DELUSIONAL

ue
dS TAT E S

FEELING RULE AND

D E V E L O P M E N T I N PA K I S TA N ’ S
NORTHERN FRONTIER

NOSHEEN ALI
 1
UNIMAGINED COMMUNITIES IN THE
ECO-BODY OF THE NATION

Within academic analyses of state-making, it has become axiomatic to argue

that state power over a territory is achieved by implementing discursive
techniques of legibility, uniformity, and transparency. Indeed, in James Scott’s
pioneering work Seeing Like a State (1998), the realization of the control of the
state depends precisely on the visible seeing and objectification of spaces and
subjects. Yet the case of Gilgit-Baltistan complicates this argument because
the region has historically embodied an opaque, inconsistent, and distorted
representation within Pakistan. This illegibility, however, cannot be interpreted
as a sign of inadequate or non-existing state authority in some kind of non-
state space.
To examine this paradox, this chapter explores how the border territory of
Gilgit-Baltistan has been historically constructed within the representational
practices of the Pakistani nation-state. The data under review concerns the
‘Northern Areas’, which defined the name, status, and representation of Gilgit-
Baltistan from the 1947 partition till 2009. I have thus retained the region’s
previous name in this chapter, as I examine the multiple modes through which
knowledge about the Northern Areas is regulated in sites where the nation-
state is articulated and reproduced, such as textbooks, maps, and censuses. On
the one hand, I show how the Northern Areas is constructed as the eco-body
of the nation—a territory that is reduced to its physical environment, and
epitomized as the quintessential, pictorial landscape of Pakistan. On the other
 32 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

hand, my analysis demonstrates how the presence of the region in discursive

sites is constituted by the very absence of its political and social identity.
This amounts to an effective unseeing that is produced through ambiguous,
contradictory, and exclusionary modes of representation, which continue to
dominate even after the name change to Gilgit-Baltistan. Such modes suggest
that far from embodying legibility, liminal, suspended spaces like Gilgit-
Baltistan occupy a structural political indeterminacy that may translate into
their illegibility within national discourses. Moreover, this illegibility serves
to invisibilize the region, its people, and their political marginalization from
the imagination of ‘Pakistan’ and ‘Kashmir’, hence feeding into the process of
rule and legitimation that has marked this region as politically unsettled in the
first place.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Naming is a basic yet critical way of attaching meaning to a place. It is a crucial

tool of state power precisely because it can be used to privilege certain meanings
over others. States also claim the power to name because it reflects ownership
of space and, in fact, it is the very act of naming that symbolically transforms
space into place and embeds it within the territory of a state.1 It is an effect
of power that people come to internalize names as the permanent attributes
of the places they denote. This naturalization of place-names obscures the
fact that place-names are chosen by authorities of power, and may reflect
strategic political aims linked to nation-building and state-formation.2 The
creation and naming of Pakistan’s capital city of ‘Islamabad’ is a case in point.
Islamabad literally means the abode of Islam, or the place where Islam thrives.
Such a naming and thus, place-making practice reflects the attempts by the
first military regime in Pakistan to entrench Islam as the dominant motif and
legitimating basis for the new nation-state.
In disputed territories, the politics of nomenclature is even more
consequential, and this can be understood by exploring the history and
significance of the name ‘Northern Areas’. Historically, the region that
formed the Northern Areas was never united politically; it comprised
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 33

several independent princely kingdoms such as those of Hunza, Nagar,

Ishkoman, and Yasin.3 These kingdoms paid tribute to, and recognized the
sovereignty of the Maharaja of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. To
distinguish these principalities from the Kashmir Valley, Jammu, and Ladakh
regions, they were referred to as the Northern Areas of Kashmir in official
documents.4 Under the British/Kashmiri administration, these areas were
further classified into the political units of Gilgit Agency, Gilgit Wazarat, and
Baltistan—administrative classifications that remained operative even after
the partition of 1947 when the entire region came under Pakistani control.
Between 1972 and 1974, the Pakistani government abolished the administrative
units of Gilgit Agency, Gilgit Wazarat, and Baltistan, as well as the feudal
estates of local kings that were contained within these units. The region was
then integrated into a single political unit that was brought under the direct
rule of the federal administration. This unit was renamed as the ‘Federally
Administered Northern Areas’ (FANA), though it became commonly known
as the ‘Northern Areas’ or the ‘Northern Areas of Pakistan’.
While the enforcement of direct rule over the region paved the way
for institutional domination, the naming of the region signified a form of
symbolic control. Even if the name was essentially a historical leftover, its
post-1970s use was blatantly and strategically possessive. The official and
popular use of the name ‘Northern Areas of Pakistan’ made it clear that the
Northern Areas were not the ‘Northern Areas of Kashmir’, hence changing
the region into a non-negotiable place. More importantly, by reducing the
region to a mere component of Pakistan, the name also denied a sense of
regional identity that would be embodied by locally significant names
such as ‘Gilgit-Baltistan’ or ‘Boloristan’. By erasing this local identity while
firmly embedding the region within Pakistan, the strategic naming of the
region thus symbolized the state project of ‘permanent possession through
dispossession’.5
The name of Northern Areas constituted a further form of erasure because
of the effect of non-specificity that it created: it seemed like a reference to a
general geographical space rather than the name of a particular demarcated
place. Not surprisingly, it was often interpreted as an allusion to ‘areas in the
north of Pakistan’, or ‘Northern Pakistan’, instead of being recognized as an
identifier for a specific administrative unit of Pakistan called the ‘Northern
 34 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

Areas’. Moreover, due to a similar geographical connotation, the name of the

Northern Areas was also commonly misunderstood as a reference for the
‘North-West Frontier Province’ (NWFP)—now called Kyber-Pukhtoonkhwa—
which is adjacent to the Northern Areas.6 Furthermore, people living outside of
the Northern Areas also tended to confuse the region with the geographically
non-contiguous tribal region called ‘Federally Administered Tribal Areas’
and specifically its territory of ‘Wana’, presumably because the names of these
regions are similar to the official name ‘Federally Administered Northern
Areas’ and acronym ‘FANA’ of the Northern Areas. Together with the already
vague and mystifying nature of the name ‘Northern Areas’, such conflations
further served to obscure the existence and identity of the actual region called
the Northern Areas.
The power of naming and its relationship to the identity and marginality
of a place was first revealed to me during my research in the Northern Areas
in August 2004. On a visit to the Gilgit Public Library, I had ended up joining
a discussion that included local politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers. Over
a duration of three hours, I listened and took notes while the rest of the
group discussed various forms of political injustice that were prevalent in the
Northern Areas. At one point, a consensus emerged that part of the reason for
the disempowerment of the region and its people was the lack of awareness
of this very fact within the ‘rest of Pakistan’ and that the people of Pakistan
needed to be made aware of the region’s issues in order to exert pressure on the
Pakistani government for changing the status quo. A local politician pointed
out that this was a monumental task, as people in the cities of Pakistan did not
even know what the Northern Areas were. He said:

When you tell anyone in Karachi or Lahore that you are from the Northern
Areas, either they don’t understand what it means or they think we are from
NWFP. They are so ignorant.

Responding to this comment, another politician added:

Part of the problem is that Pakistanis are ignorant. But part of it is also that
our name is ajeeb.7 It does not sound like the name of a place. Is naam nay
humain benaam kar dia hai [this name has rendered us unknown].8
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 35

Over the course of my extended research in the region, I realized that an

overwhelming number of inhabitants of the region similarly perceived the
name of the Northern Areas as personally and politically marginalizing.
The renaming of the region—which eventually happened in 2009—was in
response to a strong demand of several local political parties that saw it as a
way of reclaiming their identity from the Pakistan state and as a necessary first
step for foregrounding and resolving their political predicament.
Importantly, the crisis of naming extends beyond the name of the region
itself. The top court in Gilgit-Baltistan is the ‘Chief Court’, which does not follow
the norms and nomenclature of a ‘High Court’, as activists in the region have
constantly emphasized. Hence, the binding consultation of the Chief Justice of
the Pakistani Supreme Court with regard to the appointment of judges is not
applicable to the Chief Court, with the result that a sitting Law Minister can also
be appointed as a judge on contract.9 Similarly, the demand for regional legislative
powers has been evaded through a series of ‘reforms’ which were essentially
reforms of nomenclature: the Northern Areas Advisory Council set up in 1971
became the Northern Areas Executive Council in 1994, the Northern Areas
Legislative Council in 1999, and then the Northern Areas Legislative Assembly in
2007—symbolic changes that rarely devolved any real powers to the region. The
current ‘Gilgit-Baltistan Legislative Assembly’, which came into being in 2009 is
the first to be based on general elections—and certainly a major step forward in
terms of local demands for democratic rights—but the reforms under which it
was established do not have constitutional protection and the assembly itself is
superseded by the centre-controlled ‘Gilgit-Baltistan Council’. The institutional
structure of Gilgit-Baltistan has been modelled partly after Azad Kashmir, and
partly after a Pakistani province with the result that both in nomenclature and in
actual practice, it can only be described as ‘like a self-governed territory’ and ‘like
a province’, without having a well-defined status of its own.

