with villages and communities on the other side. Families and social groups were divided across the India- and Pakistan-administered regions, and people continued to reaffirm their kinship ties. Residents of villages on the line crossed it to attend important ritual events like weddings and funerals. The reinforcement of kinship ties through marriage and the continued participation in exchanges of ritual labor were particularly important for refugees as an expression of their social commitment to the idea of return. Refugees who thought of themselves as temporarily resettled sought to reinforce their social networks in the villages from which they had been displaced.
It became progressively more difficult and dangerous to make such crossings after 1971, when both India and Pakistan began treating the LoC like a border. Parts of the LoC were mined, and people caught crossing it were subject to arrest, investigation, and imprisonment. In other places, people experienced the LoC as an absence, a place across which contact with family members ceased. For divided families, the LoC marks where social interaction has become circumscribed and restricted and where interaction with “the other” places a person at risk.
Ideologically, the LoC marks a clear boundary. India has always regarded the events of October 1947 as a military invasion of Jammu and Kashmir orchestrated by Pakistan; it claims that the monarch of Jammu and Kashmir legally joined India in 1947, that the territory currently administered by Pakistan is therefore illegitimately and illegally occupied, and that the entirety of the former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir—including Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK)—is an integral part of India. Indian officials regularly accuse the government of Pakistan of attempting to internationalize the Kashmir issue, but in Pakistan the Kashmir Dispute has historically been viewed as an inherently international problem.82 Pakistan had no Instrument of Accession for Jammu and Kashmir, disputed or otherwise, but it claimed that the Maharaja’s accession to India was illegitimate and illegal and that interim constitution formation and elections did not invalidate the UN resolution calling for a general referendum. In Pakistan, people call AJK Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir) and refer to Jammu and Kashmir State in India as muqbūza kashmīr (Occupied Kashmir) or Indian Held Kashmir.
The process of legitimizing India’s claim in domestic political discourse involved linking the dispute to the central concerns of Indian national political culture, and Jammu and Kashmir came to represent the secular claims of Indian democracy. As Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, argued several years after the Partition, “the Kashmir dispute [is] symbolic for us as it has far-reaching consequences in India. Kashmir is symbolic as it illustrates that we are a secular state.”83 This symbolic relationship’s asserted importance to the stability and security of the Indian Union is now fully validated in policy analysis and academic studies of the Kashmir Dispute.84 In this formulation, the Kashmir Dispute is not just a conflict between India and Pakistan; it is a struggle to secure a modern secular state in South Asia.
In Pakistan, political thinking on the Kashmir Dispute focused on state security issues, on the illegitimacy of the electoral process and constitution formation in Indian-administered Kashmir, and on the imperative of international intervention to enforce the UN resolutions until the 1970s.85 After 1972, the two-nation theory underwent crisis with the secession of East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1971, and Islamist parties acquired influence in Pakistan’s national politics.86 New slogans such as “Kashmir is the jugular vein of Pakistan” (kashmīr shāhrag-e-pakistān hai) and “Kashmir will become Pakistan” (kashmīr pakistān banegā) emphasized the purported common (Islamic) cultural identity of Kashmiris and Pakistanis and the “natural” relationship between Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan. In this formulation, the Kashmir Dispute “concerns the life and the destiny of a people who have been historically and culturally an integral part of the nation that achieved sovereignty through the establishment of Pakistan.”87 In short, the Kashmir Dispute was reconceived as nothing less than a struggle for the very existence of Pakistan as a viable nation-state.
India and Pakistan now consider border crossers of all kinds national security risks. Residents of border villages and nomadic herders, who have a reputation as potential crossing guides, are subject to surveillance and suspicion by all sides in the conflict. In tracing family life histories, it was evident to me that marriages connecting families across the LoC continue, but people are now taciturn in discussing the movement of marriage parties. To talk about clandestine LoC crossings now is to admit to an activity that is associated with either terrorism or spying. For many people living in the Kashmir borderlands, cross-LoC alliances represented a continuation of old patterns of social, economic, and political alliances. Over time, it became more difficult to maintain these connections and more important to forge and solidify social bonds that connected people to networks in the broader postcolonial national contexts. Therefore, it was primarily refugee families who were committed to continuing these trans-LoC alliances, especially if they maintained a hope of return to their predisplacement homes.
The Kashmir Problem and the Line of Control
India and Pakistan consider the Kashmir Dispute a territorial dispute but Kashmiri refugees living in Pakistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir refer instead to the mas’alah-e-kashmīr (Kashmir Problem) to talk about the border in Jammu and Kashmir and its impact on their lives. The mas’alah-e-kashmīr is not a territorial dispute between states but a problem of the incomplete realization of the rights of the people (haqūq-e-awām).
When Kashmiri politicians, public intellectuals, or refugees use the term mas’alah-e-kashmīr, they place the Kashmir conflict in the context of a freedom movement (taharīk-e-āzādī) that began as a struggle to force the Maharaja to recognize the sovereignty of the people and that has become a struggle for the same recognition against the postcolonial state and in the international system of states.88 None of the UN resolutions envisioned the option of a third independent state in South Asia, but in the 1970s, Jammu and Kashmir nationalist thinkers introduced the possibility of an independent (unified) state to the popular understanding of the options that the promised referendum would present. They argued that the plebiscite (rāyeshumārī) called for in the 1949 UN resolutions referred to the right of self-determination (haqq-e-khudirādīyat), which they linked to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).89 Contemporary discourse on the politics of the mas’alah-e-kashmīr has established a firm link between the promised future of haqq-e-khudirādīyat, the historical haqūq-e-awām, and the continuing integrity of the dispersed awām-e-riyāsat, or awām-e-kashmīr (people of the state of Jammu and Kashmir).
Arshad Sohail was working as a Central Committee member of the Organization for the Rehabilitation (Settlement) of Unsettled Refugees of Jammu and Kashmir when I met him in an unofficial refugee settlement colony in Rawalpindi in 2001. It was a chance meeting, and he greeted me warmly, recalling that we had met in passing at a social gathering in Murree, a hill station in the northern Punjab. I didn’t remember meeting him, as I had spent most of the day with the women guests, but I did remember that the gathering had been to remember the death of a family member of the hosts—a young man who had been a member of the militant wing of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). Arshad Sohail said that he had been a district organizer for the JKLF’s political wing and told me about his own history as a refugee displaced from Baramullah in 1971.
His recollection caught my attention because I knew that the family I was visiting were registered members of the AJKMC (although likely with Kashmiri nationalist sympathies because they had a picture of Maqbool Bhat—an iconic nationalist martyr—hanging on the wall of their shack). I also knew that the Organization for the Rehabilitation (Settlement) of Unsettled Refugees drew its membership primarily from Jammu and Kashmir refugees living in Pakistan, where the AJKMC had a large base of support. Refugees from Jammu and Kashmir are often members of multiple political parties, because these multiple alliances express different political ideologies, aspirations for the future, and investments in networks of patronage in the places where they live and work. They might be members of one political party that was effective in “getting it done” in their daily lives and another that connected them to the places from which they had been displaced, and to where they hoped to return. It is important to pay attention to this multiplicity of affiliations,