MUZAFFARABAD/LONDON: Danish Irshad, a columnist for the Kashmir Times and a journalist who has covered the politics of Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir (PaJK) for nearly a decade and is currently based in Rawalpindi, has been placed on Pakistan's Fourth Schedule - a terrorism watchlist that exposes him to state monitoring and a set of legal restrictions on his movement, finances and public life.
His name appears twelfth, in a list of 24 people from the region, on an official notification issued by the ‘Azad Jammu and Kashmir’ (AJK) Home Department, numbered Home/HS-FS-4(8)/P-H/2026. Azad Jammu and Kashmir is the official name of PaJK in Pakistan.
Citing the 41st Cabinet meeting of June 5, 2026, and invoking Section 16(1) of the ‘Azad Jammu and Kashmir Anti-Terrorism Act, 2014’, the notification places at least 14 people on the Fourth Schedule, describing them as activists of the Jammu & Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JK-JAAC) - a protest movement the PaJK government banned as a proscribed organisation under Section 12 of the same Act.
Irshad is listed by his CNIC number and identified as a resident of Poonch district; other names on the document span districts including Muzaffarabad, Kotli, Mirpur, Bhimber and the Jhelum Valley. As with earlier notifications in this campaign, the document does not spell out any specific allegation or act attributed to the individuals named.
The order is dated July 29, 2026. Irshad told the Kashmir Times, he was never served the order and first learnt about it on August 18 from social media. Later in the day, he got it confirmed from the Home Department through a source.
Irshad has reported extensively on the internal politics of Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan and is the author of a book on the region's post-1947 history. In recent months he has also appeared in broadcast interviews discussing the unrest in PaJK. It is that same unrest and Islamabad's escalating response to it that has now placed him on a list ordinarily used against terrorism suspects.
What Fourth Schedule Means
Placement on the Fourth Schedule requires neither a conviction nor a criminal charge. Under Pakistan's anti-terrorism framework, a provincial or territorial Home Department can add anyone it considers linked, through intelligence reporting or alleged association with a banned group, to a security watchlist.
According to Pakistan's National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA), the designation triggers a passport embargo, freezing of bank accounts, a bar on new loans and credit cards, restrictions on arms licences, and monitoring of the person's eligibility for government recruitment; those affected are informally known to police as "Fourth Schedulers."
NACTA's own figures, last updated in 2021, put the nationwide total at nearly 2,700 people, a baseline that predates the current PaJK campaign entirely.
A List That Keeps Growing
Irshad's name is the latest addition to a Fourth Schedule that has expanded rapidly since the JAAC ban. The PaJK government proscribed the group on June 5, the same day it kicked off the process for a general election scheduled for July 27, after the PaJK Legislative Assembly rejected JAAC's central demand - the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees who settled in Pakistan after 1947 and which JAAC says mainstream Pakistani parties use to sway government formation in Muzaffarabad.
A day earlier, Islamabad had begun moving paramilitary reinforcements into the region; within 18 hours of the ban, police reported hundreds of arrests.
Violence followed quickly. Clashes in Rawalakot and elsewhere in the first week of the ban left dozens dead, according to regional authorities and wire agencies, and the PaJK government put a 10-million-rupee bounty on four wanted JAAC figures, including the group's head, Shaukat Nawaz Mir, who was arrested in late June and later charged with sedition over the deaths of security personnel and civilians during the unrest.
On June 20, the PaJK Home Department placed 147 JAAC activists and supporters on the Fourth Schedule - 33 from Poonch, 31 from Sudhnoti, and dozens more spread across Kotli, Bagh, Mirpur, Bhimber, Neelum, Haveli and Muzaffarabad - as a region-wide strike entered its 11th day and internet and banking services remained disrupted.
A second wave of unrest coincided with the first phase of the general election on July 27, when JAAC, boycotting the vote, led a long march from Rawalakot toward Muzaffarabad. The clashes that followed left 90 protesters dead, including the brother of a senior JAAC organiser.
On August 10, ten more names were added to the list. The London based advocacy group CAGE, in a statement issued this week, put the overall death toll from the crackdown at more than 50, noting that the government has not released an official figure.
Journalists in the Crosshairs
Irshad's addition to the list comes as press freedom groups warn that reporters covering the unrest have themselves become targets. The Committee to Protect Journalists earlier said that Islamabad-based journalist Syed Farhad Ali Shah was detained without charge in July over his coverage of the protests, and that independent journalists Razi Tahir and Muhammad Saif were taken from their Islamabad office on August 1 by men in police uniform and held at an undisclosed location. CPJ's Pakistan representative described it as part of a widening effort to suppress independent reporting on Kashmir.
The New York Times reported on a broader crackdown on journalists in Pakistan early August, and media organisations have said reporters were kept away from areas hit by clashes during the election's first phase. The situation in PaJK is dismal amidst reports of detentions, harassment, and a bar on foreign reporters to the region.
Pakistan already ranked 158th out of roughly 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders' 2025 press freedom index, down six places from the year before. The Fourth Schedule notification naming Irshad does not itself cite his journalism as a reason for his listing. Like other entries on the list, it offers no individualised justification, but it fits within this wider pattern.
An Election Held Under a Cloud
Irshad's listing comes as AJK's electoral process grinds toward its final stage. The three-phase general election was contested without the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which remained barred from taking part, leaving PML-N and PPP, coalition partners at the federal level, to trade accusations of rigging, violence and interference throughout. The first phase alone left a PPP worker dead and produced competing claims of ballot tampering that neither party has dropped.
On Thursday, twelve candidates filed nominations for the assembly's eight remaining reserved seats - five for women, and one each for religious scholars, technocrats and overseas Kashmiris - with PML-N and PPP again the only parties fielding candidates.
The vote is unfolding in a territory where the government's most organised opposition movement has been outlawed, more than 150 of its activists and associates, now including a journalist who has spent a decade covering the region, have been placed under a terrorism designation, and dozens of people have died since June.
Part of a Wider Pattern
In a statement, CAGE placed the JAAC ban within what it called a broader pattern in Pakistan's use of anti-terrorism law against civilian movements - the third such proscription of a rights-focused group in under two years. It comes after the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement was banned in October 2024 and members of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee were prosecuted under the same statute, culminating in a life sentence for the group's most prominent organiser, physician Mahrang Baloch, handed down by a Quetta anti-terrorism court on June 22 after what Amnesty International called an expedited, secretive trial.
CAGE argued that broad legal language with phrases like "acts prejudicial to peace" lets authorities blend strikes, boycotts and solidarity rallies into the same legal category as armed insurgency without having to prove the distinction.
The group also highlighted the case of former senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan, founder of the Pakistan Rights Movement, who it said was intercepted twice and held for hours in late July while travelling to visit families of those killed in the crackdown, before being charged under the Anti-Terrorism Act over a Kashmir solidarity rally.
CAGE linked the current campaign to a longer history of enforced disappearances dating to Pakistan's early War on Terror years, and noted that the crackdown has coincided with continued warmth in Pakistan's military relationship with Washington, including a revived US-Pakistan counterterrorism dialogue in 2026.
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