UNIMAGINED COMMUNITIES IN NATURALIZED LANDSCAPES

Ironically, while people within Pakistan may not have been able to recognize
the name of the Northern Areas or the specific place it denoted, they could
 36 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

nevertheless identify particular kinds of physical spaces that fall largely within
the bounds of the Northern Areas—such as the valleys of Gilgit and Hunza
and mountains like Nanga Parbat and K2. This is because the region has come
to epitomize the ‘natural beauty’ of Pakistan, constituting what I call its eco-
body. As such, it occupies a central place in the geographical imagination of
the nation. While I question the ways of seeing which normalize particular
landscapes as beautiful and others not, I do not wish to deny the picturesque
qualities of the landscape of the Northern Areas per se. Rather, my concern is
with exploring how a mode of inclusion based on spatial appeal has come to
embody and produce a number of exclusionary effects. To explore this dynamic
of inclusion and exclusion, I now turn my attention to the representation of
the Northern Areas in specific texts on Pakistan.
The first book that I examine is titled Pakistan Studies: Class X.10 It is a
10th-grade textbook designed for government schools in the province of
Punjab, which is the most populous province of Pakistan. I have not conducted
a detailed investigation of official textbooks on Pakistan Studies used in
provinces other than Punjab, but a brief overview of them has given me a sense
that they treat the region of the Northern Areas in ways similar to the one in
Punjab that I now proceed to analyse.
The Northern Areas are conspicuous in the text by their very absence. In the
entire book, there is not even a single mention of the word ‘Northern Areas’.
At one point, the text does state that the Karakoram Highway ‘links northern
areas of Pakistan with China’.11 However, due to the lack of capitalization, one
gets a sense that it is ‘areas in the north of Pakistan’ that are being referred to,
not the specific region called Northern Areas which in fact contains the bulk
of the Karakoram Highway. While the regional identity of the Northern Areas
is unacknowledged, locations within the region are frequently referenced
and included as parts of Pakistan. For example, a chapter titled ‘The Natural
Resources of Pakistan’ mentions that marble is available in ‘Gilgat’, and that
the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) passenger and cargo services are
available in ‘Gilgat’ and ‘Skardu’. Gilgit—which is consistently misspelt as
‘Gilgat’—and Skardu are the main towns of the Northern Areas, located
in the districts of Gilgit and Skardu respectively. A chapter called the ‘The
Land of Pakistan’ more explicitly refers to the Northern Areas. It has a
section on the ‘Physical Features’ of Pakistan, which in fact, begins with a
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 37

description of the ‘Northern Mountain Ranges’. The part of these ranges that
falls within Pakistan primarily lies in the Northern Areas, but this fact is not
acknowledged, though specific valleys of the region like Gilgit and Hunza
are mentioned. The Himalayan, Karakoram, and Hindukush mountains that
comprise these ranges are each described at length in separate sub-sections,
and mention details such as:

…between Karakoram mountains and Himalayas the valleys of Gilgat

and Hunza are situated. The mountain peaks surrounding these areas are
covered with snow throughout the year. When the summer season sets in,
these valleys are full of life. The people are busy in different activities. The
hill torrents flow with great force and the green grass grows everywhere.12

The region of the Northern Areas is thus produced as an eco-body

through its romanticization as a scenic landscape, significant to the
nation merely for its beautiful mountains and lush valleys. The abstract
‘people’ of the region appear not as living, cultural beings but almost as
physical features of the land to lend an aspect of reality to the picture.
We do not get any sense of the social identities of these people as they
remain absent from the whole book—even from the chapter called
‘The People of Pakistan and their Culture’. Of course, one can justifiably
argue that government textbooks in Pakistan are generally of a very poor
quality, and embody a ridiculously simplistic depiction of Pakistan. However,
while all the regions of Pakistan are likely to be portrayed in selective
and distorting ways, I would argue that the representations of Northern
Areas are particularly invisibilizing. Moreover, they deserve attention
precisely because they shape how a strategic territory is geographically
and culturally mis-imagined by its school-going population. It is also
important to note that the official textbook construction of the Northern
Areas discussed above is not limited to one particular text. The region is
similarly represented in a variety of other nation-making sites, such as
in newspaper and television, and even in unofficial sites like private school
textbooks and popular/academic publications. In a sense then, there is
a persistent discursive structure that characterizes the production of the
Northern Areas within depictions of the Pakistani nation-state. However, this
 38 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

discourse is not produced in the same manner in every text and context. There
are certain regularly occurring tropes, but each recurrence may also produce
its own forms of inclusions and exclusions.
Introduction to Pakistan Studies is a book written by Muhammad Ikram
Rabbani (2003), and is primarily used by 9th–11th grade private schools in
Pakistan that follow the British O-level examination system.13 This 420-page
book is one of the most widely used comprehensive texts on ‘Pakistan Studies’,
and also one which gives the most detailed attention to the Northern Areas.
However, this emphasis is ridden with ambiguities and contradictions. The
Northern Areas are not included in the ‘Area and Location’ of Pakistan, which
is the first section of a chapter titled ‘Geography of Pakistan’.14 This may be
explainable by the fact that the Northern Areas are not constitutionally
part of Pakistan. On the very same page, however, there is a section called
‘Neighbouring Countries and Borders’ which mentions Pakistan’s common
border with China along ‘its Gilgit Agency and Baltistan’. As indicated earlier,
Gilgit Agency was a colonial political unit which ceased to exist in 1972 when it
was merged with surrounding territories to form the Northern Areas. Hence,
while the region of the Northern Areas itself is not included in the definition
of the territory of Pakistan, older names of the Northern Areas or locations
within it are nevertheless incorporated into the state’s territory in descriptions
of the border areas of Pakistan. Likewise, while the Northern Areas remain
absent from the extensive, written discussion of ‘Political Divisions’ that is
provided in the text, they are vividly present on a map titled ‘Pakistan: Political
Divisions’.15
Similar to the official textbook discussed earlier, the major presence of
the Northern Areas in this independently written textbook appears in the
section on ‘Physiography’. This section begins with a discussion of Pakistan’s
‘Northern Mountains’, and talks at length about the peaks, valleys, glaciers
and passes that mark the region. Unlike the previous text, however, this text
recognizes that besides the physical landmarks, the north of Pakistan also
comprises a place called the ‘Northern Areas’. This place is considered so
crucial for describing the physical landscape of Pakistan that it is allocated
a separate sub-section, which is titled ‘Importance of the Northern Areas
of Pakistan (FANA).’ It begins with a basic administrative definition of the
Northern Areas:
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 39

The Federally Administered Northern Areas (FANA), include the territories

of Gilgit and Baltistan (Ghizer, Gilgit, Diamer, Skardu, and Ghanche)
situated in the extreme North of Pakistan.16

It is paradoxical that this definition appears in a section on ’Physiography’,

while the very existence of the Northern Areas remains unacknowledged in
the section on the political and administrative divisions of Pakistan. Hence,
it is only in the context of the physical description of Pakistan that the region
is considered significant enough to be expanded upon. As the text goes on to
state:

The FANA is one of the most beautiful locations in the sub-continent. More
than 100 peaks soar over 7000 meters (22,960 ft.). World’s three famous
mountain ranges meet in the Northern Areas. They are Himalayas, the
Karakorams and the Hindukush. The whole of Northern area of Pakistan is
known as paradise for mountaineers, climbers, trekkers and hikers.17

It is this tourist-adventurist gaze which defines the ‘importance’ of the

Northern Areas, and now, Gilgit-Baltistan. The text also goes on to mention
how the region’s rivers and glaciers serve as vital sources of water. There
is not even a scant mention of the region’s relationship with Kashmir—
not even in separate, detailed sections on ‘Kashmir’ that appear elsewhere
in the same textbook. And this is also true for the government textbook
discussed earlier. In the private school textbook, at least the nature-related
glorification is specifically linked to the ‘Northern Areas’ which is not the
case for the government textbook. However, even this recognition is short-
lived: while the section titled ‘Importance of Northern Areas (FANA)’
recognizes the Northern Areas as a specific, bounded, administrative
region of Pakistan, the very next section called ‘Valleys of the Northern
Areas’ displaces this unique regional identity. In this section, the valleys of
the Northern Areas include those that lie in the place Northern Areas—like
Gilgit, Hunza, Yasin, Ishkoman, and Skardu—as well as other valleys such
as Swat and Kaghan which lie in the North-West Frontier Province. This
textual manifestation of the confusion between the Northern Areas and
the NWFP can be linked to the geographically related mystifying names of
 40 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

these regions which I discussed earlier, as well as the common context of

natural beauty in which both these places are often invoked.
The tendency of claiming and acclaiming the landscape of the Northern
Areas while at the same time reducing its regional identity to an ambiguous
or non-existent place is also prevalent in popular and academic discourse.
An example of this is provided in a prominent Oxford University Press
volume called Pakistan18 which was published in 1997 to mark the 50th
anniversary of the creation of Pakistan. This book is written for popular
consumption, and features contributions from leading national and
international scholars who work on Pakistani politics, culture, and history.
Images of the Northern Areas are abundantly present throughout the
book. In fact, even the cover page of the book displays an image from the
Northern Areas—that of the magnificent Deosai peaks, as viewed from the
Skardu district of the Northern Areas. Moreover, the book has a section on
‘The Land and the People’ which predictably begins with a fairly detailed
discussion of the beautiful mountains and valleys of the Northern Areas.
Yet again, these landmarks appear to be located directly in Pakistan rather
than in a specific region called the Northern Areas. Moreover, while other
regions of Pakistan—mainly the four provinces of Punjab, Sindh, North-
West Frontier, and Balochistan—are expanded in separate sub-sections,
no such section is assigned to the Northern Areas. Instead, the region is
defined in the section on ‘The North-West Frontier’. This is also the section
in which pictures from the Northern Areas are prominently included.
Hence, this text becomes yet another site where the conflation of the
Northern Areas and the North-West Frontier Province is reproduced. It
needs to be noted that the book does have a separate section for ‘Jammu
and Kashmir’, but the ‘Northern Areas’ do not appear in this section. There
is a reference to the fact that ‘Dardistan and Baltistan’19 historically formed
the north of Jammu and Kashmir state,20 but in the rest of the section’s
text, as well as in the images that accompany it, one gets the sense that
‘Pakistani’ Kashmir exclusively refers to Azad Kashmir. Here, as in the two
texts that I discussed earlier, the delinking of the Northern Areas from
Kashmir exists alongside, and in fact, is produced through the romanticized
landscaping of the region within Pakistan. Such depictions silence the fact
that the political status of the Northern Areas is inextricably linked to the
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 41

