Explained: How Pakistan-administered Kashmir came to revolt against the terms of its own freedom

For 60 years the rivers of Pakistan-administered Kashmir (PaK) have been turning turbines and generating power for Pakistan’s national grid, and for most of those years the territory received approximately fifteen paisa for every unit of electricity they produced, a water-use charge that represented roughly one-seventh of what Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa collected from dams within their own borders, provinces that received net hydel profit of about one rupee and ten paisa per unit as a matter of constitutional entitlement.

That gap, between fifteen paisa and one rupee ten, is the entire crisis compressed into arithmetic.

Understanding why it existed explains why the region has spent three summers in open revolt, why a movement of shopkeepers, transporters, lawyers and students came to command more public trust than any political party on the ballot, and why in June this year the government of PaK declared that movement a terrorist organisation under anti-terror laws.

Since then, the killing has been substantial. The Azad Jammu Kashmir Awami Action Committee (JAAC) claims at least thirty-one of its supporters have been shot dead by security forces since early June, while police confirm two security personnel were killed.

No one outside can independently verify either number because mobile and fibre internet have been suspended across almost the entire territory for weeks, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for prompt, thorough and impartial investigations into all deaths on both sides.

What has not changed, across three summers and a rising death toll, is the character of the movement itself. JAAC’s marches, sit-ins, shutter-down strikes and wheel-jam protests have remained overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations led by shopkeepers, transporters, lawyers and students, even as the government’s response has escalated from tear gas to live fire to a total communications blackout to formal designation as terrorism.

The marchers are not asking to leave Pakistan or to take up arms against it. They are asking for a seat in the rooms where decisions about their electricity, their flour, their compensation and their votes are made, and the plainest way to state they demand that PaK will no longer stay quiet outside those rooms while others decide its future inside them.

A right and a favour

The distinction that governs life in PaK is not between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, urban and rural, but rather between money that is owed as a constitutional right and money that arrives as a discretionary favour from a distant capital.

Under Article 160 of Pakistan’s 1973 Constitution, the four provinces draw their revenue from the National Finance Commission Award, a constitutionally mandated formula that divides the federal divisible pool between the provinces and which the eighteenth constitutional amendment made legally impossible to reduce or alter without consent.

When Punjab or Sindh receives its transfer from this formula, as the economist Danish Khan has written, no one calls it a grant or a favour. It is wages, not charity, and no province thanks anyone for it.

PaK is not a claimant on this formula because of its peculiar constitutional status: the territory’s political future remains formally unresolved, still pending the plebiscite that the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan promised in 1948 and that has never been held. Because that status is unresolved, PaK sits entirely outside the National Finance Commission framework.

What it receives instead is called the Federal Variable Grant, and the word “variable” contains the entire architecture of asymmetry. In the 2025-26 budget, that discretionary grant comprised roughly 149 billion rupees out of projected total revenue receipts of about 260 billion rupees, meaning more than half of everything the government of four million people had to spend came from funds that Islamabad set, could delay, could reduce, and could condition on compliance with federal policy.

The budget documents themselves make this plain: the grant is not indexed by formula, is not protected by constitutional amendment, and carries no legal shield against reduction or withdrawal.

This fiscal arrangement became the catalyst for economic protest when Pakistan entered a new International Monetary Fund programme in 2023, with immediate socioeconomic consequences for a territory whose economy is closely integrated with Pakistan’s broader economy. In May 2023, the AJK government abruptly doubled the price of flour – a staple that arrives almost entirely from Punjab by truck – triggering protests first in Rawalakot, then spreading to Muzaffarabad and Mirpur as electricity tariffs followed suit and doubled as well in August.

For a mountainous region that hosts some of Pakistan’s largest hydropower stations and generates nearly 2,331 megawatts of installed capacity against a local demand of under 300 megawatts, the policy felt like adding insult to injury: the territory generated power for the national grid while paying the highest tariffs to consume it locally.

Out of these three separate, cascading protests across the territory, JAAC, emerged in late 2023, bringing together traders, transporters, lawyers, students and civil society groups around a shared platform of demands.

The escalation

The first march toward Muzaffarabad occurred in May 2024, when JAAC organised a large-scale mobilisation demanding cheaper flour and electricity, the abolition of perks enjoyed by political elites, and greater local autonomy over resource management.

At least five people died in clashes between protesters and security forces during that march, and Shehbaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, responded by announcing a 23-billion-rupee emergency package for PaK that included subsidies for flour and electricity and established a judicial commission to review the perks and privileges enjoyed by government officials and elected representatives. The movement suspended its planned demonstrations.

Three months later, in October 2024, the AJK government signed what was termed a charter of demands that included most of the movement’s economic asks: devolved development budgets to local councillors, the elimination of government-provided vehicles and bodyguards for ministers, restrictions on fuel allocations for official vehicles, and a commitment to address elite privileges.

The movement again stood down, treating the charter as a commitment from the government to implement these structural changes.
Between that October agreement and June 2026, almost none of the commitments materialised. No development budgets were transferred to local councils; no restrictions were placed on ministerial vehicles or perks; the judicial commission did not produce its report; the promised fuel restrictions were not implemented.

When JAAC attempted a second mobilisation in September 2025, calling for another region-wide shutdown to pressure the government to deliver on those promises, the movement pivoted to a constitutional demand that could not be reversed or delayed: the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees who had settled in mainland Pakistan after 1947.

