The streets of Pakistan-Administered Jammu & Kashmir (PaJK) are in the grip of a significant popular agitation. The Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), leading the movement, has grounded its demands firmly in concrete grievances: electricity tariffs, flour prices, the scrapping of twelve assembly seats reserved for J&K refugees settled in Pakistan, and broader questions of economic neglect and political disempowerment. JAAC leadership has explicitly and repeatedly maintained that the movement is about rights, not sovereignty.
Yet, other voices have begun to intrude. Some speeches have touched on notions of separate identity and autonomous destiny. Alongside this, the Pakistani national flag has been conspicuously absent from certain public gatherings, signalling a visible departure from every previous protest movement in the region. Whether these are the organic expressions of a historically distinct people, or calculated attempts by outside actors to hijack a genuine rights movement and inject the azadi question into it, is a matter that demands careful and honest examination
The Revolutionary Origins of PaJK
To understand why the azadi question finds any resonance at all in PaJK, even when the JAAC itself has not raised it, one must go back to the territory's origins.
Long before Maharaja Hari Singh, the last ruler of undivided Jammu & Kashmir, signed the Instrument of Accession in favour of India on October 26, 1947, he had already lost effective control over large parts of Mirpur, Poonch, and Muzaffarabad districts - territories separated from the Pothwar/Pahari Rawalpindi region of West Punjab by the River Jhelum. This stands in direct contrast to Gilgit Baltistan, where the Maharaja's authority remained intact until accession day.
The campaigns that wrested these three districts were revolutionary in character. This was the hotbed where warfare history was rewritten by repelling the British and Dogra forces after Partition. Over sixty thousand local veterans of the Second World War dismantled the Maharaja's thinly spread forces, which had no prospect of reinforcement from the rest of the State. Like the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, whose transformations were subsequently grounded in legislative processes built on popular sovereignty, the victories achieved in what is now PaJK need a proper legal and constitutional recognition.
After accession, it took the Indian Army more than fourteen months to push back the invaders, by then reinforced by the regular Pakistani Army, from the Poonch and Rajouri strip. Brigadier Mohammad Usman - the Lion of Nowshera - led counter-attacks that recaptured Nowshera and Rajouri, preventing the Peer Panjal range from becoming the de facto border between the Kashmir Valley and PaJK. Usman had been offered a senior commission in the Pakistani Army with the promise of becoming its Chief. He chose his motherland and embraced martyrdom.
It is this landscape, where Dogra and British forces were repelled at the very birth of Partition, whose people have risen again. Government can ignore it at its own peril.
The Idea of Independent Kashmir and Why It Failed
At the time of Partition, there were genuine voices for a third path. Chaudhary Hamidullah of the Muslim Conference advocated an independent Kashmir under the ruling dynasty paired with an empowered elected government. A convention at Achabal, Anantnag, convened by Abdul Salam Itoo of the Kisan Mazdoor Conference, reached the same conclusion. The Maharaja himself was not indifferent to the idea, as recorded by his son Dr Karan Singh in Heir Apparent. But the Partition Plan had effectively foreclosed the option by restricting choices to India or Pakistan, and the Maharaja ultimately failed to build the political consensus that could have made independence viable.
The emergence of Bangladesh in 1971, born out of secession from Pakistan, was widely interpreted as demolishing the Two-Nation Theory and, by extension, the Partition Plan's two choice option. This gave the third option a renewed intellectual legitimacy.
The third option had been dormant completely till it was inserted into the public discourse in State People’s Convention held in Srinagar at Mujahid Manzel in 1968. Later, Maqbool Butt and the J&K National Liberation Front attempted to give it organisational form, articulating a vision of independent, secular Kashmir in friendly relations with both India and Pakistan. But the programme was built on sand.
It asked Pakistan to declare PaJK independent, lobby the international community for recognition, convert PaJK into a base for armed operations against India, and supply weapons and financing. What the founders failed to calculate was India's capacity for overwhelming counter-action. Nobody in Pakistan's establishment took the idea seriously.
Maqbool Butt's eventual execution in 1984, precipitated by the abduction and killing of Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatre in Birmingham by JKLF operatives, illustrated precisely this pattern of self-defeating miscalculation.
The third option has consistently failed to gain traction for structural reasons that have not changed. Both India and Pakistan are unwilling to relinquish their respective portions of the former State. It is unacceptable to the largest minority regardless of constitutional guarantees. Furthermore, the region's geographic constraints and economic limitations make it perpetually vulnerable to external manipulation. These factors turn the third option into a vacuum in which anarchy breeds, and thus it is impractical.
Dismemberment and Disempowerment
The people of PaJK carry genuine historical grievances that deserve acknowledgement, not dismissal. The Karachi Agreement of April 1949 transferred all of Gilgit Baltistan to Pakistan - a region which had no direct connect with the present PaJK before 1947. However, the two regions of Ladakh & Gilgit Baltistan were connected with Srinagar through trade, cultural affinities & fair-weather road networks. On the Indian side, the de-operationalisation of Article 370 in August 2019 and the separation of Ladakh reduced the former State to a fraction of its original extent. Dismemberment has proceeded on both sides of the Line of Control, and on both sides, it has been accompanied by disempowerment.
These are the conditions in which the JAAC's demands have taken root, and they are legitimate conditions deserving of a legitimate political response.
On the Refugee Seats
The JAAC's demand to scrap the twelve assembly seats reserved for J&K refugees settled in Pakistan merits serious engagement. A legislative assembly governs the territory within its jurisdiction. Persons permanently domiciled in Pakistan cannot legitimately return legislators for constituencies located in PaJK.
The argument for these seats confuses electoral representation with plebiscite eligibility. For purposes of any future plebiscite, those who were permanent residents of J&K in 1947 and their descendants, wherever domiciled, stand on equal footing, provided they retain citizenship. Their identity and prospective interests could be protected through legacy-based identity cards as part of a future India-Pakistan détente. If any assembly representation is warranted, it should be capped proportionately at four seats and filled through election by a college of sitting members, not through reservation.
The Reckoning and Pragmatism
The present agitation arrives at a sensitive moment. Pakistan is playing a constructive regional role alongside Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and other powers at a time of immense global volatility. It raises doubts within Pakistan’s state apparatus about the genuine bona fides of the JAAC. The JAAC's core demands of fair energy pricing, food security, economic development, and political rights are legitimate, but an injection of the azadi question into the protest will be counterproductive.
The realistic long-term path for the entire region remains the one outlined at Shimla in 1972 and reiterated in Lahore in 1999: formalising the Line of Control as a permanent border, unlocking resolution of Sir Creek and Siachen, and opening the conditions for trade, movement, and eventual normalisation between the two halves of the former State.
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