disputed territory of Kashmir, and thus, marginalize the region within

representations of Kashmir.
One might argue that the majority of people within Gilgit-Baltistan
themselves do not prefer to be associated with Kashmir, and that they
fought a war against Maharaja Hari Singh precisely to rid themselves of
Kashmiri rule. However, as political activists in the region repeatedly
emphasize, the issue is not whether Northern Areas/Gilgit-Baltistan is part
of Kashmir but rather that the region remains internationally considered
as part of the dispute of Kashmir, and its political status within Pakistan
remains inextricably tied to the ‘Kashmir issue’. Hence, it is important
that their region and its predicament receive attention in the discourse on
Pakistan as well as on Kashmir. Neither holds true in the school texts and
popular books on Pakistan.
The region of the Northern Areas—and now Gilgit-Baltistan—also
remains predominantly absent from depictions of the ‘people’ and ‘culture’
of Pakistan as well as of Kashmir. For example, in the edited volume just
discussed, the socioeconomic and cultural profile of Pakistan is provided
on the basis of specific regions. The cultural imagining of a Pakistani
national and citizen is thus associated with the regional entities to which
they belong, that is, the regions of Punjab, Sindh, NWFP, Balochistan,
and Kashmir, which are seen as the constitutive units of Pakistan. Hence,
the Punjabi lives in Punjab, the Sindhi lives in Sindh, the Balochi in
Balochistan, the Pukhtoon in NWFP, and the Kashmiri in Kashmir. Even
if acknowledged, other linguistic and ethnic groups that reside in these
territorial units seem to get overshadowed in this homogenizing, one
people–one place configuration. In the case of Northern Areas/Gilgit-
Baltistan, such a configuration is made difficult because no group can be
constructed as the dominant one. The cultural landscape of the region—
with its diversity of people like the Shina, the Burushaski, the Wakhi, and the
Balti—cannot fit into the ethnic matrix of nationalist discourses in which
places are assumed to map onto a particular social identity. To be sure, there
is mention of the ‘longevity and tranquility’ of Hunzakuts21 and the ‘ancient
Greek ancestry’22 of Baltis, but even these scarce, often essentializing
references are not related to the place called the ‘Northern Areas’ and thus,
do not convey that Baltis and Hunzakuts live in the Northern Areas. The
 42 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

region is effectively reduced to an unpeopled landscape, inhabited only

with peaks and valleys. This produces a double exclusion: the communities
of the Northern Areas remain largely unimagined within the nationalist
imaginings of Pakistan and Kashmir, and simultaneously, their political
dispossession is also obscured from the nation’s view.
This landscape-only, no-people no-region depiction of the Northern
Areas is linked to the ambiguity surrounding the political status of the
region, as well as its contested and dominated status, which necessitates
the erasure of its identity in nationalist discourse. At the same time, it
is important to note that the practice of effacing people from depictions
of a scenic Kashmiri ‘wilderness’ was prevalent even in Mughal times,
and continued in the colonial period particularly through the writings
of European travellers.23 This practice is not even limited to Kashmir, and
extends to the depiction of mountain territories in general which have
always remained barred from the realm of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’. Even
a historian like Braudel claims: ‘The mountains are as a rule a world apart
from civilizations, which are an urban and lowland achievement. Their
history is to have none.’24 This outside-history depiction of mountains
often accompanies a picture of timeless isolation and inertia, as evident
in the following representation of the Northern Areas in an academic text:

Over many thousands of years the economy and the society of Northern
Areas had changed but little. The lives and work of its people had remained
isolated from the modernization of the Indus Valley. Rulers from the
plains—including the British and the Chinese from across the mountains—
had come and gone, but material conditions were relatively unaltered.25

Such representations of mountain societies as history-less, timeless,

isolated, and backward are typical and symbolic of the lowland perspective
from which historical and social analysis is often written.26 Particularly in
the context of the Northern Areas, this perspective runs counter to local
histories of caravan trade, travel, religious conversions, and political and
military struggles that have shaped the trajectory of the region as well as that
of the British Empire in India. For example, rulers of Hunza and other states
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 43

that today constitute the Northern Areas/Gilgit-Baltistan were key players

in the Great Game. They frequently manoeuvred the British, Russian, and
Chinese authorities against each other, making their territory as one ‘where
three empires met’ and one that was central to the security and stability of the
British Empire.27
The global NGO discourse on environmental conservation—which often
reduces lived homes to nature zones—is a new form of the lowland perspective
which has become dominant in the thinking about the Northern Areas in
recent years. This NGO discourse further entrenches the region as an eco-
body in material practice—a subject that I address at length in Chapter 5.
The implication of this discourse, however, is useful to indicate here and is
captured well by the following comment from Raja Hussain Khan Maqpoon,
a journalist from the region:

It is ironic that the world is more worried about the falling trees; they are
sad that our white leopards are vanishing day by day; the dead bodies of our
Markhor frightens them; they are going all out to preserve our ecosystem.
But nobody ever thinks of the people of this land.28

Hence, what is common to the lowland nationalist discourse on Gilgit-

Baltistan as well as the NGO-led conservation discourse on the region
is the reduction of a place of people to a space of nature. My point here is
not to argue against a felt attachment to nature and a place-based sense of
belonging. Indeed, a real connection to specific parts of the earth and the
natural world is sorely needed to counteract the managerial discourses
of environmentalism that have come to dominate today.29 What we must
remain wary of, however, are the essentialist ways in which claims about
regional landscapes become implicated in nationalist narratives of identity
and erasure. In the textual and visual vocabulary of Pakistani nationalism,
Gilgit-Baltistan has been primarily constructed as a space of nature, ecology,
and beauty, thus transforming it into what I have called the eco-body of the
nation. Such constructions reduce the region to a physical and geographical
territory, effectively serving to depoliticize it by invisibilizing its specificities
and social identities.
 44 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

CONSTITUTING THE STATE AND ITS TERRITORY

Whether they strive for a provincial, supra-provincial or an independent status

for Gilgit-Baltistan, local political parties across the spectrum agree on one
issue: the crux of the problem is the region’s ambiguous constitutional status.
Hence, it is important to understand what the constitution of Pakistan says or
does not say about the political status of Gilgit-Baltistan.
The constitution is often seen as a document that is created by a concrete
entity called the state to specify how it will function and rule the society
or nation. However, it is the constitutional text itself that concretizes the
abstractions of the ‘state’ and the ‘citizen’, and defines the nature and extent
of the state’s power over citizens. In this sense, the constitution effectively
constitutes the state rather than vice versa.
The definition of state territory is inscribed in the constitution of a
country, as the formal, legal definition of the dominion of a state. The 1973
Constitution of Pakistan30 hence begins with identifying ‘the Republic and
its territories’.31 The four provinces of Pakistan are included (Balochistan,
North-West Frontier, Punjab, and Sindh), along with the capital city of
Islamabad, and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Additionally,
Pakistan also comprises ‘such States and territories as are or may be included
in Pakistan, whether by accession or otherwise’.32 The implicit reference in
this vague clause is obviously to the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir,
including the region of Gilgit-Baltistan. Since Pakistan’s official position is
that the region is disputed, and its territorial future must be decided by a
UN-led plebiscite, the territory defined by the constitution cannot openly
include even the one-third part of Kashmir that is under the control of the
Pakistan state, that is, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. The sentence
from the constitution quoted above ensures that the Pakistan government
can constitutionally defend its control of regions belonging to Jammu and
Kashmir, but it is ambiguous enough for the state to declare that Gilgit-
Baltistan is not ‘constitutionally’ part of Pakistan yet, hence enabling it to
remain in compliance of UN resolutions as well as to continue denying
constitutional rights to the people of the region.
The only explicit reference to the territorial control of Jammu and Kashmir
is provided in Article 257 of the 1973 Constitution, which states:
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 45

When the people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir decide to accede to
Pakistan, the relationship between Pakistan and the State shall be determined
in accordance with the wishes of the people of that State.33

The hypocrisy of Pakistan’s official line on Kashmir is clearly revealed in

this article. Through a clever use of words, it effectively deprives the people
of Jammu and Kashmir from exercising their right to self-determination.
Their wishes are to be respected only if they decide to join Pakistan
presumably through a plebiscite that would be conducted by the UN.
Hence, one way of reading this article is that Pakistan would abide by the
UN resolution, insofar as the eventual vote is in its favor. The only choice
granted to the inhabitants of Kashmir is in deciding what administrative
form their territory will take when it becomes part of Pakistan. And, until
they make this choice, they are not ‘part’ of the Pakistan state even if they
are directly controlled by it.
The content of the Pakistani constitution has tremendous implications
for the status of Gilgit-Baltistan. If the region is not constitutionally part of
Pakistan, then the state is not bound to give any citizenship rights to the people
inhabiting the region. In fact, in several court cases pertaining to the status
of Gilgit-Baltistan, the Federal Government has openly justified the denial of
fundamental rights to the region and its people on the basis that the region
is not part of Pakistan. Hence, while the 1973 constitution of Pakistan might
construct an ostensibly democratic state, it leaves enough room for the state to
continue its executive rule in Gilgit-Baltistan.
As suggested earlier, a constitution is fundamental to the discourse and
practice of the state as it structures and legitimizes the institutional apparatus of
the state. Hence, it embodies a discursive practice that is productive of material
power. But this power does not always work in favor of the state. By specifying
what the contours and limits of official rule would be, the constitution imposes
legal restrictions on what can be done by agents in the name of the state.
While the ‘legal’ is itself a creation of power and those who exercise power can
manipulate self-authorized legal checks in their favor, the constitution—and
law in general—can nevertheless provide a space for subjects to enforce their
rights, and hence, exercise power. To some extent, then, the state can be bound
by what it states, within the arena of the state itself.
 46 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

