Pakistan’s Kashmir Crackdown in Rawalakot

Pakistan’s rulers have discovered a remarkable exception to the principle of Kashmiri self-determination: Kashmiris possess an inalienable right to resist oppression, provided the oppressor is India. When they challenge Islamabad, freedom becomes sedition, protest becomes terrorism, and the self-appointed guardians of Kashmiri liberty unleash the machinery of state repression.

Rawalakot has exposed this hypocrisy in its bloodiest recent form.

On November 5, Pakistani security forces launched a predawn assault on protest encampments in Rawalakot, moving against a five-month sit-in demanding political rights, economic justice and implementation of agreements the authorities had already signed.

Gunfire engulfed protest sites. At least three civilians were reported killed and eighteen wounded, with subsequent accounts suggesting additional fatalities. Protesters alleged heavy machine-gun fire, explosive-laden drones and attacks on civilian homes. The precise toll and reported use of armed drones still require independent verification. But the state’s decision to crush a prolonged political protest through an armed security operation is beyond dispute.

The dead have names. Kashmiri activists identified among them Bilal Mahmood, Ehtisham and Atif Noor. Funeral processions became demonstrations of defiance; their bodies draped not in Pakistan’s flag but in Kashmir’s.

A symbolism more devastating than any diplomatic condemnation.

At Omar Farooq Chowk, Chandni Chowk and surrounding neighborhoods, residents described encircled protesters, explosions and sustained firing. Communications disruptions compounded the terror, obstructing medical assistance and concealing the full human cost. Accounts of grenade-dropping drones and intercepted orders to fire rocket-propelled grenades demand urgent forensic investigation. No government should be permitted to bury evidence of civilian killings beneath an information blackout.

Unheeded Grievances

The authorities call this restoration of order.

Apparently, the supreme achievement of Pakistani governance is the military conquest of a bus terminal while the grievances that filled it remain entirely unresolved.

The confrontation had already acquired an international dimension. Six United Nations human rights experts challenged Pakistan’s designation of the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) as a terrorist organization, warning that counter-terrorism powers appeared to be weaponized against legitimate political advocacy. Their communication documented reports of at least 96 protester deaths since June and restrictions affecting 205 individuals. These figures demand independent investigation, not bureaucratic dismissal.

Consider the institutional obscenity. A coalition of traders, workers, lawyers and civil-rights campaigners negotiates with the government, demands implementation of its agreements and challenges political subordination only to discover that Islamabad’s response is criminalization, military force and the language of counter-terrorism.

Yesterday’s negotiating partner. Today’s terrorist. Tomorrow’s corpse.

But this confrontation is not fundamentally about electricity tariffs or subsidies. Economic grievances ignited the movement; the demand for political agency sustains it.

State’s Focal Anxiety

JAAC’s challenge to twelve legislative assembly seats reserved for refugees residing outside the territory strikes at the institutional mechanisms through which Pakistan-based interests influence Kashmiri governance. Genuine autonomy threatens something more fundamental than administrative convenience: Islamabad’s presumed entitlement to determine the limits of Kashmiri freedom.

That is the establishment’s real anxiety.

Economic concessions can be negotiated. Subsidies adjusted. Broken agreements repackaged as procedural complications. What cannot be comfortably accommodated is an organized Kashmiri population insisting upon the authority to govern itself.

Hence the familiar security-state sequence: betray agreements, criminalize dissent, detain leadership, restrict communications, deploy armed forces, kill protesters, then invoke the resulting turmoil as justification for further repression.

The state manufactures the crisis and subsequently advertises itself as the indispensable solution.

Under Asim Munir’s military leadership, the political consequences reach far beyond Rawalakot. From Balochistan to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the recurrent answer to demands for rights is increasingly militarized coercion. A governing establishment incapable of securing political consent mistakes the capacity to terrorize citizens for the legitimacy to rule them.

Kashmiris’ Rights are Non-negotiable

There is a particular historical cruelty in Kashmiris carrying the bodies of protesters killed during a Pakistani security operation. For decades, Islamabad has invoked Kashmiri suffering to condemn Indian militarization, arbitrary detention, communications blackouts and suppression of dissent.

Those principles apparently expire at the Line of Control.

Indian repression remains reprehensible. Pakistani repression cannot be legitimized by invoking it. Kashmiri rights are universal obligations; not geopolitical privileges distributed according to which capital exercises authority.

And the political damage is incalculable.

When Kashmiris who once looked towards Pakistan as their champion now denounce its uniformed establishment, Islamabad has lost something no security operation can recover by force: moral credibility.

The immediate imperatives are unmistakable: halt armed operations against civilian demonstrators, guarantee medical access, restore communications, account for the dead and detained, permit international investigators and journalists unrestricted access, and end the criminalization of peaceful political organization.

Those responsible for unlawful killings must face justice, however elevated their rank.

Yet the deeper contradiction cannot be resolved through another military deployment, terrorist designation or carefully rehearsed address to the United Nations.

Pakistan demands that India recognize the political will of Kashmiris while insisting that Kashmiris submit to the political will of Pakistan.

That is not self-determination. It is conditional sovereignty masquerading as solidarity.

And Rawalakot has delivered the most devastating verdict on Pakistan’s Kashmir doctrine: Islamabad has not extinguished the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination. It has turned its guns upon the very people whose freedom it claims to defend. In doing so, it has destroyed its own claim to champion their liberation.