Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
Kristen Borges, Jennifer Lee, Teri Lanza, and Kathleen Loisel, and their assurance that there is a world before, during, and beyond the book, buoyed me many times. I thank Shoshanna Press for the stickers. My family offered immeasurable support through years of research and writing. My special remembrance to my great uncle John Strater, who gave the gift of an education without debt, a wondrous and liberating thing. I thank my brother, Kylian Robinson for his spirit and for dancing on the polo grounds in Hunza. I thank my parents, Karen and Christopher Robinson, for their visits to AJK and Pakistan, and for publicly bestowing on me the status of dutiful daughter, which was helpful, although not well deserved. H. Paul Hammann, my husband, has become my anchor and my sail; I thank him for his love, endurance, and for taking care while I tended to this book.
While many people commented on drafts of this book, I alone am responsible for any shortcoming or errors that remain. The interpretations and arguments offered here are also solely mine. I say this in recognition of the fact that some research participants do not agree with my conclusions; I offer them my special appreciation for the discussions and debates that we have had on these topics over the years.
Parts of Chapters 1 and 3 were previously published in the Journal of Refugee Studies (2012) as “Too Much Nationality: Kashmiri Refugees, the South Asian Refugee Regime, and a Refugee State, 1947–1974,” 25(3): 344–365.
INTRODUCTION
The Social Production of Jihād
IN THIS BOOK, I PRESENT an anthropological analysis of the social production of jihād among refugees who occupy a transnational space in the borderlands between Pakistan and India. For the first four decades after the Partition of colonial India, displaced Muslims from Jammu and Kashmir placed tremendous value on the Islamic practice of a kind of migration known as hijarat (protective migration). They defined themselves as muhājirs (refugees) and accorded spiritual value to the practice of reestablishing the Muslim family in exile. In the 1990s, a shift was discernible; more and more, Kashmiri refugees talked about the importance of becoming mujāhids (warriors) and participating in a jihād (armed struggle) as a way to defend their families and to make it possible to return to their homes. Through their incorporation in militant groups, Kashmiri Muslim refugees living in Pakistan and in the Pakistan-administered territory known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) played a significant role in shaping the militant movement known as the “Kashmir Jihad.” I use the tension between hijarat and jihād to tell the story of why “refuge-seeking” became a socially and politically devalued practice in the Kashmir region and how this devaluation made large numbers of refugee men available for militant mobilization. The tension between hijarat and jihād grounds this analysis in a set of debates in which Muslim Kashmiri refugees are deeply invested and which are both explicit in political discourses and implicit in social practices.
A long history of violent political conflict has shaped the lives of people who live in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir. During each period of interstate and intrastate armed conflict, people were forcibly dislocated across the military Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan. In Pakistan and AJK, Muslim refugees from the Indian side of the LoC were given temporary property allotments and resettled in refugee resettlement villages and urban satellite colonies. Their resettlement was, and remains, legally temporary; international agreements provided for refugees to return to their home places and reclaim their properties when the territorial dispute between India and Pakistan will be resolved. In the interim, their documented legal status as “Kashmiri refugees” became the basis of the extension of political rights in Pakistan. That legal category includes both people who were themselves displaced and their descendants, and there are now over five million officially recognized Kashmiri refugees in AJK and Pakistan. These documented Kashmiri refugees now comprise a large percentage of the citizens of the provincial state of AJK.1 Of these, none are recognized as conventional refugees by the United Nations or by international refugee organizations. While they successfully garner recognition as “Kashmiri” within Pakistan, they are increasingly categorized as “Pakistanis” in other contexts.
After the beginning of the civil armed conflict in the Indian valley of Kashmir in 1989, additional refugees entered AJK territory. They were settled in camps rather than offered resettlement provisions, and many of the men from these camps became active in militant organizations that fight in Indian Jammu and Kashmir State. The refugee camps became spaces both for providing relief and for organizing militant violence, and youths from resettlement villages and urban Kashmiri refugee communities began joining active militant organizations fighting on the Indian side of the LoC. They called this struggle the Kashmir Jihad (jihād-e-kashmīr). Young militants often endured the disapproval and discouragement of their elders, but they eventually garnered widespread public support. By the late 1990s, their participation had prompted the emergence of new jihadist groups that had little connection to established Kashmiri political parties and only loose ties to organized religious schools. The Kashmiri refugees who joined and supported these militant organizations had refashioned an insurgency as an Islamic jihād, but they also reframed popular understanding of what jihād is and how it should be practiced.
This book is organized in three parts, each of which integrates ethnographic with historical accounts to explore the relationship between these two social forms produced by displaced peoples’ experiences with political violence: that of the muhājir (refugee) and that of the mujāhid (warrior). Part One, “Between Hijarat and Jihād in Azad Kashmir,” examines the political and cultural paradigms through which Kashmiri Muslim refugees interpret and explain their personal and collective histories and express their aspirations for the future. Over their lives, displaced people sometimes claimed to be muhājirs and sometimes mujāhids. They did not always achieve the social recognition they sought, but their claims referenced symbolic meanings that connected refugees to other historical migrations and to periods of violent political struggle in other parts of the Muslim world. The designation “Kashmiri” also indicates people’s awareness of their involvement in political contexts and historical processes that exceed the immediate context of daily life. Many people were displaced by historical accidents—by the unanticipated formation of new borders or by the border’s propensity for wandering across terrain. But the production of Kashmiri refugees as political subjects was not an accident of history. Kashmiri refugees insisted on recognition as Jammu and Kashmir “hereditary state subjects” and on the institutionalization of their status as refugees, because they derive their rights claims in the postcolonial state from a polity that existed in the past (and that some still strive to re-form for the future): the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. In this sense, national and transnational processes shaped Kashmiri refugees’ experiences of incorporation into the postcolonial nation-state. “Being Kashmiri” and “being a refugee” now simultaneously secure rights claims and obscure intense social conflicts about how cultural affinities correspond to political identities.
The second part of the book, “The Historical Emergence of Kashmiri Refugees as Political Subjects,” analyzes the formation and transformation of the Jammu and Kashmir state subject refugee (muhajir-e-riyasat-e-jammu-o-kashmir)—or simply Kashmiri refugee (muhajir-e-kashmir)—as a social and governmental category. In South Asia, a regional refugee regime developed to deal specifically with the displacements associated with the dismantling of the British Empire during the Partition. Kashmiri refugees had a distinctive place in that classificatory system. Refugee administrators, international observers, and the Pakistani public distinguished Jammu and Kashmir state subject refugees from Partition-era refugee-migrants. Jammu and Kashmir refugees and politicians also used the distinct category to make claims on legitimate governance over the former polity and to limit Pakistan’s administrative penetration into AJK. The concept of being a refugee was thus imbued with political value, both by people’s use of religious symbolism and by this specific historical formation. What it meant to be a Kashmiri refugee came into conflict with global cultural expectations, legal norms, and administrative practices that constitute the international refugee regime after 1989, when new groups of displaced people crossed into AJK. For Kashmiri refugees, the concept of hijarat no longer adequately explained the social or political experiences of violence-related forced displacement. Addressing the international community as a kind of humanitarian victim-refugee, required the de-politicization of the Kashmiri refugee subject. The terms refūjī (camp refugee), panāh