The state institution of the judiciary is one key site where such checks on
the State can be negotiated. In the context of Gilgit-Baltistan, the Supreme
Court of Pakistan has adjudicated various cases in relation to the political
status of the region, and passed decisions that have played a fundamental
role in pressuring the Pakistan government to establish a democratic process
in the region. A landmark verdict came on 28 May 1999, when the Supreme
Court decided against the Federal Government in the constitutional petition
of ‘Al-Jehad Trust versus the Federal Government of Pakistan’. It directed the
Pakistani government to ‘make necessary amendments in the Constitution’
and ‘initiate appropriate administrative/legislative measures within a period
of six months’ for the enforcement of ‘Fundamental Rights’ in the Northern
Areas.34 According to the constitution of Pakistan, these fundamental rights
include the right to freedom of speech and expression, right to equality before
law, right to vote, right to be governed by chosen representatives, and the
right to have access to an appellate court of justice.35 The representatives of the
Federal Government had argued that since the region is not constitutionally
part of Pakistan, but a ‘sensitive’ part of the disputed territory of Jammu and
Kashmir, its political destiny needs to be settled according to the awaited
UN-led plebiscite, not by the Pakistan government, and certainly not by the
Supreme Court. However, deciding in favor of the plaintiffs, the then Chief
Justice of Pakistan, Ajmal Mian, held that while the Northern Areas may not
be constitutionally part of Pakistan, they are nevertheless under the ‘de jure’
and ‘de facto’ control of the Pakistan government.36 As such, the latter is bound
to extend constitutionally guaranteed citizenship rights to the people of the
Northern Areas, particularly since most Pakistani statutes have already been
made applicable to the region. This Supreme Court decision was widely seen
in the region as a critical step towards regional political justice. Following
this decision, sections of the 1973 Pakistani Constitution guaranteeing
fundamental civil and human rights were extended to the Northern Areas
through an amendment to the Northern Areas Council Legal Framework
Order of 1994.37 A number of ‘packages’ for increasing the region’s legislative,
financial, administrative, and judicial powers have since been announced by
successive Pakistani governments.
The Supreme Court case also underscores the complexity and heterogeneity
of state discourse and practice pertaining to the region. As is evident from the
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 47

court case, institutions of the Pakistani state have often taken a contradictory
stance on the political status of Gilgit-Baltistan. However, such differences
cannot be simplistically interpreted to mean that one institution of the state
is championing the rights of the region while the other is trampling on
them and that therefore, there is no project of rule that unites the two. The
positive move by the Supreme Court needs to be seen in light of the March
1993 ruling of the Azad Kashmir High Court, in which the Court declared
that the Northern Areas are a part of Azad Kashmir and not of Pakistan, and
accordingly directed its government to assume charge of the region.38 The
apprehensive Pakistan government appealed this decision in the Supreme
Court of Pakistan. In its September 1994 verdict, the Supreme Court implicitly
reaffirmed the rule of the Pakistan state over the Northern Areas by declaring
that the Northern Areas were part of the disputed ‘Jammu and Kashmir’ but
not of Azad Kashmir.
Given this context, the recent willingness of the Pakistani Supreme Court—
and subsequently of the Pakistan government—to acknowledge the citizenship
rights of Gilgit-Baltistanis can be seen as a continuing strategic effort of the
Pakistan state to delegitimize the claims on Gilgit-Baltistan by Azad Kashmir,
and also, of course, by India. Simultaneously, it is also a means to contain
popular resentment and resistance against the Pakistan state, particularly by
nationalists—as anti-establishment political activists are called in the region—
and by secessionist movements like the Balawaristan National Front (BNF).
For these critical progressives, the denial of constitutionally guaranteed rights
is deeply problematic, given Pakistani control of regional resources and the
sacrifice of regional soldiers for internal and external Pakistani wars. They are
well aware that this denial is a historical outcome of the state’s self-serving
desire to keep Gilgit-Baltistan connected to the Kashmir dispute, so as to gain
a majority Muslim vote in the case of a plebiscite. This calculation is both
outdated and hypocritical—Azad Kashmir has enjoyed far more democratic
freedoms despite similar concerns regarding a Kashmir plebiscite. The status
quo simultaneously demonstrates the overconfidence of the state in the
region’s loyalty, and its abuse of the certainty of that loyalty. It is for this reason
that the lack of a constitutional status is not just seen as a matter of political
deprivation by local residents but also as the quintessential expression of
emotional deception. To quote the founding leader of BNF, Nawaz Khan Naji:
 48 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

They rule us and fleece us and manipulate our love of Pakistan for supra-
national geo-political ends but won’t give us the constitutional status we
deserve.39

As I argued in the Introduction, such feelings of betrayed love and

insincerity demonstrate the centrality of emotions in defining the regional
experience of the Pakistani state. While analyses of nations/states have often
emphasized how state processes are formed through emotions of ‘political
love’ that draw upon familial and romantic rhetoric,40 what we see in Gilgit-
Baltistan is that state rule in realpolitik is perceived in precisely the opposite
terms—on a manipulated love that is rooted in apathy, abuse, and deception.

CARTOGRAPHIC ANXIETIES

In July 2004, the Pakistan government organized golden jubilee celebrations to

mark the first ascent of K2, which is Pakistan’s highest and the world’s second
highest mountain. Grand festivities were arranged across three weeks, for
which numerous state bureaucrats and international dignitaries flew into the
district of Skardu. A journalist, Israr Mohammad, who belongs to the region
and was covering these celebrations, related to me the confusion of foreign
visitors who had obtained copies of Pakistan’s map only to discover that the
region of ‘Northern Areas’ was nowhere to be found. In an attempt to point out
the cartographic location of K2 to one of these visitors, my friend discovered
much to his own astonishment that while some parts of the Northern Areas
were shown as part of Pakistan, the regions of K2 and Skardu were excluded
from it and instead depicted as part of the ‘Disputed Territory of Jammu and
Kashmir’. Recounting this experience, Israr sarcastically and indignantly
commented:

This is the height of injustice and exploitation. The Pakistani government

claims that our beautiful mountains and valleys are the glory of Pakistan.
Yet, not only has it denied us our fundamental rights, it has even denied us
on the map. As if we don’t exist.41
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 49

Maps—like flags—are totemic symbols of the nation that bind the

national community together, and allow the nation to be articulated in the
first place.42 They are powerful texts that orient how the nation imagines
the territory of the state. In the South Asian context, maps have played
a particularly significant role in shaping state-formation and interstate
relations. As Razvi has pointed out,

The Radcliffe Line, which covers most of Pakistan’s borders with India, was
drawn on a map in the first instance. The line was then re-laid on the ground
by the survey teams of India and Pakistan. No cadastral or aerial survey
preceded the Radcliffe decisions, which were taken only with reference to
the guiding principles contained in the Partition Plan of 3 June 1947, and on
the basis of existing reports.43

Moreover, the Sino-Indian war of 1962 stemmed partly from the

hostilities which emerged in response to the publication of Chinese maps
that depicted the Aksai Chin frontier of disputed Kashmir as part of Chinese
territory. Similarly, the Sino-Pakistan Agreement of 1963 which delineated
the border between Pakistan and China stemmed from Pakistani protests
against the publication of Chinese maps that claimed control of some parts
of the Northern Areas. Hence, the significance of maps is not only limited
to a symbolic-material structuring of national thought but also extends to
the formation and defence of the very territory of the state.
Before examining the cartographic representations of the Northern
Areas, I wish to clarify that I have not researched the circuits through which
cartographic knowledge is produced in Pakistan, and I cannot and do not
wish to establish definite relationships between political intentionality and
the production of Pakistani maps. My concern is with exploring the ‘truth
effects’ of the knowledge that is conveyed in maps, both of its more emphatic
utterances, and also of its equally emphatic silences’.44 I am concerned with
investigating how these truth effects might reveal and realize state power
in the region.
One would expect the politically critical region of Kashmir to have a
particularly clear representation on the maps of both India and Pakistan.
The Indian map fulfills this expectation: it incorporates the entire former
 50 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir—including the region of Northern

Areas — as part of its territory. This depiction represents India’s official claim
that Kashmir is its integral part, instead of the reality of a disputed Kashmir
that has regions under control of the Pakistan state. The Pakistani map, on
the other hand, embodies a curious image of Kashmir. The Pakistan state
officially considers Kashmir as ‘Disputed Territory’, the future of which will
be decided on the basis of a UN-backed plebiscite. But on the map, all of
Kashmir does not appear as ‘disputed’. Ironically, there are a number of
maps of Pakistan that circulate within the country, all portraying different
versions of Kashmir and especially, of the Northern Areas.
Map 1.1 provides a section from the official map of Pakistan that was
published by the Survey of Pakistan in 1995, and is included in the Census
Report of 1998.45
Conforming to the definition of Pakistani territory in the constitution, the
map neither has a space marked as the ‘Northern Areas’, nor one categorized as
‘Azad Kashmir’, though both these components of Pakistan-ruled Kashmir are
practically treated and controlled as administrative districts of Pakistan. There
is just a blanket category called ‘Jammu and Kashmir (Disputed Territory)’,
which has an un-delineated eastern boundary labelled as ‘Frontier Undefined’.
The Line of Control (LoC) which divides Indian-controlled Kashmir from
the Pakistan-controlled one is not marked, as it would symbolically map the
reality of Indian-held Kashmir, and undermine Pakistan’s official claim to the
entire territory of Kashmir.46
Interestingly though, the region identified as disputed Kashmir does
not include all of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It leaves out the colonial
administrative unit of ‘Gilgit Agency’ that forms a sub-region of present-
day Northern Areas. The Gilgit Agency covers districts such as Gilgit and
Ghizer which constitute key administrative units of the Northern Areas,
and now of Gilgit-Baltistan. Technically, the Agency itself does not exist as
an ‘administrative district’ anymore as it was combined with the adjoining
territories of Gilgit Wazarat and Baltistan to constitute the ‘Northern Areas’
in 1972. While the space of these latter territories is unmarked and is included
within that of Jammu and Kashmir, that of the defunct Gilgit Agency retains its
label and is firmly mapped within Pakistan. It is clearly separated from ‘Jammu
and Kashmir’. At the same time though, the colour of both the ‘Gilgit Agency’
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 51

MAP 1.1 Section from ‘Pakistan: Showing Administrative Districts’

Source: Survey of Pakistan, 1995.
Note: Map drawn from primary source. It is not to scale and does not represent authentic international
boundaries.

and ‘Jammu and Kashmir (Disputed Territory)’ is the same—light green—

which cannot be considered a coincidence as no other territory of Pakistan is
shaded in this colour. Even in the abridged version of the map (Map 1.2) that
appears right below the original map, both these regions are the only two on
the map to be vertically lined, and that too in the same colour, indicating a
clear connection. There is a boundary between them though, that marks them
as distinct units. Hence, the colours connect but the lines divide.
 52 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

MAP 1.2 ‘Pakistan: Showing Administrative Division’

Source: Survey of Pakistan (1995).
Note: Map drawn from primary source. It is not to scale and does not represent authentic international
boundaries.

