The revolt within: Why Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is restless again

Nearly two decades ago, a person from Pakistan’s Punjab asked me, curiously, why people in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir appeared so antipathetic towards Punjabis, even though, as he put it, “we almost spoke a similar language.” Perhaps he assumed that someone who also had one side of the family that had migrated from the region during the 1947 Partition riots and who could converse in that language might offer a more detached assessment. Coincidentally, I was then researching my book — Across the LoC — on the region. What stayed with me was not merely the question itself, but the deeper tensions it hinted at questions of identity, representation and the uneasy relationship between the region and Pakistan’s political centre. Nearly two decades later, those unresolved sentiments appear to be resurfacing in a new form.