Pakistan-administered Jammu Kashmir (PaJK), officially called ‘Azad Jammu and Kashmir’ in Pakistan, has elections, a parliament, a prime minister and a president. On paper, it looks like a functioning democracy. In practice, many of the people who live there feel they govern almost nothing.
That gap between the appearance of democracy and its reality is what has driven one of the most significant grassroots movements in the region's recent history. The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, known as JAAC, has grown from a protest over electricity bills into a full democratic challenge to how the region is run. With a major mobilisation planned for June 9, 2026, the question now is whether the authorities will finally take it seriously or repeat the same mistakes.
PaJK's problem is not simply one of bad government, one failed prime minister or one delayed agreement. The problem is structural. Governments come and go, but ordinary life barely changes. Electricity bills rise, hospitals are underfunded, schools lack basic facilities, and public officials treat citizens as supplicants rather than rights-holders.
Part of the reason is that real authority in PaJK has always been limited and conditional. Pakistani political parties operate through local branches and play a decisive role in which governments are formed, how development funds are distributed, and how elections are managed. People vote, but many feel their elected assembly lacks the power to resolve even basic local problems. The assembly exists but without authority.
This is the situation that gave birth to JAAC. There is an additional nuance that is crucial for understanding the growth of JAAC.
Under the ‘Azad Jammu and Kashmir Interim Constitution’, political activity is restricted by a requirement that no person or party may act in ways considered detrimental to the ideology of accession to Pakistan. In practice, this has shut out nationalist and progressive political forces - those who advocate independence or question the accession arrangement - from standing in elections or holding office. These voices have not disappeared. They have been pushed into street politics, civil society, student organisations and trade bodies.
JAAC, therefore, represents two democratic pressures at once. It speaks for ordinary people crushed by the cost of electricity and the failure of public services. It also gives indirect expression to political forces that the formal system has deliberately excluded. That combination is what makes it powerful as well as threatening to those invested in the current order.
JAAC is not a conventional political party. It has no single leader, no hereditary dynasty, no electoral machine. Its base is made up of traders, lawyers, transporters, teachers, students, workers and community organisers across towns and districts. Its authority has come entirely from public mobilization, from people recognising their own problems in JAAC's demands and turning out in numbers.
The long march of May 2024 was the first real proof of this. Few expected the crowds that showed up. The authorities deployed Rangers, resulting in killings of people. But in the end, the government backed down, reducing electricity and flour prices and announcing a Rs 23 billion relief package. For ordinary families who had been struggling to pay inflated bills, the relief was real and immediate.
That moment changed how people saw JAAC - not as a protest movement but as their political voice - not because it had won seats, but because it had achieved what elected representatives had failed to achieve. JAAC legitimacy came from people's experience, not state recognition.
From that point, the movement's language deepened. It began speaking of haq-e-malkiyat and haq-e-hakimiyat (the right of ownership and the right to govern). Beyond slogans for cheaper flour, they are a claim to citizenship. They shift the question from "will the government reduce our bills?" to "why does a territory that generates more electricity than it uses have no say over what it charges its own people?"
By September 2025, the movement had grown broader and more demanding. When JAAC called a general strike on September 29, the authorities responded by shutting down internet, mobile and landline services across large parts of PaJK. Pakistani television channels reported that the strike had failed and suggested Indian interference was behind the unrest.
On the ground, the picture was entirely different. Markets were shut. Crowds gathered across towns and villages that had never previously been centres of protest. The movement was not held together because of central direction, but because its roots were local, in which people recognized their own grievances.
After nearly 24 hours of negotiations, on the night of October 4, 2025, three JAAC representatives - Shaukat Nawaz Mir, Raja Amjad Ali Advocate and Anjum Zaman Awan - who held no government office and belonged to no ruling party sat across a table from federal ministers, senior politicians and a former president at Muzaffarabad's Pearl Continental Hotel. The 38 demands in JAAC's Charter of Demands were accepted in principle. It was called the Muzaffarabad Agreement.
The symbolism of that table was significant. It was a meeting between an old, controlled and exhausted political order and a grassroots people’s democratic movement that had grown from markets, towns, transport stands, professional networks, nationalist and progressive activist circles, and ordinary households. For the first time in a long time, people outside the established order had forced those inside it to negotiate on their terms.
But the cost had been severe: civilians and police officers had died, hundreds were injured, and the territory had been cut off from communications for days. A democratic movement had been met with a security response.
