until they could all return to their proper homes.
One day, we were invited to the home of the former president of the other major political party that represented the town’s refugee community. We were graciously received, and we waited a short time in the formal guest receiving room, where there were many photographs of the political leader. He had served several terms as the Prime Minister of AJK, and the photographs showed him shaking hands with several of the Prime Ministers and Military Administrators of Pakistan, including Nawaz Sharif, who was then in office. Our hostess, the politician’s sister, received us with tea and refreshments and discussed the specific history of her family’s contribution to founding AJK and establishing a place for Kashmiri refugees in its territory and within its government.
As she spoke, Farida Begum became increasingly agitated. At last she interrupted our hostess: “We are all Kashmiri, there is no difference that you can name to draw a distinction between this Kashmiri and that Kashmiri. Is it not so?” Our hostess agreed by inclining her head slightly to the side, but it seemed like a polite acquiescence to me, the kind a hostess might extend to a guest. Apparently Farida Begum was not satisfied, because she interjected again:
Then what is this that you are speaking of muhājirīn [refugees] in Poonch? Yes, it is fine, you may call me this, a muhājir, and you may even call yourself a muhājir, since you are now in Pakistan and not in Poonch. But how can you call a muhājir those people who are living in their own country? They have not crossed any border that you should call them muhājir. It is all our one Jammu and Kashmir, and they are not refugees in their own homeland!
The lady of the house agreed, but in a way that suggested that she was loathe to contradict, and she resumed answering my questions and talking about her family’s history. But she found it difficult to tell her story without using the words that upset my companion.
Soon Farida Begum turned to me and suggested that we ask to be excused. We began the long walk back to the center of town, and I noticed how very angry she was. Her lips pursed slightly and she walked quickly. She had pulled her veil briskly about her face and the broad cloth draped her shoulders and torso, but I could see the rigid set of her shoulders, and on the busy streets and narrow alleys, men pulled slightly aside to let her pass. I struggled to keep pace with her as we wound our way through the steep back alleys of the Pakistani hill town. When we arrived at her house, I tried to beg her pardon for asking her to accompany me to the home of a political rival. She dismissed my concern:
I campaign for my husband, she campaigns for her brother, that’s just politics. Didn’t you notice how well she received us for tea? After all, we are all Kashmiri. But she should not call them muhājirs when they are in their very own homeland!
“Just Mountain People”
On a hot summer Afternoon, I arrived at the Islamabad offices of the All Parties Hurriyat (Freedom) Conference (APHC), where the five members of the executive committee greeted me. The chairman represented the party that held the chair on the executive committee APHC in Srinagar, and he introduced each of the other delegates, each appointed by their respective political parties. He and his colleagues were used to meeting with diplomats and government officials, representatives of nongovernmental organizations, journalists, and scholars, and he presented the APHC’s official position on the Kashmir Problem succinctly: the current struggle in the valley of Kashmir is an indigenous liberation struggle of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, who are fighting for their right to exercise their right of self-determination, a basic human right according to the UN charter and, moreover, a specific right that was promised to the people of Jammu and Kashmir in 1949 by the United Nations. I listened to his presentation and then asked him to explain the APHC’s policy on refugee return.
He explained that the APHC, while cognizant of the refugee issue, did not have a specific unified position on the refugee question. He gave two reasons for this. First, he said, the right of refugees to return to their homes and reclaim their properties was a principle of state law. Second, Kashmiri refugees would not be able to return to their homes until the end of armed fighting and abuses of civilians on the Indian side of the LoC. At that point, the issue would be moot, because refugees and all the people of Jammu and Kashmir would participate in the UN-mandated plebiscite and express their preferences for the future status of Jammu and Kashmir—accession to Pakistan, accession to India, or an independent state. The chairman said that he was himself personally worried about the provisions for future refugee return, but he emphasized, “Kashmiri refugees are Kashmiri people”; the parties represented in the APHC had many refugee members and organizers, as the group’s only requirement for participation was that members be Jammu and Kashmir state subjects.
It was a long meeting, and after the official presentation the APHC members spoke openly about their own circumstances as exiles from the valley of Kashmir. While they each traveled extensively around the world, either on APHC or party work, none of them could return to their homes on the Indian side of the LoC because their prominent political work and human rights advocacy had made them targets of the Indian security forces. As we talked, it became clear that each of them had been appointed to their positions because they had already been in danger in the Valley for their political activities.
At the end of the afternoon, Arif Obaid, one of the APHC representatives, offered to drop me at my residence on his way home, and we had a chance to speak more as we traveled. He asked me to tell him more about the refugees in the camps in Muzaffarabad. I began to list names of the towns and villages outside the towns of Kupwara, Handwara, and Uri that I had heard mentioned most often in the camps when I asked people where they had lived before coming to AJK. He sighed and said disappointedly,
Oh, I thought you said that they were kashmīrī refugees, but they are just pahārī lōg [mountain people].
“Not of Concern to the Government of Azad Jammu and Kashmir”
During the monsoon season of 2001, a flash flood washed through the city of Rawalpindi. In some neighborhoods, buildings were flooded to the third story, and less sturdy homes, livestock, and people were swept away with the rushing waters. In the lowest-lying neighborhoods, families lost all of their possessions and counted themselves lucky not to have lost loved ones. The AJK Legislative elections had just announced returns, and Sabur Qadir had won election to a refugee seat from the Rawalpindi constituency expected to receive a Ministry assignment in the formation of the new government in Muzaffarabad. In the days after the flood, he was busy visiting Kashmiri refugees in neighborhoods around Rawalpindi, where he informed himself of their condition and compiled a list of families who suffered losses. He also promised to advocate for relief funds from the AJK government on his next trip to Muzaffarabad.
I accompanied him for several days on his rounds. Hanging on the remains of several houses we visited were the tattered election campaign posters of his rival, but Sabur Qadir was recognized and welcomed at each house. At each, he spoke with the head of the house, and his secretary made an entry in an account book. Privately, he expressed concern that he would not be successful, or at least not very successful, in securing relief for the flood victims. The damage was extensive; entire neighborhoods had become structurally unsound. In many cases what people needed were new homes. The biggest problem, in his view, was that the Kashmiri residents of Rawalpindi were widely distributed across different parts of the city, and there was thus little that the government of AJK could do to provide relief to Kashmiris as a group. Sabur Qadir said that he also found it personally very difficult to visit Kashmiri refugee families in their urban neighborhoods and to walk past their neighbors, who were just as profoundly affected. He found it extremely difficult that, while he might do little more than write the name, address, and an estimate of losses suffered by the Kashmiri residents, for the others he could not even do that much.
One day I did not accompany him and went instead to the kacchī ābādī (squatter settlement) on the outskirts of Islamabad, where I had spent a great deal of time during earlier fieldwork. One of several kacchī ābādīs in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the colony had begun as a labor camp during the building of the capital of Islamabad in the 1960s. Over the years, the laborers living there had built mud and stone shacks, but the state power and water agencies refused to provide services to illegal habitations; the laborers hijacked electricity from main lines but had no water or