxically, the LoC has had a more concrete presence when its physical location has been less certain—during periods of warfare. Thus, the line has had a cyclical as well as historical temporality; it has become more borderlike over time, but it has shifted in each war and has been serially revisited