This is a three-part series on JAAC, Pakistan-administered Kashmir's protest movement, tracing its rise from a 2023 flour-and-electricity dispute into a full-blown political crisis, the government's terrorism ban and its fallout, and the paths forward for both the movement and the state. Part-I is published today.
In Rawalakot, a hill town in Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir (PaJK), officially called 'Azad Jammu Kashmir' in Pakistan, thousands of people have been sitting in the streets since June 5, refusing to leave until their demands are met. Shops, schools and government offices across large parts of the territory have stayed shut for months at a stretch. Extra troops and paramilitary units patrol roads that would normally be full of traffic. Internet and phone connectivity is banned.
The organisation that called people onto these streets in the first place, the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), has been formally banned as a proscribed organisation by the very government it was formed to pressure, with its leaders and supporters facing arrest and criminal prosecution. PaJK is living through the most serious political crisis of its recent history.
The crisis is no longer simply about whether the remaining demands will be accepted; it has become a struggle over political legitimacy and authority. The Government claims the constitutional right to govern and enforce order. JAAC claims the democratic legitimacy of mass participation and the Government's repeated failure to honour agreements it signed. Neither side has been able to impose a sustainable settlement.
The Pakistani establishment occupies the decisive position in this confrontation. Formally, PaJK has an elected government, legislature, judiciary and administrative structure. In practice, the repeated involvement of Pakistan's federal ministers, financial institutions, security agencies and military and paramilitary forces shows that the real limits on what the PaJK Government can negotiate are set elsewhere. The movement has exposed not just the weaknesses of individual PaJK governments but the structural limits of the political order itself.
JAAC has succeeded in showing that the old system cannot continue without resistance. It has not yet shown how popular resistance can be converted into durable democratic power. That is now the central historical question.
Origins of the Movement
In May 2023, a protest outside a single flour depot in Rawalakot was about nothing more than the price of bread and the cost of electricity. Three years on, that small protest has grown into boycotts of electricity bills, local action committees across the territory, general strikes, long marches on the capital, and formal negotiations involving both the PaJK and Pakistani governments.
Along the way it won real economic concessions, grew into a full People's Charter, and forced open questions once left on the margins of political debate: the privileges enjoyed by the elite, who owns the region's natural resources, constitutional authority, and what democratic representation actually means in Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir.
Where the anger began
JAAC was not born out of constitutional theory, nationalist ideology or party rivalry. It grew out of pressure ordinary households were feeling in daily life. By 2023, families across PaJK faced rising flour prices, shortages of subsidised wheat, expensive electricity, inflation, unemployment and shrinking purchasing power, while ministers, legislators and other powerful people around them enjoyed visible privileges.
The electricity issue carried a particular sting. PaJK's rivers and dams generate much of the hydropower that lights up Pakistan, yet residents paid tariffs set by the wider national system, not the cost of generating that power locally - raising a bigger question: if the power comes from this region's own rivers, what claim do its people have over that resource?
Flour and electricity worked as rallying demands because everyone could relate to them, cutting across party lines, ideology, region and biradari, the clan and kinship networks that to a large extent still shape local politics in South Asia. A family did not need to know constitutional law or the history of the Kashmir dispute to understand why a bag of flour had become unaffordable - that simplicity, linking politics to everyday life, was the movement's original strength.
From scattered anger to collective organisation
Before JAAC existed, many people in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir were unhappy, but that unhappiness was scattered. Traders protested alone, transporters raised their own concerns, lawyers argued constitutional questions, activists worked under a patchwork of ideological banners, and ordinary citizens went to individual politicians looking for personal favours.
JAAC's achievement was to pull these separate constituencies - traders' associations, transport unions, lawyers, students, activists and local civic committees - into one organisation, working side by side without settling their ideological differences first. This mattered in a region where established parties were tied to Pakistan's national parties and patronage networks, while smaller independence or progressive parties had committed members but little reach. JAAC asked them only to cooperate around one shared charter of demands.
That flexibility was both the movement's greatest strength and, later, a source of real trouble. It let JAAC grow quickly, but it postponed difficult questions about internal democracy, representation, class interests, constitutional objectives and the movement's ultimate destination.
The lesson of May 2024
JAAC's first decisive win came in May 2024. When authorities tried to stop a long march on the capital with arrests, roadblocks and heavy security, the crackdown made people angrier rather than sending them home. After violent clashes and a general shutdown, Pakistan's federal government approved an immediate Rs 23 billion package within days. Flour and electricity prices came down.
The money mattered, but the psychological impact mattered more: for perhaps the first time, many residents lived through a clear, repeatable sequence - people organised, the government pushed back, the public stayed in the streets anyway, Islamabad stepped in, and real concessions followed. That reversed the older habit of treating politicians as people to be petitioned for favours; people who had grown up asking as supplicants began to think of themselves as citizens with rights to claim.
