system” of Islam rejects a foundational distinction between social order and political order and, on one hand, Islamism failed as a global political ideology if its focus was to capture and transform the modern state. Islamist parties have rarely been successful electorally. When they have had electoral success, they have been suppressed by authoritarian regimes often supported by external powers. Where they have had electoral or revolutionary success, the paradox of Muslims, including Islamist leaders, having different conceptions of the Islam on which the order of society and state should be based becomes an object of immediate dispute. But the social work and political organizing actually carried out on the ground by fundamentalist and Islamist social activists extended the cultivation of disciplined, self-reflective Muslim personhood and demonstrated that people could be the agents of their own political possibilities.28 As Islamist activists and parties reinterpreted Islamic precepts for application in state legal practices and institutions, they had to make arguments that were convincing and compelling to people in the emergent political public sphere. In this process, overtly nonpolitical reform and revivalist movements contributed to the formation of modern political subjects, through their focus on the self-reflective moral reform of individual Muslims and the inculcation of conscious bodily practices of piety.27 Religiously inflected moral terminologies were integrated into discursive arguments about the rationality and value of political practices, but in ways that confounded doctrinal regulation and actually produced hybrid political forms.29
The concept of “political Islam” should be understood and applied as an analytic concept distinct from but related to both Islamic fundamentalism and Islamism. Political Islam properly marks epistemological and ontological orientations—rather than ideological ones—that have become legible though the central role that cultural processes and cultural conflicts play in modern political forms of rule. Questions of authoritative interpretation remain contested issues in Muslim societies, but in practice, neither traditionally trained scholars nor political ideologues, control the actual social debates and cultural process of evaluation by which people evaluate the “good” use of power or the legitimacy of political practices, including the use of violence to achieve political ends. Instead, the forms of knowing and being in the world that correspond to the politicization of Islamic cultural forms in late modern societies are connected to Muslim political subjects’ awareness of and engagement in local, national, and global social, political, and economic processes.
ON CATEGORICAL COMMENSURABILITY, TAXONOMIC ANXIETIES, AND KASHMIRI REFUGEES
One of the theoretical strengths of anthropology has long been its ability to explain how systems of cultural categorization operate to frame the conditions of politics. This book explains the coherence and contradictions within and between systems of categorization that shape who qualifies as a Kashmiri refugee. What appear to be merely taxonomic struggles actually reveal social and political struggles over, and anxieties about, who is Kashmiri, Pakistani, or Indian; who qualifies as a refugee as distinct from a citizen; and whose violent pasts are worthy of solidarity and care (such as refugees or victims of human rights abuses) as opposed to those whose pasts are not (such as militants and terrorists).
Some have argued that the young men who joined militant groups in the 1990s came to think of themselves as Kashmiri refugees as a result of an effort by Pakistan to recruit them to a proxy war in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.30 This perspective is underwritten by two misleading assumptions about political violence in Jammu and Kashmir. The first is a tautological but pervasive culturalist argument that has held that Kashmiri society is fundamentally nonviolent and religiously syncretic and that it therefore follows that a political struggle based on violence or legitimated in a religious discourse must by definition be “unKashmiri” and carried out by people who are not Kashmiri and come from outside of Kashmir.31 However, the category “Kashmiri” also emerged as a distinct rights-bearing political subject through the cultural, social, and political work of Jammu and Kashmir politicians and political activists who struggled to maintain the Princely State’s categories of legal identification. Through their efforts, the Hereditary State Subject provisions remain wrapped into the political and social fabric of the divided regions of the former state; they undergird struggles for political belonging in ways often obscured by the claims of the postcolonial states of India and Pakistan for legitimacy and domination in the region.
The second misleading assumption is that there is a single real (universal and unchanging) refugee subject against which disjunctures or contradictions can be held up as a sign of inauthenticity. In fact, categorical incommensurability is a familiar problem in accounting for displaced people in many parts of the world.32 One of its causes is a failure to recognize the different symbolic systems that order the management of refugees. Another is a failure to examine how and why these systems change over time. The refugee regime concept illuminates the different processes through which people displaced by political violence in Jammu and Kashmir became refugees at different historical moments and the varying social, institutional, and cultural meaning accorded to it. It renders visible the changes in meaning that derive from refugees’ place in the regional, transnational, and international cultural and political order. The category “Kashmiri refugee” has a historical continuity, and its relational meanings to other political forms have changed over time. Indeed, that refugee camps could become spaces for organizing militant violence as well as for offering relief to refugees, while disturbing to many observers, was a comparatively well-known phenomenon by the 1990s. In fact, the issue of the humanitarian dilemma (that long-term support for displaced peoples perpetuates conflicts by supporting women and children and freeing men for militant labor) was by then a topic of debate among humanitarian practitioners.33 Taking serious inventory of the relationship between the category of the Kashmiri refugee and the classificatory system of the South Asian refugee regime, thus also renders visible the process of problem of regime change.
Refugee Regimes and Refugees in South Asia
Examining violence-related forced mass displacement in postcolonial South Asia within the rubric of refugee studies has long been a problem for the field. This is due in no small part to the emergence of a new “conventional” definition of a modern refugee during the Partition of colonial India. The final version of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees defined a refugee as an individual who has crossed a national boundary and has a well-founded fear of persecution in the country of origin for reason of race, religion, nationality, or political opinion.34 Although it took several years to set this definition, in part because states’ representatives had serious disagreements about the principles of recognition that should be applied, the standards of categorization and management that developed became normative on a global scale, and this system is now commonly referred to as “the international refugee regime.”
The idea that refugees are people deprived of their nationality had the effect of excluding displaced people who could be argued to have multiple claims on nationality—particularly people displaced by decolonization processes. It became a generally accepted argument that Partition-era displacement was a mass migration in which Partition’s displaced did not lose the protection of their states and that therefore Partition “migrants” were not subject to United Nations (UN) refugee agreements.35 But as the historian Mark Mazower has argued about that formative period in the creation of the UN, “the origins of legal regimes lie in a set of cultural, political, and ideological struggles.”36 These legal regimes did not merely reflect an obvious distinction or institutionalize a preexisting agreement—it shaped them. In the words of B.S. Chimni, a legal scholar and former advisor to the United National High Commissioner for Refugees, “the problem of defining a refugee is a debate about the epistemological principles which inform its elaboration.”37 This epistemological ordering of displacement—the process of identifying a person as a refugee, or defining a group as a refugee population—is an inherently political project that orders international relations by categorizing migration and assigning different values to dislocation experiences.38
In the social sciences, political scientist Aristide Zolberg and anthropologist Liisa Malkki refocused the study of the international refugee regime; they approached it as a set of transnational expectations, provisions, and representations that constitute