There are governments that solve crises. There are governments that repress them. And then there is Islamabad, which has perfected the more sophisticated art of repressing a crisis and calling the repression governance.
Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir (PaJK) has become the latest laboratory.
For months, Rawalakot and surrounding districts have convulsed with strikes, sit-ins, marches, boycotts, women filling the streets, schoolchildren protesting the wreckage of their education, traders absorbing economic paralysis, and ordinary Kashmiris discovering that the state becomes remarkably sensitive to “order” the moment the governed begin asking who gave it the right to rule.
Islamabad’s response has been textbook: Restrict communications. Criminalise mobilisation. Deploy force. Hold elections under extraordinary political conditions. Install a new prime minister. Declare normality restored.
Change the Furniture to Fight Fire
Authoritarianism has always possessed a touching faith in furniture: change the man behind the desk and perhaps nobody will notice the building is on fire.
Thus, arrives Barrister Syed Iftikhar Ali Gillani, prime minister of what Pakistan continues, with impressive constitutional optimism, to call “Azad” Jammu and Kashmir. The word “Azad” is now doing enough political labour to qualify for overtime.
Gillani was elected amid prolonged internet restrictions, a proscribed protest movement, boycott mobilization, political confrontation and unresolved voting in parts of Poonch. Yet Islamabad apparently believes the cure for a legitimacy crisis is additional procedure.
Ballots become anaesthetic. Cabinets become camouflage. Administration becomes pacification. And this is precisely where the Mahmoud Abbas analogy becomes uncomfortable.
The Palestinian Authority model is not principally about government. It is about management. When resistance cannot be eliminated, power seeks intermediaries capable of containing it. The local administrator speaks the vocabulary of his own people while performing the security logic of the system above him. He does not resolve the political question. He supervises its suspension. He does not exercise sovereignty. He manages its absence.
Islamabad now risks constructing precisely such an arrangement in Kashmir.
Gillani’s real test will not be whether he announces employment schemes, digitisation, transparency or merit - the standard menu served by governments after legitimacy has left the restaurant.
His test is simpler: Is he there to represent Rawalakot to Islamabad? Or Islamabad to Rawalakot?
Healing Symptoms or the Disease?
Will roads reopen while political space closes? Will internet service return alongside deeper surveillance? Will dissent be repackaged as disorder, obedience renamed stability, and political defeat marketed as reconciliation?
Kashmir’s crisis is not fundamentally about bandwidth, flour, electricity or even elections. Those are the symptoms. The disease is political ownership.
The protest movement began with material grievances and evolved into something far more threatening: a dispute over who possesses the moral right to govern Kashmiris. Who rules? Who consents? Who appoints? Who decides?
And what exactly does “Azad” mean when Kashmiris who challenge its political architecture are treated as threats to the state?
Burning a Legacy
For decades, Pakistan possessed a reservoir of Kashmiri goodwill that India could only envy, especially across the British Kashmiri diaspora. Pakistan, whatever its contradictions, could still posture as protector, advocate and patron of ‘Kashmiri self-determination’.
That inheritance is now being burned at extraordinary speed.
People raised to denounce Delhi are increasingly denouncing Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Protests outside Pakistani diplomatic missions represent more than fury over policy. They represent the erosion of an emotional compact.
A road can be reopened. Trust cannot. A mobile network can be restored. Legitimacy cannot be rebooted. A prime minister can be appointed. Consent cannot.
So, the state reaches for the oldest authoritarian narcotic: conspiracy. Protest becomes subversion. Boycott becomes sabotage. Anger acquires foreign sponsors.
The ruler who has lost the ability to persuade his citizens invariably becomes fascinated by the possibility that someone else must be paying them.
Pakistan therefore risks achieving something extraordinary: alienating precisely the Kashmiri population whose identification with Pakistan it spent generations cultivating. India could hardly have scripted the spectacle more effectively.
For decades, Islamabad argued that Kashmiri resistance demonstrated the bankruptcy of Indian legitimacy. Now imagine Kashmiris under Pakistani administration reaching for the same vocabulary: blackouts, arrests, political engineering, security rule and repression.
The irony is not subtle. It is geopolitical self-harm.
This does not mean Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir has suddenly become politically uniform, separatist or comprehensively anti-Pakistan. Kashmiri politics is far too complex for slogans.
But something more fundamental is deteriorating: the presumption that Pakistan is the benevolent party. Once that presumption collapses, Islamabad faces something far more dangerous than a sit-in. It faces Kashmiris asking whether they require Pakistani guardians at all.
Every baton creates another memory. Every blackout creates another grievance. Every attempt to treat political dignity as a policing problem manufactures the consciousness the state fears.
Choice Before Gillani
Gillani now has a choice. He can become a bridge. Or he can become a warden with a civilian title.
If his premiership exists merely to demobilise the streets, fracture the protest movement, restore administrative obedience and replace political renegotiation with choreographed consultation, history will not remember him as the man who stabilised PaJK. It will remember him as the man sent to discipline it.
The real danger is not that Kashmiris reject its preferred prime minister. It is that they eventually reject the political identity Pakistan spent generations constructing for them.
A state can impose silence. It can impose curfews. It can impose governments. It cannot impose belonging.
And when Kashmiris stop demanding that Pakistan honour the word “Azad” and begin asking why Pakistan possesses the authority to define it at all, Rawalakot will no longer be confronting Islamabad with a crisis of governance.
It will be confronting it with the question every hegemonic power fears most: By what right do you rule?
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