Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
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without border restriction between 1949 and 1953. Many moved in search of livelihood opportunities; others attempted to return to their home villages. Refugees who had spent most of the war in informal camps in Muzaffarabad district presumed that they could return to their home villages when the armies stopped fighting. But the road route turned out to be impenetrable, due to an Indian and Pakistani army presence, and those with young children did not try to make it back by using mountain routes and passes. Others successfully made their way to their home villages but found staying there untenable, often because of harassment by Indian Army troops or by neighbors who saw them as Pakistani sympathizers. They then returned to AJK, sometimes with family members previously left behind or from whom they had become separated. Refugees found it particularly difficult to establish themselves in the rural areas of Poonch district, and many who had initially taken refuge in those areas shifted to the refugee camps in northern Punjab, which already accommodated large numbers of refugees from the Jammu Province. Some refugees—especially those in NWFP refugee camps in Mansera and Abbottabad—moved back into AJK territories, and others who were not successful in establishing themselves in local communities in AJK moved into Pakistan.
Refugee movement slowed after 1954, when the government of AJK began making provisional allotments of evacuee property to Kashmiri refugees. In Pakistan, Kashmiri refugees remained in refugee camps into the early 1950s. Kashmiri political party leaders began advocating for provisional resettlement of refugees within Pakistan in 1951, and the official “temporary resettlement” of Kashmiri refugees began in 1954. Refugees who had been accommodated in West Punjab and NWFP refugee camps were settled in the cities of Sialkot, Gujarat, Rawalpindi, Abbottabad, and Mansera. In AJK, where relief administration had not been institutionalized, refugees had begun occupying rural and urban properties and cultivating the lands formally held by Sikh and Hindu landholders. The government of AJK began formally allocating properties after 1954 by surveying and legalizing these de facto holdings.
Border Evacuation and Political Persecution (1965–1971)
The wars of 1965 and 1971 brought 50,000 new refugees into Azad Jammu and Kashmir.78 The greatest number of people displaced during the wars of 1965 and 1971 were from areas where the front lines of warfare altered the boundaries of military control, such as the former Jammu Province districts of Poonch, Rajouri, and Mirpur. Border villages on the Indian side of the LoC were under considerable pressure to evacuate as the Indian Army created an ever-widening security line, emptying areas of people who might become casualties of warfare or whose loyalties were considered questionable. On the Pakistan side, civilians were largely pressured not to evacuate, as their presence was considered an additional impediment to an Indian ground advance. In the Jammu Division of (Indian) Jammu and Kashmir State, many people who left their villages chose to evacuate east and south within the Indian-administered territories. Most of the people who crossed the LoC knew they would not be able to return to their homes after the fighting ended. They came to AJK in family groups and chose to settle in areas where they had kinship connections.
In the high mountain regions of Muzaffarabad, Kupwara, and Baramullah districts, the LoC did not shift a great deal. In these areas, many people who crossed into AJK were young men, unaccompanied by family. Many were young male residents of border villages where they were under heavy pressure from security personnel, who suspected them of facilitating an invasion from Pakistan. Others came from towns farther from the LoC, especially from the strongly pro-Pakistan neighborhoods of Srinagar. Many of these refugees spoke the Kashmiri language, had close ties with pro-Pakistan political parties, and were advocates of Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan. Identified as pro-Pakistan activists, they left their homes to escape persecution. Such refugees were not resettled through government programs; most entered into negotiated alliances with local residents, such as through marriage. These marriages were arranged by families through cross-border kinship connections or by the leaders of political parties who, in addition to mediating such marriage alliances, secured government jobs for the refugees.
The changing contours of the preexisting LoC made for some displacement predicaments. For example, in 1965, residents of several villages in AJK’s Poonch district found their villages on the Indian side at the end of the war. When they left their homes and crossed the front lines into Pakistan-held territory, they found that they were not eligible for rehabilitation as refugees because they had been previously acknowledged as residents of AJK. Although these people no longer had access to their properties, the AJK government considered their villages “occupied by” India but not “in” Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir State.
Insurgency and Counterinsurgency (1989–2001)
In January 1990, refugees from Jammu and Kashmir State began crossing the LoC once again. This time, the context was a militant insurgency in the valley of Kashmir. The government of AJK provided relief supplies to 35,000 registered refugees between 1990 and 2004, of whom 17,000 constituted a permanent camp-resident population.79 Unlike refugees from the previous periods of intrastate conflict, the AJK government did not grant them rehabilitation allotments or recognize their right to own land. The people who came to AJK after 1990 lived in temporary tent camps until October 2005, when a severe earthquake forced relocation of all established refugee camps.
The first refugees during this period entered AJK’s Muzaffarabad district from the Kupwara and Baramullah districts of Jammu and Kashmir State’s Kashmir Division. Indian military and security force activity in border regions kept residents under constant pressure from the military forces, who suspected local people of aiding militants, and from insurgents, who suspected local residents of collaborating with the Indian military. Indian military and security forces used interrogation, torture, and harassment against those suspected of activities or sympathies that supported pro-Independence or pro-Pakistan insurgents.80 In situations in which a suspected militant could not be located, his male relatives were likely to be detained for interrogation. His female relatives were often subjected to severe public mistreatment. Thus, most refugees who crossed the LoC into AJK came in family groups, and the residents of several border villages migrated to AJK together.
In addition, there have been periods of intense military engagement at the LoC in the form of heavy artillery fire and border skirmishes. These were pronounced after the bilateral nuclear test of 1998; the Jammu districts of Jammu and Kashmir State saw an increase in fighting and a corresponding increase in the numbers of people who crossed into the AJK districts of Kotli, Bagh, and Rawalakot. During the (undeclared) Kargil War of 1999, large numbers of people were displaced from AJK and the Northern Areas into Pakistan. Many people from border villages were repeatedly displaced, and others have not been able to return to their villages since the summer of 1998. The Government of AJK provided canvas tents, but they did not register these people as refugees or make relief provisions. The AJK government estimates that more than three hundred seventy thousand residents have been displaced within AJK and Pakistan due to LoC firing since 1990. However, as the AJK Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation explained to me during our first meeting in 1999, this number is compiled from the records of military checkpoints within the Security Zone, and it likely reflects people who evacuated from their homes on multiple occasions.
The Line of Control and Its Disputed Territory
For much of its history, the LoC had neither the absolute place nor the solid materiality that its representation on maps of Jammu and Kashmir suggests. The Indian military began planning a boundary fence known as the Indian Kashmir Barrier in the mid-1990s, but for decades there was no boundary line marking the place in a stream or on a hillside that ceased to be (Pakistan-administered) Azad Jammu and Kashmir and became (Indian-administered) Jammu and Kashmir State.81 Indian and Pakistani Army posts faced each other across mountain ridges, marking the LoC’s contours, but in many places its specific location was in doubt. Occasionally people wandered across the LoC by mistake, something they had perhaps done many times, until the day they encountered an army patrol and discovered that they were carrying the wrong identity cards. Sometimes such people said they were collecting fruit from a tree that had been in the family for years, claiming that it was the army patrol that had wandered across the line.
As a social boundary, the LoC was permeable, often fluid, and sometimes irrelevant. Many people traversed the line in the first decades after its establishment. Most of these