Published: 04:03 PM, 24 June 2026
Death & Repression in the land of freedom
Pakistan has always had a peculiar talent for transforming the language of rights into the practice of repression. Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir, where a protest movement born from ordinary economic grievances has been met with the full grammar of a security state: internet shutdowns, paramilitary deployments, anti-terror designations, arrests of journalists, live fire, disappearances of bodies and the usual press-release sermon about democracy.
What is happening in Pakistan-administered Kashmir is not a law-and-order problem. It is a political revolt against a system of control. And the Pakistani state, faithful to its oldest instincts, has answered it not with accountability, but with bullets.
The unrest began around demands that are almost painfully ordinary: cheaper electricity, cheaper flour, rice and pulses, fairer electricity rates from hydropower projects such as Mangla Dam, and the removal of the twelve so-called “refugee” seats in the local Legislative Assembly. These seats, reserved for people who migrated from Indian-administered Kashmir but now live outside Pakistan-administered Kashmir, in cities such as Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Karachi, have long been seen by protesters as a mechanism of manipulation. In a 45-seat assembly, twelve externally controlled seats are not a detail. They are a lever.
The accusation is clear: the Pakistani military establishment and its intelligence apparatus use these seats to control governments in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, to break away legislators, install proxies and produce prime ministers acceptable to Rawalpindi. In other words, what is advertised as “Azad” Kashmir is not free at all. It is a supervised political space, managed through electoral engineering, security pressure and the permanent shadow of the army.
This is why a movement that began with bread, electricity and representation has become a direct challenge to military rule. The Jammu and Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, a grassroots movement advocating economic and political rights, was designated on 5 June 2026 as a “proscribed organization” under the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Anti-Terrorism Act, 2014. That single act reveals almost everything one needs to know about Pakistan’s approach to dissent. A civil society movement demanding rights was not answered politically. It was branded terrorist.
The pattern is familiar from Balochistan, from Sindh, from Pashtun areas, from the treatment of journalists, students, activists and political opponents across Pakistan. When citizens ask for rights, the state hears sedition. When they ask for representation, it sees conspiracy. When they march peacefully, it reaches for anti-terror law. When the world asks questions, Islamabad cries foreign interference.
In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the crackdown has been especially severe. Internet and mobile networks were suspended until 12 June. Outsiders were ordered to leave the region. Federal paramilitary forces were deployed. Journalists covering the protests, including Sohrab Barkat, were arrested under electronic crimes laws for allegedly “promoting” the JKJAAC. The region was effectively sealed from outside scrutiny. This is never accidental. States do not cut communications when they want transparency. They cut communications when they want silence.
Then came the killings.
On the night of 5 June, activist Shahzeb Habib was shot during an encounter with police under circumstances that human rights monitors say suggest no imminent threat to officers. He later died of his injuries. On 7 June, after his body was transferred for autopsy, clashes erupted in Rawalakot. At least eight protesters and four police officers were reported killed, with dozens injured. On 8 and 9 June, reports from the ground indicated that more than twenty-five people, including a woman, were killed by Pakistani security forces. Other accounts put the civilian death toll from military firing over the past eight months at fifty-seven.
The figures are still contested and difficult to verify, precisely because the state has restricted communications and access. But the political meaning is not difficult to understand. A population under pressure is protesting, and the Pakistani state is shooting.
Eyewitness accounts from Rawalakot are harrowing. Local residents and journalists described thousands of protesters coming under intense automatic-weapons fire during an operation that reportedly lasted more than an hour, while helicopters hovered above. Multiple witnesses claimed that seriously injured people lay at the protest site and that those attempting to carry them away were also fired upon. Others alleged that helicopters were used in the operation and that bodies were removed afterward. These reports remain unverified, but they have emerged from multiple local sources with such insistence that they cannot be simply dismissed as rumour. In a sealed region, the inability to verify is not proof that abuses did not occur. It is often the intended result of the blackout.
Rawalakot, Kotli, Muzaffarabad, Bhimber, Dadyal, Palandri and Sudhnoti have all seen shutdowns, marches or clashes. In Rawalakot, protesters blocked the main road. In Kotli, crowds chanted slogans against the Pakistani military and marched toward Rawalakot. In Dadyal, anti-army demonstrations filled the roads. In Palandri, protesters displayed tear gas shells fired by security forces. In Muzaffarabad, clashes broke out near Neelum Bridge. Markets and businesses across the region shut down. This is no longer a local administrative disturbance. It is a mass rejection of the political architecture imposed on Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
And yet the Pakistani Foreign Office responded with the familiar theatre of injured sovereignty. It accused British MPs and members of the Kashmiri diaspora of interfering in the affairs of Azad Kashmir, while simultaneously claiming that Pakistan respects democracy, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and constitutional rights. The statement would be amusing if the dead were not still being counted.