A new government led by the Pakistan Peoples Party took office after the agreement. Prime Minister Faisal Rathore initially called JAAC's demands legitimate. Within months, his government was claiming 98 percent of the demands had been implemented. JAAC said most remained unfulfilled. The dispute over elite privileges and the question of Pakistan-based assembly seats remained unresolved. The government even appointed members elected on the contested seats as chairpersons of assembly committees, directly antagonising the movement.
This is a familiar pattern in PaJK's political history. Governments negotiate under pressure. Once the pressure eases, they delay, dilute and reinterpret. JAAC's response has been to argue that this is not a failure of one government's goodwill; it is the predictable behaviour of a system built on patronage and limited accountability.
Of all the unresolved issues, the most structurally important is the demand to abolish 12 assembly seats reserved for State Subjects - PaJK residents - who have settled in mainland Pakistan.
The logic of these seats has always been questionable, and JAAC's argument against them is difficult to refute. The voters for these 12 seats live in Pakistan. They are governed by Pakistani courts, police, schools and hospitals. The PaJK Assembly has no jurisdiction over their daily lives. At the same time, these voters do not face the same local governance failures, public service collapse, administrative corruption, or constituency-level power relations that shape life in Muzaffarabad, Mirpur, Kotli, Rawalakot, Bagh, Neelum or Bhimber.
Yet their 12 seats, out of a total of 53, give Pakistani political parties a powerful lever to make or break governments in a territory they do not live in.
This is not a minor procedural issue. It is a structural distortion of democracy. Pakistani parties have repeatedly used these seats to install preferred governments in PaJK, regardless of how residents within the territory actually voted.
JAAC is not hostile to the people who hold these seats or to the communities they come from. Its argument is one of democratic principle: if an assembly cannot govern your daily life, it should not have a bloc of seats that decides who governs the people it can affect. Without resolving this question, elections in Azad Kashmir cannot be fully credible.
The standard response to democratic pressure in PaJK has been to reach for the security playbook. Before the 2025 strike, mainstream party leaders held a press conference claiming a "cipher" that proved Indian involvement in the rights movement. Days later, a rally was organised in Rawalakot under the banner of solidarity with the Pakistan Army. The message was clear: transform a people’s democratic movement into a security problem, and it becomes easier to delegitimise and suppress.
The rally drew far fewer people than expected. But the old formula of using patriotic symbolism to silence democratic demands no longer carried the same force. People who had seen JAAC deliver real change on electricity and flour prices were less willing to believe that demanding accountable government was somehow an enemy agenda.
It is worth stating plainly: demanding fair elections, accountable institutions and an end to elite privilege is not anti-Pakistan. It is pro-democracy. Conflating the two is a tactic, not an argument.
At a two-day meeting in Dadyal on 30 March 2026, JAAC issued a new declaration. It restated its demand for full implementation of the Muzaffarabad Agreement and introduced a formal charter of electoral reforms, centred on abolishing the 12 Pakistan-based seats, fresh delimitation, and an oath of loyalty to the State of Jammu and Kashmir rather than to a particular accession outcome.
It gave the governments of Pakistan and PaJK until May 31, 2026 to act. If they fail, a complete strike and long march to the PaJK Assembly in Muzaffarabad is planned for June 9, 2026, where protesters have said they will remain until the assembly is made genuinely empowered.
The governments face a choice. They can move seriously towards electoral reform and implementation, or they can manage, delay and hope the pressure fades again. The second option has worked before. It is less likely to work now.
A grassroots movement that has survived two rounds of government crackdowns, outlasted two administrations and expanded its demands from electricity prices to the structure of democracy itself is not easily extinguished. Its strength is that it does not depend on one leader or one party. It depends on people who have, over several years, come to see themselves not as supplicants waiting for favours but as citizens with rights.
For the large diaspora communities in British cities - Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester, Rochdale, and Leeds - this matters directly. They live in a country where local accountability, however imperfect, is a functioning reality. Many send money home, build houses, maintain family ties, and lobby internationally on Kashmir's future. They cannot credibly advocate for Kashmir's right to self-determination internationally while remaining indifferent to the denial of self-government within PaJK itself.
The lesson of the past three years is straightforward. Democratic politics in PaJK began where ordinary life was most visibly broken — in an electricity bill, a hospital without doctors, an assembly without real power. JAAC turned those private frustrations into a public democratic argument. Whether that argument produces structural change or is managed and absorbed once again, will be answered on and after June 9, 2026.
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