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-III is published today. Part-I and Part-II can be read here.
The journey of Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee’s (JAAC) origin, expansion, proscription and the risks to which it is vulnerable offer a guide for its future course.
Its first task is to separate its objectives from its tactics. The sit-in, the shutter-down strike and the long march are tactics, not the movement. Suspending or modifying a tactic is not surrender if it preserves public participation and opens another route to the same objectives. An indefinite closure that hollows out the local economy the movement depends on would be self-defeating.
A more useful approach would be to sort the demands into clear categories rather than treat the whole charter as one indivisible block. Some demands are immediate and humanitarian: restoring communications, guaranteeing access to food and medicine, reopening schools and hospitals, bringing detainees promptly before the courts, releasing anyone not accused of a genuine offence, protecting peaceful assembly, and properly investigating the deaths that have already occurred.
Another concern is the implementation of past agreements, including a published review of every commitment made, clear funding, real deadlines, independent monitoring and public progress reports.
A third concern is genuinely constitutional: reform of the refugee seats, electoral representation, ownership of resources and how authority is split between PaJK and Pakistan. These need a slower, more inclusive process than emergency measures - treating them the same way has arguably slowed progress on both fronts.
JAAC could also make a public offer of conditional de-escalation: suspend further strikes, guarantee schools stay accessible, keep food and medicine moving freely, and commit to time-bound talks. In exchange, it could ask the government to restore communications, stop further arrests, vacate hospitals and people’s homes, review the proscription, release all detainees, and pull Pakistani police and paramilitary forces deployed to crush the JAAC March back from PAJK. Such an offer would put real pressure on the government, since refusing it would be far harder to justify publicly than refusing a simple demand for concessions.
Internally, JAAC needs to become a more democratic organisation than the core committee built for early mobilisation: written rules, elected district representatives, transparent finances, fixed terms of office, guaranteed representation for women and young people, a mechanism for removing office holders who lose members' confidence, rules against conflicts of interest, an explicit non-violence code, and an independent unit for documentation and legal support. Collective leadership needs to become something the organisation practices, not just a slogan.
One strong option for the future is for JAAC to settle into a permanent, independent civic role that never becomes a political party - monitoring how public money is spent, running political education, publishing regular reports on whether agreements are kept, holding public hearings, defending civil liberties, and mobilising again if institutions fail. A role like that would let people from very different political backgrounds stay united under one roof.
If some of JAAC's leaders want to run for office, it would be wiser to build a separate political party for that rather than turn the entire civic platform into an electoral vehicle without consulting its base. Keeping the two apart would protect JAAC from becoming another instrument for individual ambition and patronage politics.
On the refugee seats specifically, JAAC would be in a much stronger position with a real alternative proposal rather than a simple demand for abolition - one that recognises refugees' historical rights, protects representation for refugees who live inside PaJK, prevents non-resident seats from determining who governs the territory, and separates refugee advocacy from the territory's administration. A serious alternative like this would make it far harder for the government to paint JAAC as an enemy of refugees or the wider Kashmir cause.
JAAC should also formally declare certain services off limits to any future disruption: hospitals, ambulances, medicine, schools, water supplies and food distribution. Protecting these would preserve public sympathy and make clear the movement wants to improve people's lives, not suspend them indefinitely.
Finally, JAAC needs to invest seriously in evidence and international advocacy, with a professional documentation unit preparing verified material for the UN Human Rights Office, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, British parliamentarians and international media. The strongest possible case is built on solid evidence, not rhetoric alone.
What the establishment could do next
The Pakistani establishment also has real choices in front of it, and the first is simply to admit that proscription has not worked. Banning JAAC has not removed its social base - it has deepened the confrontation, damaged the government's own legitimacy, and drawn sharp international criticism.
The more sensible course would be to treat JAAC as a legitimate civic party for negotiation without necessarily agreeing to every demand it makes. Talking to a movement is not the same as surrendering to it. States negotiate with representative organisations all the time, precisely to stop conflicts turning into full-blown security crises.
