Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference
NOTE ON NAMES, TRANSLITERATION, AND PHOTOGRAPHS
In this book, I refer to the distinct governmental regions of the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir by the names by which they are identified in their own current constitutional documents. In Pakistan, the State of Azad Jammu and Kashmir is commonly referred to as “Azad Kashmir” (Free Kashmir) and in India it is known as “POK” (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir). I employ its full constitutional name except when I am presenting ethnographic materials, in which case I reproduce names like “Azad Kashmir” and “Occupied Kashmir” in order not to distort the speakers’ intentions. For the sake of consistency and clarity, I refer to its government as the government of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Likewise, I refer to the 1949 UN Ceasefire Line as the military “Line of Control,” even though it wasn’t officially renamed until the Simla Agreement of 1972.
Following anthropological convention, I use pseudonyms in my presentation of all ethnographic information. For unmarried youths and young men, I use only a single name. I use two names for older men to whom I owe the respect due to an elder, but in order to avoid the confusion that would result from using a fictive second name linked to descent-group identities, I use two male first names. Women generally have as a second name the first name of their father or of their husband; I use the second name “Bibi” for younger women and “Begum” for elder women. In my presentation of historical material, such as documents or memoirs, I use real names as recorded in the public or governmental record.
Transliteration of Urdu words follows the system standardized by John T. Platts in A Dictionary of Urdū, Classical Hindī, and English and reflects the standard spelling of the word as it is written. I do not use diacritical markings in any personal names, proper nouns, or adjectives generated from proper nouns (such as “Kashmiri” or “Pakistani”) unless they are a part of an Urdu language phrase. In the case of political parties and militant organizations for which there are several alternative English transliterations in use, I employ a common one. The term jihād has entered into English-language usage in the past decade. As an English word, jihad is used to refer to Islamic religious warfare. As an Islamicate word, however, the term has a more variegated meaning; it can refer to a struggle in either spiritual or material realms. In this text, I retain the hard diacritic to mark the fact that it has also become a dialectical term, jihād, which refers simultaneously to its use within specific Muslim societies and to its integration into a global political vocabulary. I use the term as a foreign word (jihād) to mark its use (1) as an ethnographic distinction within translated ethnographic quotes to draw attention to the speaker’s original use of the term; and (2) as a purely Islamic concept in religious texts. I deploy a grammatically unconventional plural in this text to make another ethnographic distinction; muhājirīn is the correct grammatical plural of muhājir (refugee) and mujāhidīn of mujāhid (warrior), but I use English plurals (muhājirs and mujāhids) to indicate a plurality of individuals as opposed to a collectivity. This is an important distinction in the greater Kashmir context, where people use a singular noun with a plural verb to mean groups of individuals; for example, “yeh lōg mujāhid haiñ” (those people are mujāhids). Thus, I use the word mujāhids when many individual militants are involved, but I use the word mujāhidīn when referring to a collective of militants acting or speaking as members of an organization.
I took all photographs used in this text. I have not used any photographs depicting people in close-up focus because of issues of confidentiality. For the same reason, names and identifying data have been removed from the document facsimiles reproduced here.
PREFACE: THE KASHMIR DISPUTE AND THE CONFLICTS WITHIN CONFLICT ETHNOGRAPHY
Since 1947, the peoples of Jammu and Kashmir have experienced three interstate wars between India and Pakistan (1947–1949, 1965, and 1971), the undeclared Kargil War of 1999, frequent border clashes, and an active antistate armed conflict in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir State that began in 1989 and is ongoing. Pakistan and India consider the greater Jammu and Kashmir region a disputed territory; both claim a historical and cultural right to political rule over its entirety, and both states claim that their sovereignty has been violated by the other’s “occupation” of its territory. After bilateral nuclear tests in 1998, security and policy analysts began to discuss the Kashmir Dispute as more than a regional security problem; they began looking at the contested military Line of Control (LoC), where troops of the Indian and Pakistan armies engage in regular exchanges of heavy artillery and light arms fire, as a potential nuclear flashpoint. Invoking the specter of an outright war between India and Pakistan and the potential for increased regional instability in South and Central Asia, the international community once again turned its attention to Kashmir.
Kashmiris, however, have had their attention on the international community for decades. The phrase “Kashmir is now the most dangerous place on Earth” became a media trope during the Kargil War—and it has endured through the rise of the War on Terror, concerns about the nuclearization of Middle Eastern states like Iraq and Iran, and border tensions between North and South Korea.1 But those reporters, who stood gesturing toward the militarized border with trepidation, were standing in a place where people have lived for more than three generations caught between the gunsights of two opposing armies. People from the Indian Jammu and Kashmir State, Pakistan-administered Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and the diaspora of “overseas Kashmiris,” particularly in London and New York, had worked with United Nations commissions since 1948. They also had been actively involved in documenting human rights abuses by state and paramilitary organizations since 1990. But while the appeal to human rights is relatively uncontroversial, knowing whose rights to champion over decades of oscillating hot and cold war is less so. Which victims should we protect? Against which perpetrators? As the international community became more involved in organizing humanitarian interventions around the world in the post–Cold War era, why the international community intervened to protect the victims of one conflict and not another became part of debates within Kashmiri communities.
In refugee resettlement villages across Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), these debates became especially heated during the late spring of 1999, at the beginning of the Kargil War, when it was discovered that members of jihadist organizations, under the umbrella of the United Jihad Council and working with the Pakistan military, had occupied strategic posts on the Indian side of the LoC. Residents of AJK began preparing for an invasion by Indian troops by evacuating their families and supplying the camouflaged defense bunkers dug into the fields during previous wars and periods of border conflict. During the day, the sounds of gunshots reverberated off the mountains as villages retrained their defense committees. In the city of Muzaffarabad, the wail of ambulances announced the frequent arrival at the government hospital of casualties from the LoC. The atmosphere was tense, because many people believed a