Such cartographic manoeuvres may reflect incompetence and oversight,

but are more reflective of how the vagueness of the Pakistani state in relation
to Northern Areas/Gilgit-Baltistan finds an intriguing visual manifestation.
These manoeuvres fundamentally redesign the landscapes of the Northern
Areas, Kashmir, and Pakistan. The administrative territory of the ‘Northern
Areas’ does not appear as such on the map, as it is not named, and its
space is divided up so that most of it is included in Pakistan while the
rest (including K2) appears as part of disputed Kashmir. This ambiguous
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 53

and distorted presence makes it difficult to locate the Northern Areas on

the map. They are neither included within Pakistan nor excluded from it.
Rather, a creative and political use of lines, labels, and colours invisibilizes
their very existence and identity. At the same time, their relationship with
Kashmir is rendered ambiguous as they are simultaneously linked and
delinked from Kashmir.
According to Wirsing (1991), this ambivalence of the Pakistani state
reflects a ‘calculated ambiguity’ towards Pakistan-administered Kashmir
where the state manages an impression of indecision and openness of
the region as disputed while simultaneously enforcing deep political
control on the ground. In the case of the Northern Areas in particular, the
delinking of the Northern Areas from Kashmir came out most strongly
during the rule of General Zia when three members from Northern Areas
were also given an observer status in his appointed, national legislative
body. The depiction of Gilgit Agency as part of Pakistan also occurred only
in the mid-1980s as before that, the entire space of the Northern Areas
(Gilgit Agency, Gilgit Wazarat, and Baltistan) was depicted as part of the
‘Jammu and Kashmir (Disputed Territory)’ in official maps.47 It was with
the publication of the first atlas of Pakistan in 1985 that Gilgit Agency
was removed from ‘Disputed Territory’ and included as part of Pakistan,
though not as a province.48 Because of the conflict over Siachin which had
barely emerged a year before, Baltistan was left ‘disputed’.49 Even if partial,
this delinking eliminated some of the ambiguity surrounding Pakistan’s
relationship with the Gilgit territory, and can be linked to the post-1972
attempts of the Pakistan state to consolidate its hold over the region for
frontier stability and strategic military interests—particularly in the wake
of the loss of East Pakistan in 1971.50
The delinking also comes across more strongly than the linkage between
the Northern Areas and Kashmir, as lines are more fundamental to maps
than colours. Despite this ‘colouring’ of the Northern Areas–Kashmir
connection, the message is clear: the Gilgit Agency, and by implication the
Northern Areas, are part of Pakistan, not of disputed Kashmir. The official
map of Pakistan hence becomes a ‘model for, rather than a model of ’ what
it purports to represent.51 Instead of mapping the spatial and political
reality of Kashmir, it constructs an imagined Pakistani state which manages
 54 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

to appropriate the space of the Northern Areas, while simultaneously

obscuring its identity and political status.
Since the official map of Pakistan does not acknowledge the existence
of the Northern Areas, it is not surprising that an official, publicly
available map of the region itself is also lacking. The closest map of the
‘Northern Areas’ is a map produced by the Survey of Pakistan in 1995,
which is titled ‘Gilgit Agency and Jammu & Kashmir’. The map is too large
to be accommodated in this text, but a few points are worth noting. The
very title of the map suggests that there is a connection between these
political units, but the ‘and’ separates the two and does not explain what
the connection really is. This map is compatible with the more abstract
map shown in Map 1.1, as the same green colour is used for both the Gilgit
Agency and Jammu and Kashmir, while still dividing them into distinct
political entities. The only difference is that in this detailed map, Gilgit
Wazarat and Baltistan are labelled and visibly included as part of the
territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Hence, in this map, it is even clearer
that some territories that belong to the Northern Areas are being counted
as part of disputed Kashmir, but the major portion of the region is being
mapped within Pakistan.
Oddly enough, the official maps of Pakistan differ from those that
are included in sites such as private school textbooks and travel guides,
though they still remain broadly confined to the official, nationalist frame.
As a case in point, see Map 1.3 which is taken from a textbook titled
A Geography of Pakistan: Environment People and Economy, which is
commonly used by 9th–11th grade students in the private, British O-level
schooling system in Pakistan.
In this map, the label of ‘Gilgit Agency’ is replaced with that of ‘Northern
Areas’, which is more accurate as the political unit of Gilgit Agency ceased to
exist in 1972. However, while the name makes more sense, the lines remain
inaccurate as some parts of the Northern Areas like Baltistan (though not
labelled) are still mapped in ‘Jammu and Kashmir (Disputed Area)’. Since
textbooks for geography or Pakistan Studies are often not in colour print,
the limited connection that is officially suggested between Gilgit Agency
and Jammu and Kashmir (through a shared colour) does not come across
in this map. Hence, while the reality of a place administratively classified
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 55

MAP 1.3 Section of ‘Pakistan: Political Divisions’

Source: A Geography of Pakistan: Environment People and Economy, 1991.
Note: Map drawn from primary source. It is not to scale and does not represent authentic international
boundaries.

as ‘Northern Areas’ is now acknowledged, the area bound by it remains

inaccurate, and the connection to Kashmir is completely erased.
The last illustration (Map 1.4) that I want to discuss is taken from the
prominent academic/popular book called Pakistan which I discussed earlier
in relation to the textual construction of the Northern Areas.52
This map is one of the very few maps that I found which depicted the whole
space of Northern Areas as part of disputed Kashmir. But the map contains
different misrepresentations that are even more exclusionary than the ones
in the official map. Pakistan-controlled Kashmir is an empty, unmarked
space, literally. It incorporates the ‘cease-fire line’ that divides Pakistan-ruled
Kashmir (coloured white) from Indian-ruled Kashmir (coloured grey), and
 56 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

MAP 1.4 Map of Pakistan used in the book Pakistan

Source: Husain (1997).
Note: Map drawn from primary source. It is not to scale and does not represent authentic international
boundaries.

labels mainly the Indian part as ‘Jammu & Kashmir (Disputed Territory)’.
Moreover, Pakistan-ruled Kashmir is accurately depicted as including the
space covered by ‘Azad Kashmir’, as well as the ‘Northern Areas’, though neither
of them is labelled as such and the division between the two is not depicted.
But interestingly, while no landmark of Azad Kashmir (such as the key city
of Muzzafarabad) is identified, the territory of the Northern Areas is marked
with three labels—the main town of Gilgit, the mountain peaks of Rakaposhi
and K2, and a supposed region labelled as ‘Tribal Territory’ (in capital letters).
This label does not make any sense in relation to the Northern Areas, as in the
context of Pakistan, ‘tribal territory’ commonly denotes the region of FATA that
is located between the province formerly known as the North-West Frontier
Province and Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.53 Hence, while this map
draws the lines such that the territory of the Northern Areas is included as part
of Pakistani Kashmir, we still do not see the connection between the Northern
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 57

Areas and Kashmir because the region is neither represented with the colonial
name (‘Gilgit Agency’) nor the postcolonial one (‘Northern Areas’). Moreover,
the silence perpetuated by the absence of appropriate labels is made worse by
the presence of the misleading label of ‘Tribal Territory’ that is marked around
Gilgit. Through further identification of the Rakaposhi and K2 peaks, this map
represents and reinforces the nationalist tendency of signifying the region of
the Northern Areas in terms of its picturesque value for the nation-state.
It is evident, then, that instead of occupying a standardized place on Pakistani
maps, the Northern Areas have an opaque and distorted presence which
is produced through various techniques of what Harley calls ‘cartographic
censorship’ and ‘cartographic silence’ (2001). The presences and absences on
these maps are significant because they produce a particular imagining of the
geographies of Pakistan and Kashmir. Maps are important ideological tools
because they are used in a variety of organizational contexts, such as in schools,
government departments, and business offices. Hence, in everyday life, they
often come to be internalized as social facts that depict what Pakistan is, instead
of being considered as social constructions that represent a particular way of
seeing and unseeing the territorial boundaries and divisions of Pakistan.

THE CLASSIFIED NATURE OF CENSUS CLASSIFICATIONS

While representations through maps are powerful because they abstract,

simplify, and summarize the territory of the nation-state, those in census
documents are significant because they provide elaborate information about
this territory. Along with presenting a ‘general description of the country’, the
1998 Census Report of Pakistan provides a plethora of figures and statistics
on a wide range of topics, such as population size and distribution, house
construction and facilities, employment and migration, and education and
health. The Census Report of Pakistan may thus be seen as an all-encompassing
text that represents and legitimizes the official description of Pakistan, making
obvious what the geographical, administrative, economic and socio-cultural
composition of Pakistan is. As Cohn (1987) has argued, the introduction of the
census in British India led to a political process of classification that objectified
 58 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

the culture and society of India, making obvious to the British as well as to
the Indians what ‘India’ was. The census not only helps to shape the national
imagination but also serves to solidify totalizing identities such as those based
on ‘race’ and ‘caste’, provides comprehensive quantitative data that can be
instrumental for administrative control by the state, and plays a crucial role in
allowing people to make claims on the state.
According to the preface of the 1998 Census Report, ‘the census was
undertaken … throughout the country including … Northern Areas and
Azad Kashmir’. However, while the Northern Areas were extensively surveyed,
the district and division-level census reports of the Northern Areas are kept
confidential and are extremely difficult for the public to access. In the overall
Census Report of Pakistan too, the representations of the Northern Areas are
replete with silences, ambiguities, and contradictions.
Like the constitution, the census also describes the territory of Pakistan
as comprising the four provinces (Punjab, Sindh, North-West Frontier
Province, and Balochistan), the federal capital of Islamabad, and the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas. However, these ‘administrative units’
identified by the text of the report54 are not consistent with those depicted in
the map of Pakistan, which is provided in the report (Map 1.1). As discussed
earlier, the map additionally includes the colonial administrative entity of
‘Gilgit Agency’ as part of Pakistan. Hence, the census makes a contradictory
statement: it visually depicts the territory of the Northern Areas within
Pakistan but does not claim it as part of the country in the written description.
Even within the written text, the Northern Areas are represented in
contradictory ways. On the first page of the census report, an explicit
description of the territory of Pakistan is provided under the section titled
‘General Description of the Country’. As mentioned earlier, only the four
provinces, Islamabad, and FATA are described as being part of Pakistan. Right
after that, however, and just like the private school textbook discussed earlier,
the existence of the Northern Areas within the state of Pakistan is implicitly
acknowledged when the boundaries of the state are described:

It is bounded on the north and north-west by Afghanistan, on the east and

south-east by India, on the south by the Arabian Sea, and on the west by Iran.
The Peoples Republic of China lies in the north and north-east alongside
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 59

Gilgit and Baltistan, while close across the northern borders is the Central
Asian State of Tajikistan.55

Hence, we see the unity of the official construction of the Northern Areas—
as embodied by the census—and the supposedly unofficial representation
of the Northern Areas as depicted in Muhammad Rabbani’s textbook for
Pakistan Studies that I discussed earlier. In both these texts, spaces within the
Northern Areas are implied as part of Pakistan when the borders of the state
are described, but the spatial unit of the ‘Northern Areas’ is not included when
the territory of the state is described.
As discussed earlier, the space of the Northern Areas is given prime
focus when the geographical beauty of the country needs to be described.
Accordingly, the census makes prominent reference to the physical features
of the territory defined by the Northern Areas. For example, a section on
the topography of Pakistan that begins on the first page of the census has a
dedicated sub-section called the ‘Northern Mountains’. This section includes
the following description:

Trans-Himalayas or the Karakoram ranges in the extreme north rise to an

average height of 6,100 meters. Godwin Austen (K2) is the second highest
peak in the world (8,610 meters) located in the Karakoram. A number of
glaciers cover these ranges. Siachen, Hispar, Biafo, Baltoro, and Batura are
some of the important glaciers.