The crisis cannot be managed sustainably through military and paramilitary force alone. A credible path toward calm would include pulling extra troops back from PAJK, restoring the situation before 5 June, lifting communications restrictions, ending the blanket use of arrests and collective punishment, allowing normal economic life to resume, and letting journalists and independent observers back into the region. None of this would resolve every outstanding demand on its own, but it would rebuild the basic conditions any real resolution depends on.
An independent inquiry is also overdue - one covering every reported death, the use of firearms by any side, the conduct of protesters and security forces, how detainees have been treated, the communications shutdowns, and who bears responsibility at each level of command. For such an inquiry to mean anything, its members must be acceptable to both sides, with real power to summon officials, examine records and publish their findings.
Vague promises to need to be replaced with something enforceable: every accepted demand should sit in a public record showing which institution is responsible, what legal steps are required, what it will cost, when work begins and finishes, and how it will be independently verified. A system like that would go a long way toward ending the endless argument over whose account of progress is true.
The question of the refugee seats needs a proper constitutional forum, not another round of executive denial or street confrontation - one bringing together JAAC, elected representatives from PaJK, refugee representatives, political parties, bar associations, constitutional experts and civil society groups. Its purpose should be to protect refugees' rights while ensuring the territory's government stays accountable to the people who actually live there.
In the end, the Pakistani establishment faces a larger choice than any single demand on JAAC's charter: keep managing PaJK through controlled political parties, financial dependency and periodic security intervention, or allow more genuinely accountable and autonomous institutions to take root. The first path might preserve control short-term but will keep producing the same resistance again and again. The second apparently carries an element of political risk for Islamabad, but in fact lays foundations for a new social contract that can end the ambiguities and disparities in the relationship with PAJK and is the only path toward lasting, even permanent legitimacy.
A possible road map
A workable settlement could realistically unfold in four stages. The first would focus purely on humanitarian normalisation: restoring communications, reopening schools, offices and businesses, guaranteeing access to food and medicine, halting further arrests, protecting peaceful sit-ins, and pausing any further escalation on either side.
The second stage would deal with legal and security de-escalation: reviewing the ban on JAAC, bringing detainees before the courts, releasing anyone arrested for being part of the protests, withdrawing the extraordinary forces deployed, and launching an independent inquiry into what has happened so far.
The third stage would turn to implementing what has already been agreed: publishing a joint record of progress, appointing neutral monitors, setting real deadlines, issuing public monthly reports, and identifying the funding and legislation implementation actually requires.
The fourth and final stage would open genuine constitutional dialogue, examining refugee representation, electoral reform, rights over resources, the relationship between PaJK and Pakistan, institutional autonomy, and accountability at the level of local government.
From resistance to political construction
The People's Rights Movement has already changed Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir's history, and that is not in dispute. It has shown what organising around the basic facts of everyday life can achieve: real concessions, a weakened grip of patronage politics, exposed limits on how the territory is governed, and a long-overlooked region pulled into international human rights conversations for the first time.
But a movement can be historically important and still end in defeat. JAAC's greatest danger is that this sacrifice never turns into anything durable. If closure and confrontation become permanent rather than a phase the movement moves through, exhaustion, regional isolation, internal splits and a drift toward more militant language could erode the unity that made its earlier victories possible.
The Pakistani establishment is running an equally serious risk of its own. It clearly has the force needed to break up sit-ins, arrest leaders and cut off communications whenever it chooses. What that force cannot do is manufacture legitimacy. Trying to destroy JAAC without addressing the conditions that produced it risks leaving behind a more alienated, and quite possibly less controllable, generation than the one it inherited.
Neither side can realistically win an outright, sustainable victory. JAAC cannot keep governing society through shutdowns without ever building real public institutions of its own. The establishment cannot keep governing through security measures without any public consent at all. The choice, therefore, is between a negotiated transformation and a prolonged deterioration in which both the movement and society pay an increasingly unbearable price.
JAAC must now move from mobilisation to democratic organisation, from a collection of demands to a political programme, and from sacrifice to institutional accumulation. The Pakistani establishment must move from control to consent, from security management to political dialogue, and from treating PaJK as an administratively managed frontier to recognising its people as the principal democratic authors of its future.
The next phase will determine whether the movement becomes the foundation of a new democratic political culture, or the memory of an extraordinary uprising that could disrupt the old order but could not build a new one.
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