Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
Punjabi cities of Lahore and Amritsar. It also restructured the former Princely State’s internal relationships among administrative districts, social networks, and political authority (see maps 3 and 4).68 The decades after the 1949 division of the Princely State saw the Ceasefire Line become a frontier of political as well as military control. The Ceasefire Line moved with the front of military control during the 1965 and 1971 wars, and it was renamed the Line of Control (LoC) in the Simla Agreement of 1972 that ended the 1971 war. No plebiscite as envisioned by the original UN agreements was conducted in the former Princely State. In the absence of an internationally recognized political status for the territories under Indian and Pakistani control, the LoC became the de facto border between the semi-autonomous provincial states of Jammu and Kashmir State and the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Province (administered by India) and Azad Jammu and Kashmir and the Northern Areas (administered by Pakistan).
MAP 3. The Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir (1946).
Both the movement of people and the movement of borders created a population of refugees from the State of Jammu and Kashmir living in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. In 1947 and 1948 there were only military front lines that shifted, sometimes drastically. Some people found themselves on the same side of the line as their lands and properties; others found themselves not temporarily displaced but “refugees” only miles from their former homes. Many who became refugees did not know that there was an Azad Kashmir distinct from the Jammu and Kashmir where they had always lived; many had never heard of Pakistan, or if they had, did not know what or where it was. In 1949, seven hundred fifty thousand people were displaced, nearly twenty percent of the four million state subjects enumerated in the census of 1941.69 More were displaced in the wars that followed the dissolution of the former Princely State. During the wars of 1965 and 1971, and during the armed conflict in the Indian Jammu and Kashmir State (1989–present), refugees crossed territories marked by the LoC. Some displaced people only came to know that they had migrated in retrospect, when the creation of a new border made returning to their homes impossible. For others, migration was planned and intentional. These latter refugees were acutely aware of the presence and location of borders and the competing claims of local, regional, and national centers of authority and power.
MAP 4. The Divided Territories of Jammu and Kashmir (after 1950).
Revolt, Massacre, Incursion, and War (1947–1949)
In the Poonch district of Jammu Province, the first displacements were closely linked to the Azad Kashmir movement and the armed revolt against the Maharaja’s rule that began in August 1947 as an antimonarchical tax rebellion. The insurgency had a communal element, and between 1947 and 1948, members of minority religious communities were expelled from their homes and killed in areas held by both the Azad Kashmir Forces and by the Kashmir State Dogra Army.70 After the Pakistani and Indian Armies became directly involved in the fighting, the front lines of engagement shifted dramatically in the lower mountains of the Jammu Province, often displacing the residents of entire villages. Minorities in each of the controlled territories were also collected at refugee transit camps, similar to those organized in the Punjab, and sent to territories held by the opposing armies.71
In other parts of Jammu Province, Muslim state subjects were forcibly displaced by the Kashmir State’s Dogra Army in a program of expulsion and murder carried out for three weeks in October–November 1947. In mid-October 1947, Kashmir State Dogra Army troops began forcibly expelling Muslim villagers from Jammu Province.72 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