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-II is published today. Part-I can be read here.
The proscription of Jammu and Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) on 5 June 2026 fundamentally changed the conflict.
Before that date, JAAC was treated as a legitimate party to negotiate with. Its representatives sat in formal talks and helped design mechanisms to monitor whether agreements were being kept. After that date, the same organisation was placed inside the legal framework used for terrorism and national security.
That single change gave the authorities much wider powers: to arrest leaders and supporters more freely, restrict the right to associate, disrupt the movement's finances and networks, justify shutting down phones and the internet, restrict what journalists could report, send in more troops, and treat simple participation in a protest as a security offence rather than political activity. Amnesty International called the ban disproportionate and unlawful, arguing that anti-terrorism legislation was being used against a grassroots movement campaigning, at its core, for economic and political rights.
The state's aim seemed to be to isolate, criminalise and cut off communications to a movement that had proved it could mobilise huge numbers of people, before it could disrupt the coming elections. Instead, the ban made the confrontation worse. It gave JAAC a brand-new demand - reversal of its own ban - and turned the defence of the right to organise into part of the struggle itself.
The long sit-in and its hidden costs
The continuing sit-ins in Rawalakot and across the wider Poonch division are a genuine display of political will. They have stopped the government from claiming the movement is finished, and turned Rawalakot into a symbol of resistance for people across the territory and beyond. But holding out is not the same thing as making progress.
A sit-in is meant to be a tool, not an end in itself. It should create pressure that leads towards negotiations, concessions, institutional change or wider organisation. If it becomes indefinite without a mechanism for moving towards those objectives, it can begin consuming the movement's own social base.
After approximately seventy-five days, the burden of closure is distributed unequally. Salaried officials may continue receiving income, and wealthier or remittance-supported families have savings, but daily-wage workers, small traders, transport workers and families without overseas support face far greater hardship.
This creates a central class danger: a movement founded on the needs of ordinary people could unintentionally impose its greatest costs on those same people. The Government may be relying on precisely this contradiction - rather than defeat JAAC in a public political argument, it may wait for economic exhaustion to reduce participation.
An election fought in the shadow of protest
All this played out against the backdrop of the 2026 assembly elections, which JAAC overshadowed almost completely and helped push into disarray. Voting was postponed in constituencies across Poonch and Sudhnoti as security deteriorated, and even where polling did go ahead, its legitimacy became tangled up with JAAC's boycott, refugee-seat disputes, the security deployment, and deaths and detentions still not properly accounted for.
The diaspora finds its voice
One striking development of the past few years has been the role played by Kashmiris living outside the region, particularly in Britain. The diaspora has moved well beyond sending money home or supporting older Kashmir organisations - it has organised demonstrations, lobbied MPs directly, submitted petitions, and pulled the crisis into the heart of British politics.
A Westminster Hall debate explicitly named JAAC as one of three parties that any real dialogue would need to involve. Separately, an Early Day Motion called for communications to be restored, for due process for detainees, for medical access, and for negotiations to resume.
The world starts to notice
Alongside the diaspora's efforts, the crisis has started to draw genuine international attention on its own terms. The UN's Human Rights Office called for impartial investigations, the restoration of internet access, due process, and meaningful dialogue between the parties.
This is a major change: Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir has historically received far less independent international scrutiny than the Indian-administered side, and for the first time in a long while, is being discussed in global human rights forums on its own merits rather than as a footnote to the older India-Pakistan dispute.
The risks JAAC cannot ignore
For all it has achieved, JAAC now faces a set of dangers that could unravel much of what it has built.
The first is the likely exhaustion of its own support base: political support, sit-in participation, and willingness to keep a business closed are three different things, and the first can stay high while the other two decline. Treating reduced participation as betrayal rather than exhaustion could alienate JAAC's own supporters.