That legitimacy was therefore not built through speeches alone - it was renewed every time a family bought cheaper flour or opened a smaller electricity bill. That daily, physical proof that collective action worked is why people kept turning out for JAAC's later calls, even without fully understanding or agreeing with every new demand. Many simply felt they owed something to the one organisation that had delivered results when the established parties never had.
From economic relief to a people's charter
Having won on flour and electricity, JAAC widened its programme into what became known as the People's Charter. The new demands reached into healthcare and education, roads and communications, government jobs and recruitment, local government, the Bank of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Accountability Bureau, compensation for Mangla Dam-affected families, cuts to elite privileges, and constitutional and electoral questions including the twelve refugee legislative seats.
This expansion was historically understandable: the movement's success had brought previously suppressed grievances to the surface, and every social group wanted its own problem included.
The effect was to turn a campaign about bread-and-butter issues into one pushing for administrative, political and constitutional restructuring. Historically significant, it signals a change in the nature of the fight: flour and electricity could be fixed with subsidies, while refugee seats, political representation and constitutional authority go straight to the structure of power itself. The Pakistani state could hand over money far more easily than political control.
October agreement and the problem of implementation
The next major test came in September and October 2025, when JAAC showed it could still shut down much of PaJK. The confrontation left people dead and injured, but also produced serious, high-level talks between JAAC, the PaJK government and Pakistan's federal government. The agreement that followed covered much of the movement's charter and marked official recognition of JAAC as a legitimate party at the negotiating table.
What happened next showed how fragile that kind of recognition can be. The government said a clear majority of the demands had since been accepted or carried out. JAAC, however, argued that many commitments were still incomplete, delayed, or honoured only on paper rather than in substance.
This disagreement exposed a recurring weakness in settlements between movements and governments: an agreement without precise deadlines, independent monitoring, progress reports and enforceable remedies can end a protest without resolving what caused it. For JAAC, the delays proved pressure had to be kept up; for the government, fresh protests after so many demands had supposedly been met looked like proof JAAC could never be satisfied. Each side increasingly read the other's conduct as evidence of bad faith.
The seats that changed everything
Of everything in the charter, the demand over the twelve refugee seats marked the movement's biggest political turn. These seats represent Kashmiris displaced from Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir who settled elsewhere in Pakistan. Supporters of the arrangement see it as part of the historical and constitutional structure built around the unresolved Kashmir dispute.
JAAC and other critics argue that the system lets voters who do not live in PaJK help decide who runs its legislature and government, and that Pakistani parties can win these constituencies from anywhere in Pakistan to build majorities in Muzaffarabad. Buried inside this dispute are several separate questions: do refugees have a genuine right to political representation, and should it sit inside the ‘Azad Kashmir legislature’ specifically? Should people living outside the territory have a say in choosing its government? And could a separate institution protect refugee rights without distorting the territory's own government?
JAAC succeeded in forcing this into public debate, itself an achievement. But its demand to simply abolish the seats gave the government an opening to present the movement as a threat to the Kashmir cause and to refugees who had already lost their homes once. A more sophisticated position - separating refugees' right to representation from the mechanism letting Pakistan-based seats decide who governs PaJK - would have been harder to attack.
What the movement has already built
Whatever happens next, JAAC has already changed PaJK in ways that will outlast any single protest, and this is where its story becomes a genuine lesson in how movements are built.
It has changed how people think about rights. Electricity, flour, healthcare, education and even phone and internet access are now widely treated as things people are owed, not favours a government hands out when it feels generous - a shift unlikely to fade even if JAAC itself splinters.
It has also broken the old assumption that established parties automatically speak for the public: a movement with no party label showed, more than once, that it could mobilise society and force the government to the table faster than any party could. The old parties will not disappear, they still control campaign machinery, patronage networks and relationships with Islamabad; but can no longer assume that winning an election gives them uncontested legitimacy.
JAAC has also made visible something easier to ignore before: the real distance between PaJK's formal institutions and where decisions actually get made. Every time this crisis needed a federal financial package, a delegation of Pakistani ministers, or decisions about communications made far outside the territory, it became harder to argue that Muzaffarabad exercises real, independent authority.
The electricity dispute has also tied household economics to bigger questions of resource ownership, a connection likely to shape future arguments over hydropower, water, dams and revenue-sharing.
And finally, JAAC has built something that cannot be legislated away: a generation of organisers, local committees, communication networks, negotiating experience and a shared collective memory. Even if the organisation in its current form does not survive, this infrastructure could become the foundation for whatever comes next.
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