If Pakistan-administered Kashmir is truly autonomous and democratic, why do major political decisions require approval from Islamabad and Rawalpindi? If freedom of expression is respected, why are activists and journalists treated as security threats? If peaceful assembly is protected, why are protesters met with arrests, internet shutdowns, anti-terror designations and live ammunition? If the state has nothing to hide, why seal the region?
The accusation that British MPs are displaying a “colonial mindset” is especially grotesque. Many of the concerns raised by diaspora communities and parliamentarians relate to representation, civil liberties, accountability and the role of unelected power. These are not colonial questions. They are democratic questions. Pakistan’s problem is not that outsiders are asking them. Pakistan’s problem is that its own citizens are asking them too.
The most revealing part of Islamabad’s response is what it avoids. It does not explain why a grassroots rights movement has been proscribed as terrorist. It does not explain why communications were cut. It does not explain why journalists were arrested. It does not explain the deaths. It does not explain the repeated pattern of crackdowns on JKJAAC protests, including deadly violence in May 2024, October 2025 and now June 2026. It simply reaches for the old vocabulary: sovereignty, interference, law and order, anti-terrorism.
But democracy is not demonstrated by press release. Democracy is demonstrated by tolerating criticism. It is demonstrated by allowing opposition movements to organise. It is demonstrated by answering grievances instead of criminalising them. It is demonstrated, above all, by not firing on civilians.
The role of the Pakistani military is central. The unrest is unfolding under the shadow of the Munir–Shehbaz alliance, a partnership that has increasingly blurred the remaining lines between civilian façade and military command. The reported presence and influence of Brigadier Faiq Ayub, now ISI Sector Commander in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and previously associated by critics with violent repression in Punjab, has only intensified the perception that Rawalpindi is treating the region as occupied political terrain rather than as a constituency with rights.
That perception is not new. Pakistan has spent decades presenting Kashmir internationally as a question of self-determination while denying meaningful self-determination in the territory it controls. It speaks of Kashmiri rights at the United Nations while managing Pakistan-administered Kashmir through constitutional constraints, intelligence interference and controlled representation. It invokes the suffering of Kashmiris when useful against India, but when Kashmiris under its own administration demand flour, electricity, dignity and representation, they are labelled terrorists.
This is the central hypocrisy. Pakistan does not support Kashmiri self-determination. It supports the weaponisation of Kashmir. It supports Kashmir as a slogan, as a grievance industry, as a diplomatic instrument, as a pressure point against India. But when Kashmiris challenge Pakistani authority, the mask slips. Then the rhetoric of liberation gives way to the mechanics of occupation.
The massacre of civilians in Pakistan-administered Kashmir should therefore be understood not as an isolated excess, but as part of Pakistan’s wider architecture of coercion. In Balochistan, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings have become routine instruments of rule. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, dissenting Pashtun voices are securitised. In Punjab, political opposition has been crushed through arrests, intimidation and military pressure. In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the same method is now visible: delegitimise the movement, cut communications, deploy force, control the narrative, blame outsiders.
The International Human Rights Foundation has called for an independent inquiry into the killing of Shahzeb Habib and all unlawful deaths of protesters and police officers in Rawalakot, for immediate de-escalation, for adherence to international principles on the use of force, for the lifting of the ban on JKJAAC, and for restoration of internet, mobile networks, peaceful assembly and freedom of association. These are minimal demands. They are not radical. They are the bare requirements of a state that claims to be democratic.
The announced regional elections of 27 July 2026 make the situation even more urgent. Elections held after massacres, shutdowns, arrests and proscription orders cannot be treated as normal democratic exercises. A ballot under intimidation is not legitimacy. It is choreography. If Pakistan wants the world to believe in the democratic character of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, it must first allow its people to speak, organise, report, protest and vote without fear of being shot or branded terrorists.
The people of Pakistan-administered Kashmir are not asking for charity. They are asking for political agency. They are asking why their resources do not benefit them. They are asking why non-residents help decide their government. They are asking why promises made after earlier protests were not implemented. They are asking why the state responds to bread-and-butter demands with bullets.
Pakistan has no answer, because the answer would expose the structure itself.
So it does what it always does. It invokes democracy while strangling dissent. It invokes rights while banning rights movements. It invokes Kashmir while shooting Kashmiris. It invokes sovereignty while denying people the sovereign dignity of citizenship.
Rawalakot is not merely another crackdown. It is a revelation. It shows the world what Pakistan’s Kashmir policy looks like when stripped of slogans: control without accountability, representation without autonomy, elections without freedom, and repression wrapped in the language of liberation.
The dead in Pakistan-administered Kashmir deserve more than condolences. They deserve names, investigations, prosecutions and memory. Above all, they deserve the one thing Islamabad has always feared most from the people it claims to defend: a voice of their own.
>> Source: Stringerasia
