During the 1950s and 1960s, the concept of “plebiscite” caught the imagination of Kashmiri Muslims living under oppressive state regimes and excluded from the networks of patronage by the Kashmiri political elites who collaborated to integrate Jammu and Kashmir with India. Demanding “self-determination,” these excluded voices expressed their discontent against a hegemonic power by organizing a plebiscite movement that challenged Indian nationalist narratives’ tacit assumption of Indian control over Kashmir. While local bands and balladeers integrated “self-determination” into their songs, making the term a part of popular memory, activists and writers mobilized the excluded majority to generate global support for Kashmiris trapped in the territorial dispute between India and Pakistan.

The right to self-determination, as per the United Nations Security Council resolution of 1948, promised the inhabitants of Jammu and Kashmir the option of joining India or Pakistan. This political and territorial definition of selfdetermination does not address the passionate emotions and responses that this concept evoked among Kashmiri Muslims. The term encapsulated Kashmiri desire for a voice not only in shaping their political destiny, but also in creating a society that valued freedom of expression, respected individual dignity, and was free from social and economic inequality. In postcolonial Kashmir, the slogan of self-determination emerged as a nonviolent demand for all communities struggling to attain rights and liberty under India-sponsored puppet regimes. The plebiscite demand appealed to the sentiments of ordinary Kashmiri Muslims, while activists broadened its meaning from simple political emancipation to encompass ethical concepts of human dignity, justice, and truth—ideas inherent in the earlier discourses of Kashmiri freedom. Most significantly, the slogan of self-determination provided supporters with psychological space to question the hegemony of the nation-states treating Kashmiri destiny as a mere territorial dispute. “Self-determination” projected Kashmiris themselves as the main actors shaping the future of their homeland.