Kashmir, across the Line of Control, must be the most blessed place on earth. In the subcontinent, everybody's heart bleeds for Kashmiris - a word used both to denote the ethnic community of the Kashmir Valley and the broader communities of the Jammu and Kashmir state as it stood in 1947. The caveat, however, is that the bleeding is conspicuously selective. It depends entirely on which side of the fence one sits, and where the solidarity is being poured out in generous measure.
Nothing exposes this hypocrisy more starkly than the ongoing crisis in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir (PaJK), locally called 'Azad Jammu and Kashmir', where a democratic movement for basic rights is being crushed under military jackboots, and where a single kill switch has plunged an entire population into darkness.
Jammu and Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JKJAAC) has been proscribed and branded as a terrorist organization with cynical precision just weeks before elections. Security forces have killed at least twenty civilians, arbitrarily detained hundreds, imposed a communications blackout, withheld bodies from grieving families unless they sign statements branding their dead as terrorists, and blockaded food and medicine to an estimated 350,000 people. Lethal force is deployed against those who dared to mourn.
Fog of Propaganda and Myths
And yet, the usual Kashmir heart-bleeders in Pakistan, including a section of its celebrated liberals, find their tongues hopelessly knotted. Those who can speak with fiery eloquence about rights violations on the Indian side of Kashmir now manage a little more than muted blabber about 'security concerns', or the convenient dismissal of the JKJAAC agitation as 'politicised'.
Across the border, the mirror image is equally telling: those in India who suffer from acute myopia when civil liberties on their side of Jammu and Kashmir are crushed through sweeping detentions, house demolitions, and the systematic gagging of media and civil society have suddenly discovered their empathy with rallying voices in defence of the suffering masses in Rawalakot and beyond.
The propaganda, too, runs predictably on both sides. Pakistan insists that PaJK's campaign is Indian-sponsored. India touts it as a movement demanding separation from Pakistan. Both are spectacularly wide of the mark. The fog of manufactured narrative cannot bury the truth. This is not a movement for azadi. It is a movement for the restoration of basic rights and against the methodical political manipulation that has been par for the course for seven decades.
PaJK’s Grievances at the Centre
The historical trajectory of manipulations is telling. Over the past seven decades, regional parties have been steadily eased out while Pakistan's national parties have made deeper inroads, horizontal and vertical, into the territory's political life. Central to this contestation are the non-territorial seats, a glaring democratic distortion in which six Kashmir Valley refugee constituencies elect one MLA for roughly 5,600 voters, giving those voters over seventeen times the voting power of ordinary territorial citizens. These seats, rather than being a bridge for refugee representation, have become an instrument of political engineering, a lever through which Islamabad can reliably shape electoral outcomes.
These concerns, apart from the demands related to economy and development, are genuine. The refugee seats issue was seen as the most ticklish of the grievances. It demanded engagement and dialogue, a search for common ground, perhaps even a middle way, not bullets.
The scale of the violence is brutal. Additionally, it has been matched by an even more vitriolic scale of propaganda with labels like 'anti-national', ‘sedition’, ‘terrorism’ articulating a language of suppression. Pakistan has deployed this before, in Balochistan and elsewhere.
What is lesser Understood about PaJK
But PaJK's history carries lessons that Islamabad has never bothered to learn. Poonch, the present epicentre of unrest, was the epicentre of another revolt in 1947, when the then monarch disarmed Muslim soldiers returning from the Second World War. Those men demonstrated then that they were willing to shed their blood for dignity. The present generation has inherited that memory and that resolve.
The public of PaJK today, moreover, is not the public of 1947. Though politically and economically sidelined within Pakistan, the territory has a diaspora, particularly those displaced from Mirpur when the Mangla Dam was built in the 1960s, that has grown into a formidable political and financial force, especially in the United Kingdom. In the present Westminster parliament, the community has eight MPs; it is also represented extensively across local councils. When security forces opened fire on mourners in Rawalakot, the diaspora did not sit moping in private grief. It mounted a coordinated lobbying campaign at Westminster, winning an Early Day Motion, a formal letter from the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Kashmir to the Foreign Secretary, and a mass constituent letter drive targeting MPs across the country.
What Pakistan does not understand about the Mirpuri community is this: its umbilical cord to the homeland - culturally, emotionally, and politically - has never frayed. Historical and political uncertainty cements it further. The diaspora's weight is firmly behind the resistance.
In keeping with the region's deep history of defiance, the movement has only grown over the past two years, even ably bridged the historic caste divisions that traditionally characterise the region's socio-political landscape. This is an exemplary movement in peaceful, democratic mobilisation despite sustained attempts to crush it, divide it, and malign it. What began as a protest over electricity bills has been reframed by the JKJAAC into a sweeping challenge to the territory's power structure, a demand for haq-e-malkiyat and haq-e-hakimiyat - the right to own and the right to govern. Most recently, women have joined the protests in significant numbers, a profound statement in what remains a traditionally patriarchal society.
PaJK's anger is not a seasonal storm. It cannot be brushed under the carpet or wished away.
Which raises the unavoidable question about Pakistan's calculations. Is this simply catastrophically ill-advised, or is there a more sinister design at work - a strategy of forced political and constitutional assimilation wrapped in ‘security’ anxieties?
A decade ago, during a visit to the region, many people in PaJK told me that their identity papers marked them differently from those of the rest of Pakistan. That distinction, they said, was experienced as Pakistan’s recognition and acknowledgement of their distinct identity, their unique history, their disputed status. It gave them a sense of both agency and belonging. The lesson embedded in that detail is one Pakistan refuses to absorb. Any attempt to assimilate PaJK politically or constitutionally and dilute its distinction will be provocative.
A powerful state, guided by amnesia and an unfathomable arrogance, believes that enough force, enough silence, enough darkness will make a people forget who they are. History is instructive that such calculations are wrong.
Have you liked the news article?