Published: 04:52 PM, 05 July 2026
Kashmir’s rebellion against Pakistan’s colonial fiction
Pakistan likes to speak of Kashmir as an unfinished dispute, a wound of history, a Muslim cause betrayed by India and awaiting liberation. It has built an entire diplomatic vocabulary around this claim: self-determination, human rights, occupation, plebiscite, repression. It has taken this language to the United Nations, to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, to Western capitals, to television studios, to every platform where Islamabad can present itself as the natural defender of Kashmiri dignity.
Then the people of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir take to the streets, and the mask falls.
What has been happening in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir is not a routine protest over flour, electricity bills or subsidies. Those are the immediate triggers, not the cause. The cause is older, deeper and more political. It is the accumulated anger of a population that has been used for decades as a diplomatic prop by a state that denies it real power, extracts its resources, manipulates its institutions, militarises its political life and then calls the arrangement “Azad” — free. The irony would be comic if it were not written in blood.
The latest unrest, centred around Rawalakot, Muzaffarabad and other parts of so-called Azad Jammu and Kashmir, has exposed once again the true nature of Pakistan’s rule in the territory. Protesters mobilised by the Joint Awami Action Committee have demanded affordable flour, fair electricity rates, an end to elite privileges, accountability and genuine local rights. These are not revolutionary demands in any normal political system. They are the minimum vocabulary of citizenship. Yet Pakistan responded as it so often does when the periphery speaks: with bans, arrests, road blockades, paramilitary deployment, tear gas, live fire and the language of terrorism.
The Joint Awami Action Committee was not born as an armed movement. It is a coalition of traders, students, lawyers, transporters and civil society groups. Its strength lies precisely in this social breadth. It has managed to transform local economic grievances into a wider political platform. That is why Islamabad fears it. A militant can be killed, branded, banned, absorbed into the usual security narrative. A popular civilian movement is more dangerous. It exposes the fiction of consent.
In early June, the crackdown turned deadly. Clashes between protesters and law enforcement in Rawalakot and surrounding areas left civilians and police officers dead, with many more injured. The authorities had already moved to proscribe the Joint Awami Action Committee, treating a mass protest movement as a security threat. The script is familiar. In Balochistan, Pashtun areas, Sindh, Gilgit-Baltistan and now PoK, Pakistan’s state machinery uses the same progression: ignore the grievance, delegitimise the protesters, accuse them of foreign manipulation, deploy force, arrest leaders, then offer dialogue after the damage is done. This is not crisis management. It is colonial reflex.
The word “Azad” in Azad Jammu and Kashmir has always been Pakistan’s most cynical joke. The territory has a president, a prime minister, an assembly, flags, ceremonies and all the theatrical accessories of autonomy. But real power does not reside in Muzaffarabad. It resides in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. The so-called local government operates within a structure designed to preserve Pakistan’s strategic control while maintaining the illusion of Kashmiri self-rule. The Kashmir Council, federal ministries, intelligence agencies and the military-security establishment have historically shaped the territory’s politics, economy and institutional boundaries. Local leaders may administer. They do not decide.
This is why every protest in PoK eventually becomes constitutional, even when it begins with electricity bills. The people are not merely asking for cheaper power. They are asking why a territory rich in hydropower pays inflated rates while its resources are channelled outward. They are not merely asking for subsidised flour. They are asking why a population displayed internationally as the heart of the Kashmir cause is treated domestically as a burden to be disciplined. They are not merely asking for the removal of elite privileges. They are asking who this political system actually serves.
Pakistan’s answer has been revealing. Instead of recognising the protests as a legitimate expression of social distress, it reached for securitisation. The very state that lectures India daily on Kashmiris’ right to protest could not tolerate Kashmiris protesting under its own control. The very establishment that invokes human rights in Srinagar showed little hesitation in sending police and paramilitary forces into Rawalakot. The very political class that denounces repression across the Line of Control suddenly discovered the language of law and order when the slogans were directed at Islamabad.
This hypocrisy is not incidental. It is structural. Pakistan’s Kashmir policy has never been about Kashmiri sovereignty. It has been about Pakistani strategy. Kashmir is useful as a cause, as a weapon against India, as an ideological glue for the army’s domestic legitimacy, as a diplomatic file, as a permanent emergency. But actual Kashmiris, especially those under Pakistan’s administration, are useful only as long as they remain obedient symbols. The moment they become political subjects, they become inconvenient.
That is the real meaning of the unrest in PoK. It is the revolt of the symbol against the state that owns it.
For decades, Islamabad has presented Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as the moral counter-image to Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. On one side, according to Pakistani propaganda, there is occupation; on the other, freedom. But freedom that cannot tolerate protest is not freedom. Autonomy that collapses at the first sign of mass mobilisation is not autonomy. A political system that needs paramilitary force to control demands for bread, electricity and dignity is not democratic self-government. It is administered dependency.
