Too Much Nationality: Kashmiri Refugees, the South Asian Refugee Regime, and a Refugee State, 1947-1974

Abstract

This article examines the development of a regional refugee regime through an examination of the international context in which ‘Kashmiri refugees’ emerged as rights-bearing political subjects. I distinguish between the refugee regime that was developing in Europe at the end of the Second World War and the refugee regime that was developing to handle the integration of Partition refugees into the new nation-states of Pakistan and India during the Partition of British colonial India in 1947. I also describe how the ‘Kashmiri refugee’ emerged as a distinct political subject within the South Asian refugee regime through treaties between India and Pakistan and provincial legal provisions, designated administrative practices by the national governments, and the eventual creation of a ‘refugee electorate’ in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. The constitution of a modern regional refugee regime that recognized refugees as inherently political subjects enables a critical perspective on the globalizing claims of the ‘international refugee regime’.