'Jihadis, faujis and Chinese' in PoK

Between the Great Divide: A Journey into Pakistan-administered Kashmir
Anam Zakaria
HarperCollins
320 pages; Rs 599

This is a pioneering work on Azad Kashmir, which Indians prefer to call Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), by a Pakistani journalist who made eight visits for her fieldwork over 2016 and 2017. Ms Anam Zakaria conducted intensive and extensive interviews not only with residents of villages near the Line of Control (LoC), who live under the shadow of daily mortar shells and rifle fire, but also with many politicians and military officials, including Jehangir Karamat, Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan from 1996 to 1998 and President of Azad Kashmir. Researching this book was no easy task: Ms Zakaria attests that “on each of my eight trips to ‘Azad Kashmir’, I certainly had to go through various check posts, entering information at multipoints on the way.” 

This work of immense courage has been presented in three parts: Conflict, State Policies and Beyond the Ceasefire. The author tells her story through the prism of everyday reality in Azad Kashmir by linking it with the larger issues concerning Pakistan’s history and politics. Pakistanis believe that the Maharaja of Kashmir wanted to accede to Pakistan but was pressured by Jawaharlal Nehru, Lord Mountbatten and others to opt for India for “strategic reasons”. “And so, with multiple players and such high stakes, it was perhaps naïve to assume that a peaceful transition could ever take place in Kashmir,” Ms Zakaria writes. The clash between so-called “tribesmen” from Pakistan and the Indian Army in August 1947 ensured that this would never happen. “This heavy militarisation on both sides of the LoC is just one of the legacies left behind by the ‘tribals’ in the eyes of some,” she says. 

Ms Zakaria refers to events in the Indian part of Kashmir because they also exercise direct impact on PoK and its politics. The author refers to the rigged elections of 1987 in Jammu & Kashmir, which made Sayeed Salahuddin a rebel, who founded the anti-India Hizbul Mujahideen and announced that the “Kashmir conflict is a personal conflict for all of us”. The author also refers to Burhan Wani’s killing by the Indian army and how its impact was felt in Azad Kashmir and Pakistan. 

Chapters four and five are devoted to the human tragedy of refugees and women in the conflict zone. During two trips to the Neelam valley and Muzaffarabad, she talked with refugees who crossed to PoK in 1989-1990, still live in refugee camps and “yearn to go back, but can’t”. The women, meanwhile, say they have had enough. “We have no life. If we were alive at one moment, we do not know if we would be alive 10 minutes later,” they say. Wives and mothers speak of the suffering in every family. They want this struggle (Mukhbooza) for Kashmir to end because they are sure nothing will come of it. 

Neither state nor non-state actors like Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed of Jamat-ul-Dawa (JUD) or Lakshar-e-Taiba or religio-political Jihadis are in any mood to make peace in this divided land. The slogan on Kashmir Solidarity Day is meaningful: “Kashmir and Pakistan are like souls in two hearts”. A solution is unlikely to emerge anytime soon. Describing the India-Pakistan wars of 1947-48, 1965, 1971 and 1999, Ms Zakaria points out that “…the damage of war was perhaps felt the worst by the Kashmiris” because the army dominates the Pakistani state and a “war to the finish” is its established goal. Jehangir Karamat admitted as much in an interview in 1990. 

Much of this history would be familiar to Indians. The more interesting part of the book is on the governance of PoK by the Kashmir Council and its President whom she describes as a puppet of the central government. In an interview in April 2016, the President of Azad Kashmir also maintained that “Kashmir is a core issue”. 

But Azad Kashmiris have very practical resentments beyond the realm of religion. People in PoK rue the lost Sufi traditions under the tide of global fundamentalism, and there is a view that “the Mujahideen are outsiders, Punjabis and Pathans, not Kashmiris. They just want to create trouble”. Tourism has suffered because the local economy of the Neelam valley has been disrupted by constant firing across the LoC, especially from 2016. There is some uncertainty because of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the relationship between Azad Kashmiris with the separatists of Gilgit-Baltistan. 

In this context, the author also discusses the genesis of the weak but important demand for independence in PoK. A section of society known as Nationalists is demanding “pre-Pakistan status” for PoK, principally because of the degree to which Islamabad has eroded the autonomy of the Kashmir Council. The author has interviewed the pro-independence National Students’ Federation, formed in 1966, and the National Awami Party. Nobody, she says, “would want to raise Indian flag in Pakistan-administered Kashmir”. The partition of India and Pakistan is a settled fact, it seems.