Whose side are you on: a view of Keran in Neelum Valley, with ‘Azad’ Kashmir on the right and India-held Kashmir on the left, and the Neelum river in between acting as a natural ‘border’ between the two regions | Photo from the book
For many Pakistanis, the words ‘Azad’ Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) — Free, or Pakistan-administered Kashmir — conjure up images of apple blossoms, beautiful peaks, touristic bliss and national pride. These images are cultivated in our political imagination in juxtaposition to scenes of state-terror, human rights violations and religious bigotry in ‘Maqbooza’ Kashmir — Occupied, or India-held Kashmir. Plenty of attention and solidarity is dedicated to Kashmiris living in India-held Kashmir. Our brothers and sisters in Azad Kashmir, however, are seldom remembered in our thoughts.
The Kashmiri conflict is most commonly discussed in reference to the geopolitical tussles between Pakistan and India. Both countries lay claim to the region, have fought three wars to make it their own and regularly exchange diplomatic fury and military fire over the infamous Line of Control (LoC). What is lost in the process are the voices of Kashmiris — voices that have been swallowed up by narratives that see Pakistan and India as the true makers of Kashmiri history. So much so that we only hear about Azad Kashmiris as the passive martyrs of cross-border shelling.
Anam Zakaria’s new book, Between the Great Divide: A Journey into Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, brings these voices to the centre as it “explores the larger Kashmir conflict through the lens of ‘Azad’ Kashmiris.” The book is a collection of oral history interviews — an increasingly popular method of enquiry that looks at history not to determine ‘objective’ facts per se, but to dissect memory and subjectivity and analyse them as “facts of history.” It seeks to decipher the historical force generated by subjectivities.
A new book uses oral histories to explore the larger Kashmir conflict through the lens of Azad Kashmiris
Oral history gives primacy to the voices of ordinary citizens without devaluing traditional historical sources; instead, it looks at the interplay between various sources, between official and non-official narratives, and discards the usual academic pretences of objectivity. Needless to say, this is an approach that opens up exciting possibilities in the field of history. Zakaria is cognisant of oral history’s limitations and harnesses its strengths effectively, showing us that it is not only geography that is disputed in Kashmir, but history too.
The book is divided into three parts, with the first “seeking to understand the origins of the conflict at the time of Partition” (for example, the infamous ‘tribal’ raids). The second part “studies the conflict from the perspective of the state with the aim of deconstructing official narratives.” Interviews with Pakistan’s former chief of army staff, Jehangir Karamat, and the former president of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Sardar Muhammad Yaqoob Khan, make up this section of the book. The last part “looks beyond the 2003 ceasefire to understand the role of state and non-state actors in Kashmir today, and explores the current grievances of ‘Azad’ Kashmiris through the narratives of nationalists as well as pro-Pakistan supporters.”
As Zakaria writes, “It seeks to understand what peace and freedom mean in ‘Azad’ Kashmir.”
The official narrative of the Kashmiri conflict — that my generation was taught at school — is that at the time of Partition, Kashmir was a Muslim-majority state with socio-economic ties to Pakistani Punjab and it was ruled by an anti-Muslim Hindu prince who joined India against the wishes of his people. Pakistan intervened in support of Kashmiris, pressuring India to promise a plebiscite, which it never honoured. In this narrative, Kashmiris are instrumentalised as a symbol of Pakistani victimhood when, in fact, the Kashmiri struggle for independence and self-determination predates 1947. As pointed out by several interviewees, the tribal raids were a mistake that took away agency and authenticity from Kashmir’s struggle for independence: “We could have won our independence without this meddling,” says one of them. Others claim that the tribal raids and the subsequent communal violence that ensued between religious groups irrecoverably altered social relations in the Valley.
The biggest casualty of the raids, Zakaria suggests, might have been the collapse of “Kashmiriyat”, a notion of collective identity “defined in terms of the region’s tolerance of multiple cultures and religions.”
The legacies of these raids — compounded by the marriage of religion and nationalism in Pakistan — have led to tragic consequences in terms of social relations between different religious groups in Azad Kashmir. Sometimes these fractures manifest themselves within the same family. One Sikh interviewee recalls a branch of his family that had converted to Islam and stayed in Azad Kashmir after Partition: “His son, a little too self-conscious of his Sikh heritage, grew up as a junooni (fiery) Muslim, constantly trying to prove himself as a pure Muslim. Though extremely helpful, he refused to walk with me in his hometown in Pakistan because he was afraid to be seen in the streets with a man wearing a turban.” This is not a unique phenomenon, nor is it limited to our national borders: in Pakistan and India, “religious minorities have to exert their allegiance to the state over and over again,” writes Zakaria.