Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
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contradictory political ideologies. It is impossible to deduce people’s political proclivities or to predict their behavior from their political affiliations. However, I was interested to know how Arshad Sohail had become a Central Committee member for an organization that not only served members of a different political party than his own but also primarily served people who had been displaced from the Jammu region.90
He explained that his standing in the Kashmiri refugee community derived in part from his role in organizing refugee participation in a 1992 protest march from Muzaffarabad toward Srinagar, which was intended to meet marchers from Srinagar at Chakothi/Uri and thus “break” the LoC. The refugees he organized were all registered with the Organization for the Rehabilitation (Settlement) of Unsettled Refugees living in Rawalpindi, and they were also members and supporters of a variety of different political parties in AJK and Pakistan. In fact, he said, although the 1992 march had been a JKLF initiative, the first organized attempt to break the Ceasefire Line had been in 1958 by activists of the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Liberation League. During the years of Muslim Conference party rule in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, successive party leaders and AJK presidents had led public marches to break the LoC.91 Kashmiri refugees living in Pakistan always participated in these marches, Arshad Sohail said, because the LoC needed to be revealed as an irrelevant boundary and made visibly permeable to Jammu and Kashmir state subjects:
We are all Kashmiri. When this mas’alah-e-kashmīr is resolved then one day we will return to our homes, but even now this LoC– it does not apply to us. The LoC was an agreement between India and Pakistan, but the UN never said to awām-e-kashmīr, “this is your LoC.” The haqq-e-khudirādīyat is a political right that we were promised, but some conditions were not met and we are still waiting—and by the grace of God if the UN does not give it to us then we will grasp it ourselves.
Being Kashmiri, according to Arshad Sohail, cannot be interpreted within a worldview that privileges the territorial division of Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan. He continued:
That LoC? Well, that is a thing which Pakistan must know and India must know, but I do not know any LoC. I am a muhājir in Pakistan, but if I accept this LoC between my home and my family and my own self, then I will be a refugee in the whole world and I will have no home.
BEING KASHMIRI, THE BORDERLAND OF THE BODY, AND THE TERRITORY OF THE STATE
The existence of the muhājir-e-jammū-o-kashmīr (Kashmiri refugee) as a politico-legal and sociocultural identity both underwrites and challenges the foundational narratives that legitimate the postcolonial nation-states of Pakistan and India. It challenges citizenship categories and destabilizes a major material line of separation and identity—the border. For this reason, the border does not provide the language that can illuminate the relationships between ways of “being Kashmiri” and the “Kashmir” to which they correspond.
Despite the guarded maintenance of the predivision Jammu and Kashmiri hereditary state-subject status as the basis for recognizing Kashmiri state subjects on both sides of the LoC, arguments about the proper use of the term erupt regularly in daily life. Three cases illustrate the constant work required to maintain the category Kashmiri as a political identity. In each of these cases, political organizers, appointed delegates, and elected representatives disputed the limits of inclusion in the community of Kashmiris and deployed the designation Kashmir in very different ways when they were speaking in formal political contexts versus when they used the word in casual interpersonal speech. Each, in speech not circumscribed as political, used the word to describe a sense of cultural difference and the speaker’s affective attachment to that difference.
Farida Begum criticized a political rival for implying that anyone within the borders of the state (as they had been in 1947) could possibly be a refugee. Her objection to the use of the term muhājir highlighted the utility of the term Kashmiri to reject a political distinction between hereditary residents (qaumī bāshindah) and resettled refugees (muhājirs) that might delimit a differential evaluation of rights based on the current divisions of territory. Yet, in private discussions with me, Farida Begum was very interested in drawing distinctions between “this and that Kashmiri” in the domain of culture and language. Likewise, as an official diplomatic representative, Arif Obaid maintained a similar although apparently inverse distinction to the one made by Farida Begum—that the same relationship to territory that makes people “refugees” also secures their identity as “Kashmiri.” In personal conversation, however, Arif Obaid expressed his interest in refugees from the cultural center of the Indian Kashmir Valley; while he had a political obligation to the “mountain people” as a representative of a transnational Kashmiri political party, he clearly did not feel an affinity with them. In Islamabad, the residents of one squatters’ colony so effectively mobilized their claims to be “Kashmiri refugees” against the government of Pakistan that their colony, located within view of the parliament, was one of the last kacchī ābādīs remaining in the capital of Islamabad after residents of other such settlements had been forcibly relocated to the outskirts of the city. Their representative to the AJK Legislative Assembly, however, denied their requests for patronage, because the government of AJK, concerned primarily with tracing the contours of displacement across the LoC, was uninterested or unwilling to take up issues particular to the condition of people displaced from the other Pakistan-administered areas into Pakistan.
In AJK and Pakistan, not all people who self-identify as Kashmiri garner recognition from others in all domains; informal, casual slippages often belie formal political speech, revealing rifts of cultural attachment and social ambivalence. In speaking to and about each other, Kashmiris sometimes become vexed by the multiple possible references of the designation, and these disagreements reveal the ambiguous and contingent quality of the term.
“Not Refugees in Their Own Homeland”
The municipality of Murree has historically been an important crossroads between the NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), the Punjab, and the Jammu and Kashmir territories. The town has had a resident community of Kashmiri refugees since 1947. In 1946, it was a hill station retreat for the colonial administrators of British India and a military outpost for the British Colonial Army. Organizers of the tax rebellion in the Poonch region in 1946–1947 smuggled weapons into the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir from Murree and brought their families to the town in order to protect them from the Maharaja’s army. In 1948, refugees arrived in Murree from the other areas in Jammu District that were most profoundly affected by frontline fighting between India and Pakistan. In the same period, prominent political supporters of the Muslim Conference from the Kashmir Valley came to Murree after being forced out of Srinagar during the violent political party contests between National Conference supporters and the AJKMC. This community of political elites from the Kashmir Valley made Murree a hospitable resettlement community for other exiles who supported the pro-Pakistan movements during the Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971 and had to leave Indian Kashmir because of later political retaliation. Murree is now a center for the constituency of one of the six KV (Kashmir Valley) seats and for one of the six JC (Jammu City) seats that are reserved for muhājir-ekashmīr (Kashmiri refugees) in the Legislative Assembly of AJK.
Farida Begum was my hostess for several days while I stayed in the town, meeting with Kashmiri refugees. Her husband had been a Member of the AJK Legislative Assembly on several occasions, elected to one of the town’s refugee seats. She herself had been a close partner in his campaigns, advocating his candidacy in women’s circles and household networks. My hostess had lived in Srinagar until she was a young woman when her family arranged her marriage to the son of a friend who was living as a refugee in Pakistan. Her own closest connections were to other Kashmiri-speaking refugees from Srinagar who traced family connections through several generations and several villages and urban neighborhoods on both sides of the LoC. Farida Begum was eager to talk about the importance for muhājirs (refugees) from the Kashmir Valley to maintain their language and traditions; she said that it was more difficult for them than for refugees from Poonch or Jammu, where the regional languages were closer to the Hinko and Punjabi their neighbors spoke in town and to the Urdu their children spoke at school. She and her husband spoke only the Kashmiri language (Koshûr) to their children, and she hoped to give her daughter in marriage to a Srinagar family so that