These glaciers are located in the Northern Areas, but this fact is never
mentioned. Later, a section on ‘Important and Historical Places’ states:

Pakistan offers to its visitors … un-spoilt natural beauty, boasting the

densest concentration of high mountains in the world like mountain ranges
of Karakoram, Hindu Khush and Himalayas with world renowned highest
peak K2… and picturesque valleys like Kaghan, Swat, Gilgit and Chitral.56

Kaghan, Swat, and Chitral valleys do not lie in the Northern Areas, and are
allocated separate sub-sections which provide details about their location, as
well as general tourism-related information. No such description is provided
 60 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

about Gilgit valley, which lies in the Northern Areas, and is as popular a tourist
site as the other valleys, if not more. Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but it
is nevertheless striking that ‘beautiful’ sites of Pakistan located outside of the
Northern Areas are expanded upon, and situated within a specific regional
context, whereas the scenery of the Northern Areas is appropriated as that ‘of
Pakistan’.
The only landmark of the Northern Areas that is elaborated upon in a
separate section is the Karakoram Highway, which is a 1300 kilometre-road
that runs through the Northern Areas, connecting Pakistan’s capital city of
Islamabad to Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang province. The section states that the
Karakoram Highway is:

The greatest wonder of modern Pakistan and one of the most spectacular
roads in the world. It is an engineering marvel which connects Pakistan to
China, twisting through three great mountain ranges [of] the Himalayas,
Karakoram, and Pamirs, following one of the ancient silk routes along the
valleys of Indus, Gilgit, and Hunza rivers .57

This is yet another example which shows how the space of the Northern
Areas is appropriated for the production of the eco-body of the nation-state,
while the identity of the region is erased. The fact that the Karakoram Highway
is the only feature of the Northern Areas that is detailed, also suggests how the
highway has become a prominent marker for the region, so much so that it has
come to stand for the Northern Areas. As Haines has argued:

The Northern Areas is the Karakoram Highway, in tourist discourse.

The people and the places are things to encounter along the way,
not really worthy of visiting in and of themselves. The landscape is
de-peopled. The attraction, and selling point, are the highway, the deep river
gorges, the glaciers, and of course, the mountain peaks.58

In the rest of the Census Report of Pakistan, even the most fundamental
‘census’ statistics about the region such as the size of its area and population are
not provided. This is odd, given that in the preface of the census, the ‘Northern
Areas’ are specifically mentioned as being included in the census-taking
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 61

process. It is not clear what data was collected from the region, as there is no
evidence of it in the entire census report.59 Hence, an acknowledgement of the
presence of the ‘Northern Areas’ creeps into the beginning of the report, only
to be subsequently negated. The section on migration does acknowledge the
existence of the Northern Areas, when people specify ‘NA’ (Northern Areas)
or ‘AK’ (Azad Kashmir) as their ‘place of previous residence’.60 But the ‘present
residence’ only includes the four provinces and the capital city of Islamabad,
suggesting that migration data was not collected within the Northern Areas.
Hence, the only way in which the people of the Northern Areas are represented
in the overall census is when they have migrated to a region which is officially
part of Pakistan. They are given a place only when they are out-of-place.

REPRESENTATION AND THE STATE

The official Pakistani constitution, census, and the map embody discursive
practices that, in different ways, articulate the form and content of the nation-
state. They offer key sites for understanding how the apparently simple and
obvious ‘fact’ of defining the territorial structure of the state is actually a deeply
political exercise that naturalizes a particular way of perceiving the nation-
state, and legitimizes its claims for sovereignty over a physical and social space.
Thus, such sites are not objective representations of a fixed, concrete structure
called the state; rather they constitute forms of knowledge that help to produce
the state itself in its formal, official garb. By emphasizing the constructed
nature of the state, I do not mean to deny the existence of what Abrams calls
the state-system, ‘a palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure
centered in government’.61 I intend to emphasize, as Abrams does, the state-
idea—‘an ideological artifact attributing unity, morality and independence to
the disunited, amoral and dependent workings of the practice of government.’62
Timothy Mitchell has argued that the ‘state-system’ and the ‘state-idea’
mutually constitute each other and are ‘two aspects of the same process’.63
This process involves mundane material techniques of disciplinary power—
including map-making and census-taking—that produce ‘spatial organization,
temporal arrangement, functional specification, supervision and surveillance,
 62 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

and representation’.64 Such techniques create the effect of an abstract totality

called the state, which seemingly stands apart from society.
At the same time, however, the ‘state’ is not merely an effect of power. It
is a crucible for the confluence, concentration, and contestation of power
relations. As Foucault has argued, ‘power relations have been progressively
governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in
the form of, or under auspices of, state institutions’ and that ‘in a certain way
all other forms of power relation must refer to it [the state]’.65 This suggests
that the state-system itself is the key arena for the deployment of disciplinary
techniques that, according to Mitchell, create the state effect. Though specific
to the ‘state’, this argument echoes Foucault’s broader thesis that ‘knowledge
is produced within the matrix of power and that power operates through the
deployment of knowledge’.66
James Scott, in his defining book Seeing Like a State (1998), argues that
the legibility of spaces and subjects through practices such as mapping and
census-taking is one of the preconditions for the modern state’s exercise of
power. An illegible society, he says, is ‘a hindrance to any effective intervention
by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public
welfare.’67 Moreover, Timothy Mitchell has compellingly demonstrated how
the map and the census were part of novel disciplinary methods of order,
that, through transparency and objectification, enabled Egypt to become
‘readable’ for the colonial state and thus facilitated surveillance and control.68
Similarly, Benedict Anderson has argued that the map and census aided first
the colonial and later the postcolonial states in Asia and Africa, by classifying,
standardizing, and solidifying spatial as well as social identities that created a
‘human landscape of perfect visibility’ for state control.69
As the analysis so far has demonstrated, state rule in the Northern Areas
does not follow this normative theoretical template of legibility and control.
Indeed, my analysis shows that the illegibility of the Northern Areas helps in
sustaining the image of the region as unpeopled—as only a landscape that
constitutes the eco-body of the nation. If the depiction of the region has not
been standardized and solidified, it does not mean that the region occupies
some kind of far-from-centre, stateless space of independence. The region, in
fact, suffers from authoritarian forms of state domination, as I elaborate in the
next section.
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 63

TERRITORIALIZING A DISPUTED TERRITORY

At different times in history, the areas that now form Gilgit-Baltistan have come
under the influence of the Scythians, the Huns, the Kushans, and the Tibetans.
By the nineteenth century, several local princely kingdoms had emerged and
come to dominate the different valleys of the region. During British rule, the
territory that today forms Gilgit-Baltistan was of special strategic significance
as it marked the northern frontier of the empire and became the site of the
Anglo-Russian ‘Great Game’ for control over Central Asia. Through military
and diplomatic campaigns that formed part of an imperialist ‘forward policy’,
the British managed to establish, in 1877, a political unit around Gilgit called
the Gilgit Agency. The Agency became a permanent base only in 1889 and
included the crucial local states of Hunza and Nagar. The British were able
to conquer these territories through the active support of the Dogra rulers of
Jammu, who had established the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir through
the Treaty of Amritsar in 1846, and had managed to annex Gilgit to their state
in 1860.70 However, this northern region of the British Empire remained a
fluid frontier zone with multiple intersecting systems of authority and alliance,
rather than a borderland with firmly established boundary lines.71 In fact, after
the establishment of the Gilgit Agency, the region became doubly classified
as a dominion of the state of Kashmir as well as that of the British Empire. It
therefore came to be supervised partly by the British Political Agent and partly
by the Kashmiri governor, though the administrative control of both was quite
weak as the local princely kings continued to have autonomous jurisdiction
over their areas.72
To expand and consolidate their control over frontier affairs, the British
in 1935 leased the Gilgit Wazarat from the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir
for a period of 60 years. The historical reasons for linking Gilgit-Baltistan to
the Kashmir dispute are related to this question of plebiscite. At the time of
partition, it was felt that in the event of a plebiscite in disputed Kashmir, the
people of the region would most likely opt to join Pakistan due to a shared
Muslim identity, hence swaying Kashmir’s vote in Pakistan’s favor. Thus, the
relationship of the then Northern Areas to Kashmir needs to be maintained
and, as such, they cannot be officially classified as part of Pakistan. Second,
a formal incorporation of the region would imply an acceptance of the Line
 64 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

of Control and a renunciation of Pakistan’s claims over Indian-held Kashmir.

