Published: 06:21 PM, 04 August 2026
Why Pakistan manages to avoid global scrutiny despite a history of violent and brutal internal repression
Pakistan Army personnel patrol outside a polling station during the first phase of voting for the local legislature in Mirpur, Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. (Photo: AFP)
”Lives of people falling to Pakistani bullets are subordinate to the urgent project of triggering a colour revolution in India.”
For the past few days, we have all been witness to the horrific images and video clips on social media emerging from places such as Rawalakot, Mirpur and Kotli in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), where, in the run-up to the ‘elections’, a profound constitutional and humanitarian crisis is unfolding behind a wall of state-imposed censorship while the world offers a resigned shrug.
The coverage in Western media of the state-sponsored killing under way in the Himalayan region has been so insipid, perfunctory and even devious that it is difficult to put it into words. Some of the world’s most notable newsrooms — which have so far been busy with breathless, wall-to-wall coverage of the NEET-related youth protests in India — have shown little concern for the dozens and dozens of civilians who have fallen to the bullets of Pakistani security forces.
Out of curiosity, I was browsing the BBC website and its coverage of the elections in PoK, which have seen the Pakistani state unleash lethal force on local residents. The situation is so dire that Amnesty International has released a lengthy statement.
“The disturbing reports emerging from Rawalakot are consistent with the Pakistani authorities’ long history of unlawful violence against protesters in Jammu and Kashmir. A prompt, independent, and transparent investigation must be ordered into the security forces’ use of force against protesters. So long as an internet and mobile services blackout remains in place, it will severely impede the independent verification of the full extent of the situation on the ground. We urge the Pakistani authorities to restore all communications access and allow media and independent observers into the area.”
The human rights group added, “tensions around this election are being heightened by the unlawful ban on the Jammu and Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC). Amnesty International has repeatedly called on the Pakistani authorities to lift the ban on this protest movement and stop weaponising anti-terror laws to silence and arbitrarily detain JAAC members and supporters. The ban cannot be used as an excuse to mete out deadly violence against protesters.”
The BBC, however, has found this unfolding catastrophe so irrelevant that it has managed just one report in the last month. The BBC’s coverage has been dominated by the more ‘interesting’ development of the West Indies beating the Pakistan cricket team.
The sole report that the British state-sponsored media outlet has carried on Pakistan’s brutal repression features a headline that sounds cherubic in its innocence: “Why have so many people died in the run-up to an election in Pakistan-administered Kashmir?” Note the sanitised verb that instantly absolves the Pakistani state of all culpability.
The New York Times takes it a notch further and turns the reportage of a humanitarian crisis into a fine art of gaslighting. The headline and the strap of the New York Times report read: “Clashes Erupt in Pakistani Kashmir as Voting in Local Election Begins”.
“Dozens have died in recent weeks ahead of a weekslong regional election, officials said. A banned civil rights group said supporters died in conflicts with the police.”
As if to suggest that it is normal for people to drop dead on their own like flies during elections. The headline does offer an obfuscation, suggesting that police may have killed the protesters, but not before clarifying that the allegation of police violence came from a “banned civil rights group”, hinting at a lack of credibility. While social media is flooded with video clips of forces opening fire on unarmed civilians, the NYT helpfully suggests protesters “died in conflicts with police”, as if it were a fair fight between equals. The discursive heist is fascinating!
The NYT report quotes the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), the civil rights group, as saying that “several of its supporters had died in clashes with the police”, but the “claim” apparently “could not be independently verified, and officials had not confirmed any deaths as of Tuesday.” If only there were social media clips of corpses lying on the street!
The free pass offered by the Anglo press to the repressive Pakistani state is particularly galling because it sits in contrast with the relentless, agenda-setting coverage of the youth protests in India, indicating that the lives of the people falling to Pakistani bullets are subordinate to the urgent project of triggering a colour revolution in India.
Beyond the gaslighting, following months of civil agitation led by the JAAC over inflationary electricity tariffs, wheat flour subsidies and demands for civic autonomy, the authorities have met unarmed public assembly with lethal and overwhelming violence, as Pakistan has done for decades.
According to reporting by some international outlets such as Al Jazeera and The Guardian, at least 40 people have been killed in clashes between security personnel and demonstrators since early June, alongside widespread arrests and injuries, while at least 30 have been killed in the last few days. The JAAC has claimed that the number of people killed by Pakistan’s security forces between 5 June and 28 July was 67, with the deadliest violence reported from Rawalakot and Mirpur. The numbers are almost certainly under-reported.
A News18 report carried dreadful details of snipers positioned on surrounding rooftops targeting unarmed demonstrators, carrying out ‘headshots’ and shooting at the lights from mobile phones during the night to spread fear and panic.
One thing the Pakistani military state is good at is controlling the flow of information. To ensure that the massacre of civilians does not reach the wider world, the authorities have instituted an informal state of emergency, suspending mobile and internet services across most of the territory and restricting the movement of journalists.
