The question of Kashmir has shaped the trajectories of India and Pakistan since the end of British rule and their birth as nation-states in August 1947. Both countries claim Kashmir in its entirety, have fought multiple wars over it, and each controls a separate part of the territory. Historically, references to Kashmir have largely focused on the dispute between India and Pakistan, or on the most visible troubles in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Pakistan-administered Kashmir has not been insulated from the wider economic crisis in Pakistan. Rising prices, fiscal pressures, energy deficits, and repeated International Monetary Fund bailouts have pushed successive governments to reduce subsidies and raise utility prices. The people of the region, already squeezed by inflation and unemployment, experience these policies not as fiscal prudence but as evidence of how little influence they have over the decisions that shape their lives.
The failures of the local government to resolve these issues created an opening for a new form of political organization. Citizens committees emerged across districts, bringing together traders, lawyers, students, and community leaders. In September 2023, these committees coalesced into the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), a unified body intended to coordinate mobilization across the region.
The movement’s appeal seems to rest on its ability to unite constituencies across partisan divides around everyday economic and governance concerns. In response to the JAAC’s organizing, authorities arrested its members on criminal charges and restricted its meetings. But these measures failed to subdue the movement, which pressed on through shutdowns, transportation strikes, and local protests. The protest movement’s strength lies in its decentralized structure, with its chapters across small towns and villages offering a grassroots network that can be activated across the region.
Clashes during the May 2024 march left at least four people dead, including three protestors and a police officer. Islamabad ultimately intervened with a relief package reportedly worth about 23 billion rupees ($82.9 million), which included subsidized electricity tariffs and lower wheat prices. But the government’s repressive response turned a campaign over utility prices into a broader test of whether the people of Pakistan-administered Kashmir could exercise meaningful political agency.
Citizens or subjects?
A council chaired by Pakistan’s prime minister used to be a major source of Islamabad’s formal control over legislation, finances, and development planning. Although a constitutional amendment in 2018 stripped many of its powers, reducing it to a largely advisory body, significant authority still rests with the federal government. Key civil servants—including the chief secretary and the inspector general of police—are appointed by Islamabad, leaving the regional elected government with limited control over crucial aspects of administration.
The electoral system of the region adds another layer of complexity. The legislature of Pakistan-administered Kashmir has 53 seats. Eight of those seats are reserved for women, religious scholars, technocrats, and overseas citizens. Lawmakers are elected for the remaining 45 seats through elections. Thirty-three of those lawmakers are elected by the people living in the region. Twelve more seats in the legislature are reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who live elsewhere in Pakistan—an arrangement introduced in the 1960s and formalized in the 1970s. Critics argue that these 12 seats significantly dilute the political weight of the territory’s voters and make it easier for whichever party rules in Islamabad to shape the assembly’s composition.
The trouble with military hegemony
The dominant role of Pakistan’s military further constrains political space. Pakistan is governed by a hybrid regime in which civilian governments function within boundaries imposed by the military, which continues to exert tutelary control over national security, foreign policy, and even political competition. Pakistan-administered Kashmir reflects a concentrated version of this wider political order.
Human rights observers have long documented the influence and the abuses of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services in the territory. The JAAC and rights activists argue that organized political activity and free expression are readily treated as security threats, narrowing the room for dissent. Elected institutions, they say, are reduced to a facade while the security apparatus determines whether political discontent can be expressed and mobilized.
The JAAC had called for a boycott of the vote, making the abolition of the 12 refugee seats one of its central demands. The first phase of voting recorded a turnout of about 46%, while officials put turnout in the second phase at roughly 50%, lower than the 60% recorded in the previous two elections in 2016 and 2021. Voting in the third phase was postponed because of continued unrest.
This manipulation begins well before polling day. Critics say officers from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence, operating under the area’s army command structure, use pressure tactics and patronage to favor candidates who endorse Kashmir’s integration with Pakistan. The 12 refugee seats, critics argue, are not simply a constitutional problem but an additional lever through which politically loyal candidates can be brought into the assembly.
The unrest also reveals an uncomfortable contradiction in Pakistan’s official position on Kashmir. For decades, Islamabad has accused India, not without justification, of gross human rights violations against Kashmiris on its side of the Line of Control. Pakistan’s foreign policy rests on the claim that Kashmiris possess a moral and legal “right of self-determination” and that Kashmir’s final status should be decided through a United Nations-administered plebiscite. Yet those claims are difficult to sustain when Islamabad’s own governance of Pakistan-administered Kashmir falls short of the very standards it invokes in criticizing India.
Kashmiris are not merely demanding lower bills and cheaper bread. They are demanding respect and representation. In the towns and valleys of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, these aspirations cannot simply be suppressed by force.
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