CHAPTER 5

Kashmiris in Britain: A Political

Project or a Social Reality?
Martin Sökefeld and Marta Bolognani

Introduction
It is estimated that 70% of the total Pakistani population in the UK is
of Kashmiri origin (Bunting 2005). However, in the 2001 Census, only
about 22,000 individuals who ticked the box “other” in the ethnicity
section defined themselves as Kashmiri, in spite of an unofficial esti-
mate of 500,000 persons of Kashmiri origin in the UK.
The great majority of Kashmiris in Britain come from the districts
of Mirpur and Kotli (which formerly was a part of Mirpur) of Azad
Kashmir. The presence of these people in the UK is the outcome of a pro-
cess of chain migration1 that, at least according to the literature, started
already before independence and the partition of the subcontinent, and
substantially accrued by the dislocation followed by the construction of
the Mangla Dam (Bolognani 2007). Yet it is ahistorical to speak about
these people simply as Kashmiris because after partition, when the
larger movement of migration to Britain started, most of them were not
identified and did not identify themselves specifically as “Kashmiris”
but as “Pakistanis” or simply as “Mirpuris”—and many, perhaps even
the majority, of them continue to do so even today. 2 Academic writing
was also used to this identification and in many early works by Badr
Dahya (1972), Muhammad Anwar (1979), and Roger Ballard (1990),
for instance, these people are referred to as Pakistanis. Beginning in
the 1990s, however, more and more political activists demanded the
identification and recognition of these Mirpuris as Kashmiris, in con-
tradistinction to Pakistanis.

M. Bolognani et al. (eds.), Pakistan and Its Diaspora

© Marta Bolognani and Stephen M. Lyon 2011
112 ● Martin Sökefeld and Marta Bolognani

This chapter explores the role of political mobilization for the con-
stitution of a British Kashmiri diaspora. We argue that political mobi-
lization, or social mobilization in general, plays a much more important
role in the constitution of diaspora (see also Sökefeld 2006) than the
diasporic condition in itself, and that the constitution of the diaspora
is so fluid and influenced by so many different hegemonic discourses
that its durability cannot be taken for granted (see also Ali 2002: 160).
This chapter shows how the idea of community that refers to the British
Kashmiri dispersal has been shaped, shifted, and articulated by political
activists, academics, and “ordinary people” through the collaboration of
factors such as opportunities (i.e., the opportunity of relative freedom
in articulating one’s identity), mobilizing structures and practices (the
forms through which collective initiatives take place, that is, political
parties), and frames (the ideas that contribute to the imagination of a
collective) (Sökefeld 2006).
This chapter is based on the authors’ fieldworks in Birmingham,
Bradford, and the Mirpur District between 2001 and 2008.
Sökefeld’s3 fieldworks in Birmingham and Bradford were mainly
based around political activists, from organizations like the Jammu
and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF, different factions), the Kashmiri
Workers Association (KWA), Association of British Kashmiris, Muslim
Conference, as well as with Kashmiri councillors and “independent
activists.” Sökefeld’s research consisted of an attempt to cover the broad
range of political affiliations among British Kashmiris. The methods
employed were interviews and observations of meetings.
Field research in political anthropology among political activists
bears a number of methodological problems. One of them is the fact
that the fieldworker almost necessarily becomes part of the game as
he or she becomes a screen for the (political) projections of his or her
interlocutors. Rather than being regarded as an “objective” observer, the
fieldworker is treated as a person who is to be convinced of a particu-
lar—the interlocutor’s own—perspective. Another, related difficulty is
that research among activists might block or limit the perception of the
attitudes of “ordinary people,” of those who are not particularly com-
mitted to a political struggle but mostly remain distant and aloof of
such issues. Hence, the idea of writing a piece of work with Bolognani,
whose fieldworks in Bradford and Mirpur over a span of seven years were
mainly among “ordinary people.” Bolognani’s data used for this chapter
are a selection of information on Kashmiri identity gathered through
in- depth interviews and participant observation for different projects
not directly linked with the topic of British Kashmiri diaspora identity