Reuters, for instance, reports that “banking, roads and internet services have largely been disrupted, hindering the flow of information”. Therefore, claims the news agency, it “could not independently verify the figure of over 30 dead given by the JAAC about the clashes around Rawalakot.”
Yet, despite the digital blackout, citizen-captured footages have surfaced, showing paramilitary units firing into unarmed crowds and bodies lying uncovered on streets.
There are two ways of looking at the censorship of violence. As Patience Quill (moniker) points out in a column for Global Village Space, “Pakistan’s military controls the pipes through which information flows to the outside world. Reporters Without Borders has documented how the army ‘quietly yet effectively’ imposes restrictions on reporting. Foreign correspondents based in Islamabad routinely find their movement outside the capital restricted, their local fixers intimidated, and their access to Balochistan effectively denied.”
The weaponisation of visas to discourage critical coverage, observes the author, results in “a controlled narrative bottleneck: by the time a story about a ‘security operation’ reaches a foreign newsroom, it has already been laundered of words like massacre, disappearance, or assassination.”
This is undoubtedly accurate. There exists another geopolitical reason why Pakistan’s sins are almost always forgiven or overlooked in Washington, DC, or Brussels, and why the ongoing lethal crackdown on civilians has been met with institutional silence. It is the same reason why Western media or diplomatic missions treat the Pakistani state’s excesses as routine or an ‘internal matter’.
This muted reaction is neither an anomaly nor an oversight. It reflects an enduring, structural reality of geopolitics in the Indian subcontinent.
As a designated Major Non-NATO Ally, it has historically suited the strategic calculus of the US — and, by extension, its allies — that Pakistan remains a highly centralised garrison state rather than a fully functioning democracy. Whenever the Pakistani security establishment has relied on state violence to suppress internal dissent — whether in the borderlands of Balochistan and Waziristan, on the streets of Islamabad, or across PoK — Western media and policymaking elites have consistently looked away, prioritising the convenience of a military interlocutor over democratic credentials.
The institutional reflex of the Pakistani security apparatus is to treat domestic protests not as a governance challenge to be negotiated or administered, but as a security threat to be neutralised. When local populations demand economic relief, justice, resource parity or constitutional rights, the state routinely frames their agitation through the lens of external subversion and calls it ‘foreign-backed conspiracies’.
As A. Jathindra writes for Eurasia Review, “It underscores the fragility of Pakistan’s governance model, which relies on coercion rather than consent, and exposes contradictions in its foreign policy: while projecting itself as a champion of Kashmiri rights internationally, Pakistan suppresses those very rights in territories under its control.”
In response to the killings in PoK, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif deployed a similar tactic. Speaking to reporters, Asif justified the crackdown by categorising the protesting civilians as hostile actors, declaring that he placed the demonstrators “in the same category as India and considered them also as enemies like India.”
By conflating citizens protesting socio-economic distress and seeking greater autonomy with an external adversary, the state turned the administrative and legislative dispute into a matter of national security.
The more important question, however, is the role played by the international community, specifically the newsrooms and policy institutes of Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels, which have consistently ignored this pattern of internal coercion. The simple explanation is Pakistan’s hedging strategy, its openness to serve the highest bidder, and its historical utility to Western geopolitical strategy.
As a classic ‘rentier state’, Pakistan’s military and ruling elite derive institutional dominance and financial sustenance not from internal resources, taxation or industrial productivity, but from external rents generated by leasing its strategic geography and security apparatus to foreign patrons.
In this equation, Western leaders, policymakers, analytical centres and even the media have endorsed and validated the fact that a garrison state is more convenient to deal with than a democracy. A centralised military command structure may guarantee sharp geopolitical pivots, share intelligence and serve tricky geopolitical needs, such as Pakistani dictator Asim Munir’s role as the go-between in the US-Iran conflict, where he had to go against the grain of Pakistan’s massive Iran-supporting Shia population.
During a March 2026 meeting with Shia clerics, Munir reportedly told those who “love Iran so much” to “go there”. A genuine, representative parliamentary democracy would be subject to pushback from the public, judicial oversight and nationalist sensitivities that could disrupt Western policy objectives.
Therefore, internal repression within Pakistan has long been interpreted as an acceptable structural cost of geopolitical alignment. Western newsrooms — whose editorial gaze reflects the priorities of their national foreign policies — have historically overlooked and under-reported state violence in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and PoK, framing Pakistan primarily as an arena of nuclear rivalry with India rather than as a state that acts as the mothership of terrorism.
The casualties in Rawalakot and Mirpur, or the ‘missing’ youth of Balochistan, are the human cost of a global consensus that has long valued the deceptive ‘stability’ of a garrison state over the fundamental rights of its people.
No one has the back of the demonstrators in PoK, who are not only falling to the bullets of a repressive state, but whose corpses are being snatched from hospitals by paramilitary forces so that the massacre remains concealed. (by, Sreemoy Talukdar)
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