The anger in PoK also reflects a wider crisis across Pakistan’s peripheries. Balochistan burns because its people are disappeared while its minerals are auctioned. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa bleeds because the state played with jihad and now calls the consequences terrorism. Gilgit-Baltistan protests against extraction, dispossession and constitutional limbo. Sindh complains of resource theft and demographic manipulation. Pashtun activists are branded traitors for asking why their lands became battlefields. Everywhere, the pattern is the same: Islamabad and Rawalpindi extract loyalty, land, water, minerals, strategic depth and silence. When the silence breaks, they call it conspiracy.
PoK fits perfectly into this architecture. It is governed as a frontier, displayed as a cause, policed as a suspect population and denied the dignity of full political agency. Its people are not even granted the clarity of status. They are neither fully integrated into Pakistan nor genuinely autonomous. They inhabit a constitutional grey zone useful to Islamabad because ambiguity preserves control. Pakistan can claim to speak for Kashmiris internationally while preventing the Kashmiris under its control from speaking too loudly at home.
The recent protests have also damaged Pakistan’s international narrative at a particularly sensitive moment. Islamabad wants to project itself as a victim of Indian aggression, a responsible diplomatic actor and a defender of Muslim rights. Yet images of unrest, killings, arrests and bans in PoK tell a different story. They reveal a state that cannot govern without coercion and cannot tolerate dissent even in the territory it claims to have “liberated”. This is why Pakistani politicians have worried openly about the protests damaging the country’s reputation. Not because citizens were killed. Because the performance was interrupted.
The state’s obsession with reputation is itself revealing. The problem, for Islamabad, is not that Kashmiris are angry; it is that the world might see them angry at Pakistan. The problem is not that people are dead; it is that the deaths complicate the propaganda. The problem is not that a movement has been criminalised; it is that criminalising it exposes the gap between Pakistan’s language abroad and its practice at home.
There is, of course, another layer. PoK is not only a political instrument. It is also strategic terrain. It sits at the heart of Pakistan’s confrontation with India, connected to the military imagination of the Line of Control, jihadist infiltration, intelligence management and national-security paranoia. No protest there is ever treated as merely local. Every slogan is heard in Rawalpindi through the filter of India. Every demand for rights is vulnerable to being labelled as enemy-inspired. This is the oldest trick in Pakistan’s manual: convert a citizen into an agent, and the state no longer has to answer him.
But the more Pakistan uses India to delegitimise local anger, the more it proves the protesters’ point. If a Kashmiri in Rawalakot cannot demand cheaper electricity without being suspected of serving Delhi, then he is not a citizen. He is a hostage of geopolitics. If a civil society coalition can be banned because it mobilises too effectively, then politics itself is permitted only as theatre. If the state’s first instinct is force, then “Azad” is nothing more than branding.
The unrest in PoK should therefore be understood as part of a broader unravelling of Pakistan’s internal compact. The old formula is failing. Religion no longer silences hunger. Anti-India rhetoric no longer pays electricity bills. Kashmir rhetoric no longer hides local dispossession. Military nationalism no longer convinces people whose children have no jobs, whose bills are unaffordable, whose leaders are powerless and whose protests are met with bullets. The people of PoK are not asking for charity. They are asking why a territory used endlessly in Pakistan’s ideological theatre receives so little of the dignity promised in its name.
Islamabad may try to contain the current wave through negotiations, arrests, concessions and intimidation. It may release some detainees, announce subsidies, reshuffle officials, blame provocateurs, promise committees, and wait for the streets to empty. It has done this before. But the deeper fracture will remain. Once people discover that their misery is political, not accidental, they do not forget. Once a movement learns that it can paralyse the system, it becomes part of the political memory of a place. Once the word “Azad” becomes an object of ridicule, no official ceremony can fully restore it.
That is why PoK matters. Not because it suddenly changes the territorial dispute overnight. Not because it can be reduced to an Indian talking point or a Pakistani embarrassment. It matters because it reveals the central contradiction of Pakistan’s Kashmir policy: a state that claims to fight for Kashmiri self-determination cannot allow Kashmiri self-expression under its own flag. It wants Kashmiris as victims of India, not critics of Pakistan. It wants them as evidence, not as citizens. It wants their suffering to be exportable, not their anger to be domestic.
The people in the streets of Rawalakot have broken that arrangement. They have forced Pakistan to confront the one Kashmir question it never wanted asked: what does liberation mean when the liberator behaves like a jailer?
The answer is visible in the barricades, the arrests, the funerals and the banned protest movement. Pakistan does not have a Kashmir policy. It has a control policy. And in PoK, for the first time in years, that policy is being challenged not by India, not by diplomats, not by insurgents, but by ordinary people demanding the most subversive thing of all: to be treated as human beings rather than as slogans.
>> Source: Stringer Asia
