Far across the low hills running to the Line of Control, the Tiraṅgā had been raised over the police station and the magistrate’s office. The rebels had no weapons other than theit ironic sensibility. Early in 1973, a boat carrying a wedding party across the Poonch River from the village of Dadyal had capsized, killing 50 people. Ever since the raising of the Mangla Dam, residents had to give up riding horse-carts to the nearest market town, Mirpur, and make the dangerous journey over the waters instead. The bridge that was never built was one broken promise too many.
The rebellion was extinguished after Pakistan Army special forces dramatically parachuted in, sociologist Roger Ballard recorded. There was, after all, no other way to get to Dadyal.
Last week, parts of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir—which Pakistan divides into the so-called region of Azad Kashmir, with its capital at Muzaffarabad, as well as the separate region of Gilgit-Baltistan—saw massive protests against economic hardship and poor administration. Facing stone-throwing mobs, central paramilitary forces opened fire near Muzaffarabad, killing three. The government hastily moved to still the escalating violence with an $83 million subsidy for grain and electricity, conceding the key demands of the traders’ organisations spearheading the protests.
The protests are good news for India—but not, as some excited commentary has claimed, because rebellion against Pakistan is looming across the LOC. Even before 1947, the people of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir shared little bar the name with Kashmiris on the Indian side of the Line of Control—not language, not ethnicity, and not politics.
Even five years ago, the largest protests in the region had to do with India. In 2008, tens of thousands of protestors sought to march across the LOC, leading to a bloody showdown. Following the end of Kashmir’s special status, pro-independence demonstrators again sought to breach the de-facto border.
This time, though, the protests are linked to PoK’s fraught relationship with their ethnic-Punjabi-dominated country, not the conflict in Kashmir. For all practical purposes, the LOC has become a border—that exists not just on a map, but in political imagination. That creates space for future peacemaking.
A tenuous democracy
From the outset, democracy struggled to put roots in the arid, unwelcoming soil of PoK. Led by the London-educated lawyer Ibrahim Khan, the regions of Mirpur and Poonch rebelled against the authority of Maharaja Hari Singh in the summer of 1947. Khan’s army of demobilised Indian army and Indian National Army soldiers brushed aside the Maharaja’s soldiers and set up an interim administration. Two years later, though, breakaway Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas arrived in Pakistan and claimed power.
Forced out of office in 1950, Khan had the support of the powerful Sudhan clans of the Mirpur region. Large-scale violence broke out, political scientists Raja Qaiser Ahmed and Javaid Hayat have written, with the Pakistan Army’s 12 Division battling the men who only months before had been fighting India.
Abbas, Ahmed and Hayat write, was a close associate of Pakistan’s founding patriarch, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He opposed “the establishment of a democratic system because he believed that election politics would divert the attention of leaders, parties, and people away from the liberation movement”. Khan, conversely, demanded that PoK be able to elect their representatives.
Fighting flared up again in 1955, and police drafted in from Punjab exchanged fire with Sudhan militia in Rawalakot, Palandri, and Baral. The rebels were subjected to artillery fire, homes were dynamited, historian Christopher Snedden has recorded in a granular political study of PoK. Leaders of the rebellion were dragged through the streets, sometimes humiliated by being forced to “bark like dogs”; some ended up in military-run prisons.
Like in India—which was battling a similar crisis after the breakdown of the relationship between Kashmir’s PM Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah and PM Jawaharlal Nehru—the Pakistani government set up a police state.
The end of the rebellion in 1956, and General Ayub Khan’s military coup of 1958, saw Islamabad dynamiting the last elements of democratic rule in PoK. Islamabad also put in power a constitutional system that gave it supreme authority, by limiting PoK’s powers on the grounds that it could not be treated as just another state while it remained a disputed territory.
Ethnicity and economics would work to challenge the hegemony Islamabad desperately held on to.
