Border Anxiety and Unmaking of Home: Migration and Everyday Precarity in an Indian Borderland

This paper examines forced migration in the villages of the Kargil borderland, situating the experiences of its residents within broader global patterns of war-induced displacement. Kargil has seen multiple conflicts and wars between India and Pakistan, and continues to remain a sensitive border dividing the two nations. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in border villages in Kargil, the paper examines how repeated wars, cross-border shelling, and geopolitical tensions have contributed to migration. While existing scholarship on the region has largely focused on territorial conflict, this paper shifts attention to abandoned villages and their relationship to forced migration. In doing so, the paper highlights how the multiple wars and conflicts in the Kargil borderland compelled people to abandon their ancestral homes and relocate to safer areas away from the border. There remains border anxiety among its residents and those who have fled, due to the uncertainty of life and the difficulty of making a living in the region.