Hence, it was doubly strategic to keep the region of the Northern Areas
‘disputed’.
The link of the Northern Areas with Kashmir has been repeatedly used by
the Pakistan state to justify the denial of political rights to the inhabitants of
the region. State representatives have claimed that any change in the region’s
status would amount to a violation of international agreements on Kashmir.73
Yet, as activists in Gilgit-Baltistan have consistently pointed out, such a fear
has hardly stopped the Pakistan state from granting rights to Azad Kashmir,
which operates as a semi-autonomous state within Pakistan. Adult franchise
was extended to Azad Kashmir in 1970, but was not implemented in Gilgit-
Baltistan till almost forty years later, in 2009. Since 1974, Azad Kashmir has
also had its own constitution, legislative assembly, elected Prime Minister,
and independent judiciary.74 Gilgit-Baltistan, on the other hand, remains in
a constitutional limbo. The difference in state policy between Azad Kashmir
and Gilgit-Baltistan has meant that people in Gilgit-Baltistan often perceive
their region as doubly victimized within the dispute of Kashmir—a ‘Kashmir
within Kashmir’, as one resident called it. The differential treatment is also
made sense of locally through a number of explanations: that Gilgit-Baltistan
is kept exceptionally suppressed because it is a Shia-majority region unlike
Azad Kashmir, and that Gilgit-Baltistan had already acquiesced and expressed
loyalty to Pakistan and thus, was not deemed to need appeasement through
rights that would weaken federal and military control. As Robinson (2013) has
pointed out, Azad Kashmir was also able to obtain more rights as a distinct
regional polity due to the sustained efforts of its political leadership in limiting
state control from Pakistan.
In the aftermath of the 1947 partition, the political arrangement that came
to be placed in the region today called Gilgit-Baltistan was one that worked
well for the Pakistani government as well as for the local ruling elites; the latter
were given full freedom to continue their feudal rule, while the former was
not compelled to grant any rights to a pacified populace. The fact that the
region was internationally considered ‘disputed territory’ was useful in further
absolving the Pakistani state from any democratic responsibility towards the
people of Gilgit-Baltistan. Simultaneously, and precisely because of the region’s
relationship with the Kashmir dispute, the Pakistan state began to implement
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 65

coercive policies of territorialization that helped to strengthen its control over

the space as well as the subjects of the region.
Between 1947 and 1972, successive Pakistani governments continued the
policies that existed during the colonial regime: indirect rule was perpetuated
through a Pakistani Political Agent in place of a British one, while the local
monarchs continued to squeeze labour, produce, and taxes from their subjects.
In some ways, the rule of the Pakistan state was even worse, as the Political Agent
implemented much despised policies. These included, first, the continuing of
the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) that gave discretionary law-enforcing
powers to state officials in the region. Subsequently, the Pakistani government
abolished the State Subject Rule—a law put in place by the Dogra state which
had regulated and prevented non-locals from claiming local citizenship and
property rights. According to several local inhabitants, the ending of this
rule eased the process of land control and demographic change in the region.
Between 1972 and 1974, the Pakistani state sought to obtain more direct control
of the region for securing its northern boundaries. Popular resentment was
tamed by abolishing the FCR, as well as the rajgiri (principality) and jagirdari
(feudal) system of local rulers.75 The territories that were previously divided
into autonomous states and political districts were now combined and brought
under the direct purview of the federal administration.
These moves were accompanied by road-building projects—most
prominently the Karakoram Highway—to ‘advance the conquest of physical
distance, the extension of central control, and economic and political
integration’.76 The construction of roads also served Pakistan’s defence needs
by providing a direct route to its ally China that would be crucial against
potential aggression from India. The roads have also paved the way for a more
entrenched role of the military-intelligence regime in defining the political
and social landscape of the region—a subject that I elaborate in the next
chapter.
Even within the territories that form part of Pakistani Kashmir, there is
a clear difference between the administrative mechanisms that have been
used to govern Azad Kashmir, versus those that have been implemented
in Gilgit-Baltistan. While Azad Kashmir has an autonomous status with
its own President, Prime Minister, Parliament, and Supreme Court, Gilgit-
Baltistan has only recently been given a province-like status. Till 2009, it
 66 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

was administered directly by the Federal Ministry of Kashmir Affairs and

Northern Areas (KANA), which is based in the capital city of Islamabad.
Since October 1994, party-based elections have been held for a local assembly
that was first called the Northern Areas Executive Council and later the
Northern Areas Legislative Council, but it was not granted any significant
powers of legislation and administration. Moreover, it was headed by an un-
elected chief executive—usually a non-local—who was only answerable to
the un-elected Minister of Kashmir Affairs and Northern Areas. The irony
of the situation is captured well by a local poet, Ahmed Din, who said to me
in 2003:

In democracy, we have two bureaucrats under a political representative;

here, we have two bureaucrats above a political representative.

Meanwhile, the broader regional status of Gilgit-Baltistan has remained

undefined. Till the 1980s, the Northern Areas were administered by a federal
organ called the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs. However, the name of this
Ministry was later changed to the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs and Northern
Areas and is today the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs & Gilgit-Baltistan. Despite
this apparent separation of the Northern Areas from Kashmir, the people of
the region were classified as ‘Kashmiri Mohajirs’ (migrants) on the national ID
cards issued to them by the Pakistan state—a move that was later rescinded in
response to local protests. Similarly, as I noted in the discussion of the Supreme
Court case earlier, the Pakistani government has claimed the region as part
of disputed Kashmir, when defending its record of not granting democratic
rights to the region. Thus, official policies on Gilgit-Baltistan have remained
ambiguous and contradictory regarding whether the region is part of Kashmir
or separate from it.
This ambivalent and liminal political status of the Northern Areas/Gilgit-
Baltistan is not only linked to the territorial history of the Kashmir dispute
but—as highlighted in the Introduction—also to the cultural anxieties that
the region poses for the Pakistani state. It is an ethnically heterogeneous, Shia-
majority unit which challenges the homogenizing, Sunni-Islamist narrative
of Pakistani nationalism. Such complex political and cultural anxieties posed
by this border territory have translated into realities of deep-rooted military
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 67

control, and together these unspoken anxieties and realities have come
to ensure a sustained erasure of meaningful discourse on the region. The
silencing of the region has thus become structural—and like other structural
silences—need not require a conspiracy, nor even a political consensus, for its
continuation.77

EXPERIENCING ILLEGIBILITY

The silencing illegibility of the Northern Areas is a cause of immense

resentment in the region. People have been outraged by the representational
and political oblivion in which they have found themselves since partition,
for it reflects a betrayal of their historical choice and struggle to be part of
Pakistan, and also demonstrates the callous arrogance and impunity with
which they have been ruled by the Pakistan state. Some characterize the
Pakistan state as downright ridiculous for not claiming the land that it
controls—like India has done—but rendering it ‘disputed’ and ‘undefined’ as
if it makes strategic sense.
Prior to 2009, the invisibility of the Northern Areas in the cognitive map
of Pakistan also affected people in the region at a most personal level. When
people from Northern Areas studied or worked elsewhere—and there is a
strong historical trend of out-migrations particularly in the winter months—
they felt an acute crisis of identity, as they were unable to identify themselves
in terms that were recognized by other Pakistanis. Saying ‘Northern Areas’
unsurprisingly drew blank stares, as it sounded like a general geographical
region, not the actual name for an administrative territory in Pakistan. A
village name or other meaningful regional names that denote place of
origin—such as Shigar, Haramosh, Darel, Astore, Gojal—were equally
unknown. Most people ended up saying they were from Gilgit or Hunza, as
these might sound more familiar and make more sense than the cryptic label
of ‘Northern Areas’. But when asked where Gilgit or Hunza was, people would
have to say shumali ilaqajaat (Northern Areas) and get trapped again. Very
often, the follow-up question they would get was: ‘Oh is that ____’, where
the ____ could be NWFP, FATA, Waziristan, or any other place in Northern
 68 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

Pakistan that might have recently been in the news, but had nothing to do
with the Northern Areas.
To circumvent the issue of clarifying what exactly the Northern Areas is, one
NGO worker, Qurban, who belongs to Gilgit and whom I met in Islamabad,
simply used to say that he was from Peshawar, the key city in the province of
Khyber-Pukhtoonkhwa. As he put it:

People are likely to think I am somewhere from around there either way,
even if I say Gilgit, Hunza, Skardu, or the Northern Areas, which are far
from Peshawar and have nothing to do with it. But Peshawar is readily
understood.

A student in Karachi, Gohar, had a more innovative solution, and expressed

how he avoided any association with the northern parts of Pakistan, given the
post–war-on-terror context where a particular, demeaning attitude towards
the ‘north’ prevails. Before the name change in 2009, I met him by chance at
a library in Karachi, and guessing that he is from the Northern Areas, asked
where he was from. Much to my amusement, he said, ‘Central Asia’. I was even
more curious then, and probed further about where in Central Asia he came
from. He hesitatingly replied, ‘Hunza’. When I responded with, ‘Oh wonderful,
I have been there quite a few times’, he was both surprised and relieved. Later
on, when I asked him why he had introduced himself to me as someone from
Central Asia, he explained:

You know, I have just adopted that as my identity because when I say
Hunza, people ask what is it, where is it, is it a village, and so on. When
I say Northern Areas, they think I am from FATA. I don’t want to explain
all the time, and these days, people make bad impressions of you when
they find out you are from the north of Pakistan. People think we are all
jaahil [ignorant] and dangerous up there, but I am sorry to say, it is the
Pakistani mentality here that is jaahil. So it’s better to say Central Asian.
By saying Central Asian, people know you are foreign and might give you
more respect. It is also true, we do have much in common with Central
Asian mountain culture.
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 69

Hence, as one way to deal with the invisibility of the Northern Areas, people
from the region themselves invisibilized their link with it in their interactions
with Pakistanis. Within the region itself, the lack of Northern Areas’ spatial and
political identity has always been the subject of intense popular discussion. In
particular, the absurdity of their placelessness has been the topic of many stories
as well as jokes that people like to tell about their ambiguous political status. For
example, an ex-Major, Karamat Khan, once related to me in a group discussion:

I think that God had complete plans to send the October 2005 earthquake
to the Northern Areas. But when His Lt. General came down to earth, he
simply couldn’t find the region!78

The implication that even God was confused by state practices of illegibility
drew an ironic laughter from the group. The confusion, indeed, went deep.
Many humorous narratives in Gilgit, for example, highlight how government
officials were themselves confused by the illegibility that state discourse had
helped to produce. One popular narrative that was repeated to me several
times goes something like this:

A delegation from the Northern Areas went to Prime Minister Junejo in 1986
to demand constitutional rights, and especially the right to representation
in Parliament. He said, ‘What rights? Of course, you have rights. How can
you not have rights?’ The delegation responded, ‘That’s exactly our point.
How can we not have rights?’ Apparently, he too had confused the Northern
Areas with NWFP. What hope do we have, if even our Prime Minister does
not know about our status!

Another incident that circulates in Gilgit is as follows:

Once a district commissioner from down country was appointed to Gilgit.