PoK’s ethnicity problem
For five millennia, ethnic Mirpuris had crewed the Indus boats that linked Punjab with Karachi, their sons sent off to earn livelihoods the harsh mountain soil could not yield. From the 1880s, Mirpuris began working on the steamships that had arrived in the Indian Ocean and soon set up the kernels of diasporas in the United Kingdom and Australia. Labourers from Mirpur worked in World War 2 munitions factories and helped rebuild the country’s devastated cities and industries. Within a decade of independence, PoK began going global.
“There is hardly a bullock cart or a bicycle to be seen,” Roger Ballard noted. “Instead cars and swarms of Japanese motor-cycles fill the roads.” There were Western-style hotels and supermarkets selling cornflakes and ketchup: “Every hamlet seems to boast three, four and even five-storied buildings rearing into the sky.”
Lacking an industrial or agrarian base, the tidal wave of remittance earnings sent home by the diaspora ended up invested in land: A strange case of capita-rich underdevelopment, Ballard observed.
The Mangla Dam, built from 1961 to 1965 after the signing of the Indus Waters Treaty with India, had harvested the waters of the Indus for agriculture and industry elsewhere in Pakistan but brought little but submergence to PoK itself. The province received an insignificant share in the project’s revenues. The rehabilitation of local residents was a tortured, endless project.
Like many newly affluent communities, the residents of Mirpur responded by sharpening ethnic boundaries. In cities like London and Manchester, stickers proclaiming their Kashmiri identity began to become visible in the 1970s, even though the Mirpuris spoke a different language and had few ties of kinship to the region. Though Mirpuri closely resembled Potohari, spoken on the other side of the Jhelum River in Punjab, Kashmiri-ness became a means of asserting national distinctiveness.
For many Mirpuris, participation in the Kashmiri anti-India movement thus became a means to assert distance from Punjabi-dominated Pakistan. Even though the Mirpuri diaspora played an important role in funding Kashmir terrorist groups like the National Liberation Front—contributing an estimated £6,000 for the 1983 kidnapping and assassination of Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre—its role on the frontlines of violence was limited.
That would change when Islamist organisations like the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad were introduced to PoK after 1990 by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate. The jihad in Kashmir was a tool for the ISI to harry India—but also stamp out Mirpur nationalism.
Two symmetrical Kashmirs
Long ruled by Islamabad and the military through the medium of the Muslim Conference party, PoK has gradually been embedding itself in Pakistan’s political life. Though it lasted only two years before General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq seized power, the Pakistan Peoples Party established a provincial coalition government in 1975. Former PM Nawaz Sharif also succeeded in making his faction of the Pakistan Muslim League a significant force from 1999 on. Former PM Imran Khan’s PTI also established a significant presence.
For Mirpuris, Pakistani political parties and politics have become instruments to pursue their autonomy and protect their identity.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that Islamabad’s leverage has ended. General Pervez Musharraf’s military government famously installed Major-General Sardar Muhammad Anwar Khan as president of PoK in 2001, bypassing requirements for candidates to have retired from public office at least two years before taking office. And PTI politician Chaudhary Anwar-ul-Haq was elected prime minister unopposed last year, after dumping his party.
Last week’s protests, however, make clear that local issues are coming to dominate PoK’s politics. Residents are no longer willing to see their interests sacrificed for a cause. There are good reasons for this. Even though PoK generates over a fifth of Pakistan’s hydroelectricity—behind only Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, which produces half—it suffers from chronic blackouts. Tariffs paid to other provinces for the use of their water were long denied to the region on the grounds it was not a province.
Following constitutional amendments brought about in 2018 under Nawaz Sharif, analyst Jalaluddin Mughal notes, PoK has come close to becoming just another province of Pakistan—just as the Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir has become in India. Ladakh, like Gilgit, is also centrally ruled.
For the first time since 1947, there is now an institutional symmetry to the two parts of Maharaja Hari Singh’s Kashmir. All that remains to be done is for the two nations to sign a piece of paper accepting reality.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)