LoCed out in Kashmir

Luv Puri has done the Indian public and policymakers yeoman’s service in writing this book because it highlights the situation in the Pakistani side of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).

India and Pakistan have fought wars over Kashmir and the search for a solution has, so far, been a case of one step forward, two steps back. This political controversy often masks the fact that the real victims of the dispute are the common people of the partitioned region. It is their story on which Puri has focused in seven well-researched chapters.

Politics in pre-Partition India was divided between the goals of the Congress party and the Muslim League, divisions that were exploited by the retreating colonisers to partition India. Muhammad Ali Jinnah claimed that the Muslim majority J&K princely state should join the Dominion of Pakistan which was created as a homeland for Muslims. Maharaja Hari Singh, however, had his own personal ambitions to rule over the independent country of J&K without realising that those days were numbered. Kashmiri political formations like the Muslim Conference and National Conference would never have accepted the arbitrary rule of a Dogra dynasty nor would Pakistan allow the Maharaja to continue or merge with India.

The two newly-born neighbouring countries fought a war to resolve the issue, the United Nation’s Security Council intervened, a ceasefire was declared after which India and Pakistan retained those territories that had come under their control during the war. This is the history of the partition of J&K and the origin of the Line of Control (LoC) and Pakistan-administered J&K (PAJK). The author has appropriately titled this chapter “Jammu and Kashmir on Fire” because Hari Singh’s actions led to communal riots and, ultimately, war in October 1947 and the partition of J&K.

How has Pakistan governed or administered its own J&K, which it chooses to describe as Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir)? This is the question Puri explores in the chapter “How Azad Is Azad Kashmir?” After the Karachi agreement was signed in March 1949, Azad Kashmir crossed many stages before it finally got a Constitution in 1970 based on adult franchise, a multi-party democracy and a formal constitutional position that it was “like a nation within a nation”.

The Constitution promised PAJK autonomy with a rider that “a person will be disqualified for propagating any opinion or action in any manner prejudicial to the ideology of Pakistan or the sovereignty and integrity of Pakistan”. In practice, this rider has meant that real control in Azad Kashmir is exercised by the central government of Pakistan. Even the oath of the PAJK president reads: “As President of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, I will be loyal to the country and the cause of accession of Jammu and Kashmir to Pakistan… .”

The absence of democracy is not Azad Kashmir’s only tragedy. Partition has not stopped the migration across the LoC of families that were separated as a result. This situation has made J&K the “Land of Human Tragedies”, as the chapter that discusses this issue has been titled.

The author informs us that “a million people on both sides of the Line of Control come from broken families separated from each other even after six decades”. The author tells many stories of families that are still searching for relatives on either side of the LoC.

No end seems to be in sight for J&K’s tragedy now that the Pakistani state has outsourced the job of fomenting violence in the Indian part of the state to Islamic fundamentalists. These extremist groups are playing havoc with the social structure of PAJK where Islam is interpreted very differently from the version practised by fanatics in Afghanistan or by the Pathans or practitioners of the Wahabbi sect of Islam.

Further, Pakistan-based Kashmiris, especially from Mirpur, constitute a prosperous diaspora in England. Like the Hindu diaspora in the US, Mirpuris in England are in search of their identity. If the US Hindu diaspora has adopted the identity of Hindutva, the Mirpuris have adopted Pakistan’s ideology of J&K’s independence from India. Unfortunately, the Kashmiri Muslim diaspora in England is confronted with the Islamophobia of the host country so they hark back to their Islamicist roots in Pakistan and PAJK.

Anti-India jihadi groups are operating at various levels and in this climate of violence any solution to this “dispute” looks difficult. Islam in Pakistan is divided into many sects and inter-Muslim conflicts are a routine affair in that country. Now that gun-wielding jihadis are operating both against India and their Muslim hosts, the Pakistani Muslim groups are inspired by the ideologies of various schools of thought (Deobandi, Barelvi and so on). These groups have brought their sects’ ideologies to Azad Kashmir and to some extent their influence is being felt across the LoC. Hindu communalists in the Indian part of J&K and the Sangh Parivar also view the Kashmir problem through the prism of Hindutva.

Thus, any solution to the Kashmir dispute has become complicated by the involvement of religious fanatics on both sides of the divide. The author’s message is that unless the great divide is healed, it is ordinary Kashmiris on both sides who stand to lose. And a solution is possible only if the state actors of India and Pakistan take a secular and forward-looking approach towards ending the tragedy of partition.

ACROSS THE LOC
Inside Pakistan-Administered
Jammu and Kashmir
Luv Puri
Penguin/Viking: 2010
136 pages