Can you believe that he landed in Peshawar, thinking that Gilgit was right
next to it? Those who are sent to rule us don’t even know where we are located.

Yet another experience was related to me by a Skardu-based member of the

then Northern Areas Legislative Assembly (NALA), Riaz Habib:
 70 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

In 2000, I was part of an NALC delegation that went to meet the law minister
for demanding an expansion of the powers granted to the NALC. He was a
very nice man, who promised us that he would look into the matter. Then,
he asked me, ‘What is Chitral’s height?’ I gave him the answer. And then he
asked me what hotel would I recommend in Chitral. At that point, I politely
told him that Chitral is not part of the Northern Areas.

Such narratives were related to me with a sense of amusement, but also

with undertones of cynical bitterness. It often seemed to me that the humor
or sarcasm with which people commented on their political illegibility,
offered a way to hide their anger, or deal with it. While the narratives might
be performed as jokes, they reflected harsh truths about the marginalization
of the region as well as the sheer Pakistani ignorance of this condition. The
‘ignorant government official’, in fact, has become a dominant trope through
which the Pakistani state is described in the region. Capturing the ignorance
of the state is a key way in which Gilgitis express the hopelessness of their
situation, but also one through which they poke fun at the state, and critique
it. Through jokes, my interviewees highlighted how the Northern Areas was
itself treated as a joke by the Pakistan state.
The ignorance of the Pakistani state is even contrasted with the knowledge
through which the British colonial state ruled the region. As Tariq Zafar, a
veteran writer from Gilgit, said to me:

The angrez afsar [British officer] always had a pen and paper with him,
and was interested in local languages and customs. His key purpose was
to safeguard British interests but at least he tried to understand the region.
And now we have Pakistani officials, most of whom are ignorant and
incompetent.

Thus, while practices of legibility that produced local knowledge were

fundamental to the realization of colonial power, they also embodied a
political recognition and cultural interest, which—at least in retrospect—is
deemed positive by formerly colonized subjects. One of the main grievances
against the Pakistan state is precisely that it does not know, or value the place
under its control, making its rule less legitimate. This compels us to rethink
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 71

the relationship between knowledge and power. Knowledge has perhaps been
viewed too narrowly, as merely the field through which governmentality is
produced,79 but especially if it is non-Orientalizing, knowledge also plays a
more affirming role by producing value and validation for subjects of power.
In some ways, at least, it is better to be seen by the nation and state, than
remain unseen altogether.

CONCLUSION

The representational illegibility of the Northern Areas till 2009 did not merely
reflect an official ambiguity. Rather, it helped to realize the structure of silence
that the contested and militarized status of the region necessitates. Illegibility
helps to sustain state power through techniques of pictorial but people-less
valorization, naming, and ambiguous mapping, which erase the identity of the
region and obscure its social condition. Thus, the role of representation in
the state’s project of rule must not be seen as subservient to ‘actual’, ‘real’, and
‘material’ practices of repression and territorialization. Rather, representational
devices themselves need to be seen as repressive, territorializing practices
because they help to claim and acclaim rule over spaces and subjects. As such,
state territoriality and rule are not only about controlling space and converting
it into a legible place but also about using representation to appropriate space,
while reducing a specific controlled place to an illegible, almost non-existent
space. We might therefore adapt the legibility thesis of state-formation to
argue that illegibility can be far more effective in realizing power, particularly
in disputed border zones like the Northern Areas.
Ultimately, the discourse of rule that defines the subjection of the Northern
Areas has neither been based on cultural veneration—as for example,
demonstrated by the construction of Manchukuo’s ‘peopled places’ as sites
of ‘primitive authenticity’80—nor on denigration as evidenced, for example,
by the depiction of the Meratus as ‘disorderly primitives’ and ‘immoral
pagans’.81 Rather, power/knowledge practices have appropriated and eulogized
the physical landscape of the Northern Areas, transforming it into the eco-
body of the nation, and through it, simultaneously, invisibilizing the identity
 72 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

of the region and its people. Hence, the Northern Areas have been given a
space, but not a place, through silencing representations which are ‘active
performances in terms of their social and political impact and their effects on
consciousness’.82 The power of these silencing representations suggests that we
need to investigate not only how states ‘state’83 but also how they do not state,
or cannot state, and regulate and dominate precisely by not stating.
The silencing representations of Gilgit-Baltistan within national discourses
exist alongside other practices of the state that silence voices and politics in
the region. It is to such practices of the military-intelligence establishment in
Gilgit-Baltistan that I now turn towards in the following chapter.

NOTES

1 Carter (1987).
2 Cohen and Kliot (1992).
3 Dani (2001).
4 This nomenclature continued to operate at least till 1950. See the Ministry of
States and Frontier Regions document transferring authority of the ‘Northern
Areas of Kashmir’ from the Government of NWFP to the Ministry of Kashmir
Affairs (No.D. 3739-B/50, 23 June 1950).
5 Carter (1987: xxiv).
6 Like the Northern Areas, this province was also renamed in 2010.
7 This Urdu word can be translated to mean ‘strange’, and ‘difficult to comprehend’.
8 I have also come across this inability to recognize the name and hence the
place of Northern Areas in my personal interactions with friends and family
members. For example, when I used to tell them that my research is based
on the Northern Areas, they often assumed that I was referring to places in
the North-West of the country, such as the province of NWFP, or the tribal
territories of FATA or Wana. Else, they would ask, ‘What do you mean by the
Northern Areas?’
9 As an example of such an appointment in 2013, http://tribune.com.pk/story/
525548/prime-ministers-summary-g-b-law-minister-appointed-chief-court-
judge/
10 Rizvi et al. (2003). ‘Pakistan Studies’ is a compulsory subject in government
schools and colleges in Pakistan.
11 Ibid., p. 139.
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 73

12 Ibid., pp. 87–88.

13 This system is managed by the Universities of London and Cambridge in the
United Kingdom.
14 Ibid., p.165.
15 Ibid., p. 183.
16 Ibid., p. 192.
17 Ibid., pp. 192–193.
18 Husain (1997).
19 Dardistan and Baltistan are historical names of regions that today form part of
Gilgit-Baltistan.
20 Ibid., p. 143.
21 Ibid., p. 93.
22 Ibid., p. 142.
23 Rai (2004).
24 Braudel (1972: 34).
25 Ispahani (1989: 185).
26 Stellrecht (1997).
27 Hussain (2015).
28 Mehkri (2001).
29 Kingsnorth (2012).
30 Pakistan has had three constitutions. The 1973 constitution is the one that
is currently in force, with various amendments over the years by successive
military and civilian regimes.
31 Qazi (2003: 3).
32 Qazi (2003: 3).
33 Qazi (2003: 150).
34 Mian (1999).
35 Qazi (2003).
36 Mian (1999).
37 Notification No. SRO 1169(1)/99 dated 28 October, 1999. Source: IUCN (2003).
38 I am grateful to Cabeiri Robinson for this insight.
39 Khan (2002); my emphasis.
40 Anderson (1991) and Berezin (1999).
41 My emphasis.
42 Durkheim (1976) and Ibrahim (2004).
43 Razvi (1971: 7).
44 Harley (2001: 107).
45 The maps in this chapter could not be printed in this book in colour. The
original maps in their actual form and colour have been made available at
delusionalstates.weebly.com.
 74 DE LU SI ONA L STATES

46 The Line of Control was legitimated by the UN in July 1949.

47 Rahman and Mahmood (2000).
48 Wirsing (1985).
49 Siachin is a glacier in disputed Kashmir, which Pakistan and India have fought
over since 1984. It is considered to be the highest battleground in the world,
where many soldiers from both sides have lost their lives due to the inhuman
conditions in which they are forced to live.
50 Wirsing (1985).
51 Winichakul (1994:130).
52 Husain (1997).
53 This area is marked in the abridged version of the official map of Pakistan,
shown in Map 3.
54 Ibid., p. 14.
55 Census Report (1998: 1); my emphasis.
56 Ibid.,p. 73.
57 Ibid.,p. 81.
58 Haines (2000: 196).
59 One possible explanation would be that since census data is categorized by
‘administrative units’, providing information about the Northern Areas would
necessitate classifying it as an administrative region of Pakistan, hence negating
the official definition of Pakistani territory provided both in the text of the
census as well as in the constitution. Also, of course, more-than-basic data is
collected from the region but is deemed to be ‘sensitive’ and hence excluded
for strategic and political interests.
60 There is a single column for ‘AK/NA’ which suggests a relationship between
these two areas.
61 Abrams (1988: 58).
62 Abrams (1988: 81).
63 Mitchell (1999: 77).
64 Mitchell (1999: 95).
65 Foucault (1983: 224).
66 Ray (2000: 62).
67 Scott (1998: 78).
68 Mitchell (1988).
69 Anderson (1991: 185)
70 For a detailed discussion of Dogra and British struggles over the northern
frontier of the subcontinent, see Schofield (2010) and Sökefeld (2017).
71 Razvi (1971) and Haines (2012).
72 The Gilgit Wazarat that came under the rule of the Maharaja of Kashmir
comprised the Gilgit tahsil, the Bunji tahsil, and the Astor niabat, whereas
 U NI M AGI N E D COMMU NI TI E S I N THE E CO- BODY OF THE NATION 75

the British political agent oversaw the Gilgit agency—including the political
districts of Yasin, Ghizer, Ishkoman, Pubial, the states of Hunza, and Nagar—
and the Chilas sub-agency (Lentz, 1997). See also Stellrecht (1997).
73 Mian (1999).
74 Much of Azad Kashmir’s parliamentary independence, however, is curtailed
by the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Council which is dominated by the federal
government in Islamabad, and retains the supreme authority over the affairs of
the region. See Human Rights Watch (2006).
75 See Notifications REG-MISC-23/1972 dated 12 October 1972 and REG-HC.
NTF-32/72 dated 1 November 1972 (Source: IUCN, 2004).
76 Ispahani (1989: 193).
77 Trouillot (1995: 99).
78 The October 2005 earthquake devastated Azad Kashmir and parts of the
NWFP, but very marginally affected the Northern Areas.
79 Foucault (1980).
80 Duara (2003).
81 Tsing (1993).
82 Harley (2001: 87).
83 Corrigan and Sayer (1985) and Roseberry (1994).