The second is regional isolation. Rawalakot's centrality to the movement is a strength but also a weakness: if the struggle stays concentrated there while life carries on elsewhere, authorities can dismiss it as a local grievance rather than one speaking for all of PaJK. Keeping people engaged across Mirpur, Kotli, Muzaffarabad, Bagh, Bhimber and Neelum is therefore strategically essential.
The third is fragmentation from within. A long confrontation sharpens disagreements JAAC has papered over - when to negotiate, how much to compromise, whether to become a political party outright, and who holds authority inside its core committee. Without clear, transparent internal rules, these can easily turn into open factional splits.
The fourth is losing control over its own rhetoric. When peaceful methods feel ineffective, some participants may drift toward the language of armed resistance. Even where leadership firmly rejects violence, a handful of statements can define how the whole movement is seen - frightening families away from protest sites and handing the government's terrorism narrative fresh evidence. Its peaceful character is one of the movement's most important strategic defences.
The fifth is a gap between the diaspora and those living through the crisis: supporters overseas do not feel the school closures, lost wages or ruined businesses at home, and may push for confrontation more easily than those paying the price. Decisions must stay with people bearing the consequences, and diaspora energy is best spent on advocacy and lobbying, not setting strategy from a distance. Related to this is the spread of inaccurate information - when communications are cut, rumour fills the silence, and inflated casualty figures or unverified claims eventually cost the movement its credibility. A movement this size needs proper documentation: verified death lists, medical and detainee records, and a firm line between what is confirmed and what remains only alleged.
The sixth, and perhaps the deepest, is the risk of sacrifice without anything durable to show for it. If every round of mobilisation ends in another agreement followed by another argument about whether it was kept, JAAC risks the same loop indefinitely: mobilisation, repression, negotiation, promises, delay, mobilisation again. Breaking this cycle requires an organisation capable of monitoring agreements in the quiet periods between one mass protest and the next.
The risks facing the state
The dangers are not one-sided. The Pakistani establishment and the PaJK government are taking on serious risks of their own by handling this crisis the way they have.
The biggest danger for the state is not that JAAC will overthrow the existing order soon, but that an entire generation may conclude that peaceful politics and constitutional methods simply do not work. When peaceful civic demands are met with a terrorism ban, force and communications blackouts, the state teaches its own citizens that following the law offers no real protection.
Closely related is the risk of radicalisation beyond JAAC itself. Its leadership gives the authorities an identifiable, accountable organisation to negotiate with; destroying it would not make the underlying grievances disappear, only remove the one group capable of moderating public anger, leaving behind smaller, less accountable and more extreme groups in its place.
There is also a real risk of delegitimising the PaJK government itself. A government that cannot restore communications, investigate deaths or negotiate on its own terms starts to look irrelevant. The more visibly Pakistan's own security establishment controls the response, the more it proves the movement's central argument - that PaJK is not really governing itself.
Pakistan's international standing on Kashmir is also at risk. Its case has long rested on presenting itself as a defender of Kashmiri rights and self-determination - and communications shutdowns, anti-terrorism law, and credible reports of lethal force against Kashmiris sit at odds with that argument. The longer this crisis continues, the more international discussion may shift from India's conduct in Kashmir towards how Pakistan governs the part it controls.
Then there is straightforward economic damage. Months of shutdowns hurt commerce, banking, transport, tourism, education, healthcare, revenue and household income all at once. Even if the state eventually restores full physical control, it may find itself governing a territory that is poorer, angrier and harder to manage than before.
Using terrorism law against a civic coalition also sets a precedent that will not stay contained to JAAC alone - the same tools could later target lawyers, journalists, unions or student groups, and there are already some cases, weakening the region's entire constitutional and political environment. Finally, the establishment risks losing control of the story internationally: Indian media has cast the movement as an anti-Pakistan uprising while Pakistani officials allege outside sponsorship, both ignoring its homegrown, material origins. Refusing to negotiate hands more credibility to hostile narratives and leaves JAAC's local rights agenda exposed to being used as a pawn in the wider India-Pakistan rivalry.