The logic was stark and straightforward: a subsidy could be withdrawn by a subsequent government, a commission could languish indefinitely, but a constitutional amendment required a parliamentary supermajority and represented a permanent structural change that no future government could unilaterally reverse.

Warning

The person best placed to describe what this arrangement does to a territory over time was, for a period, its president. K H Khurshid had been Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s private secretary before he came to Kashmir, and in 1962 he broke from the mainstream Muslim Conference to found the Jammu Kashmir Liberation League, arguing that PaK should function as a genuine revolutionary successor to the deposed Dogra state, with real authority over its own affairs, rather than as an administrative appendage of the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs.

Installed as president in 1959 with Ayub Khan’s backing, he spent much of his term resisting the centre’s attempts to fold the territory’s institutions more tightly into Pakistan’s, and was forced from office in 1964 by a mid-ranking police official and jailed at Palandari and Dalai Camp for the trouble.

His argument, made from inside the system rather than against it, was that the structure Pakistan built in PaK was designed to keep the territory dependent rather than to develop it. A government that cannot set its own budget, cannot appoint its own judges without Islamabad’s approval, and cannot survive a change of mood in Rawalpindi has no incentive to build the institutions, infrastructure or economy that would let it eventually stand on its own.

Sixty years on, the territory still has no functioning international airport and no independent university system to rival what Pakistan’s provinces run, and its most capable workers leave for the Gulf or Britain because there is comparatively little to build a career on at home.

That is not simple underdevelopment. It is what an arrangement produces when the people meant to benefit from growth have no seat in the rooms where decisions about that growth are made.

Sardar Ibrahim Khan, the founder of PaK itself, learned the same lesson from the other direction. He had led the Poonch rebellion against the Dogra state in 1947 and became the territory’s first president, but in 1955 he too was dismissed, and his removal triggered a Poonch uprising that ran for roughly a year before being put down.

The man who had raised the militia that created the state was pushed out of it by the state’s own patron, and the district that produced the original revolt against a distant ruler rose again against a second one.

The pattern beneath

These were not isolated incidents. The pattern stretches back seventy-seven years and reflects a constitutional architecture that gives the territory the appearance of self-governance while retaining substantive control in Islamabad. Under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s civilian government, President Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan was arrested in Muzaffarabad by a mid-level Federal Security Forces officer and dismissed.

When General Zia-ul-Haq imposed martial law in July 1977, he dissolved the elected government, suspended the 1974 Interim Constitution, and installed Brigadier Mohammad Hayat Khan, a serving officer, as administrator for seven years without any pretence of electoral legitimacy.

These patterns continued after democracy was formally restored to Pakistan in 1988. When Benazir Bhutto’s government was dismissed in 1990, Prime Minister Mumtaz Rathore of PaK was escorted onto a military helicopter in Muzaffarabad, flown to Islamabad, and made to sign a letter of resignation.

In 2001, after General Pervez Musharraf’s coup, a serving major-general named Sardar Muhammad Anwar Khan was nominated for the presidency; he retired from the army four days before his election, under an ordinance Musharraf issued for the purpose, and members of the assembly that elected him told Human Rights Watch they had never heard of him before he introduced himself.

Taken together, the record shows PaK’s president or prime minister removed through arrest, forced resignation, dismissal or martial law at least half a dozen times since 1947, none of it through the ordinary defeat of a government at the ballot box. Politicians who survive in this system have learned to read the wind rather than build a durable base, and it is a commonplace observation in Muzaffarabad that a legislator’s party affiliation tends to track whichever party currently holds power in Islamabad, since a seat, a ministry, or continued access to patronage depends far more on standing with the centre than with constituents.

Throughout this 77-year period, PaK’s four million people have held no vote for the Pakistan National Assembly or Senate, the institutions that set tariffs, approve budgets and shape their lives most directly.

Every general election since the current parliamentary system was adopted in 1975 has produced an elected government aligned with whichever party held power in Islamabad, and most senior civil and police posts are filled by Pakistani officers on deputation who answer to Islamabad rather than to the territory they administer.

Danish Khan’s account of why this persists is structural rather than a claim about individual corruption. The paK branches of Pakistan’s mainstream parties are answerable, in practice, to the centre that can make or unmake their governments, not to the constituents who elect them, and the route to power in Muzaffarabad runs through Islamabad rather than through Bagh or Rawalakot.

Provinces at least have constituencies their parties must eventually face; in PaK, the incentive runs the other way. The result, on Khan’s account, is a political class that uses the Kashmir cause as cover while its own record of governance goes largely unexamined: ruling elites installed by Islamabad’s favour, rather than representatives answerable to the people who vote for them.

The constitution that forbids alternatives
The 1974 Interim Constitution Act, which remains in force as the governing document for PaK, granted the territory many of the institutional features that appear to constitute self-government: a directly elected legislative assembly, an indirectly elected president, a prime minister commanding majority support in the assembly, an independent judiciary with a High Court and Supreme Court.

Section 7, subsection 2 of that constitution, however, forbids any person or political party from engaging in activity “prejudicial or detrimental to the ideology of the State’s accession to Pakistan.”

This means that all political choices available to voters are constrained by a constitutional requirement that all viable political options must support accession to Pakistan as a governing principle.

Officeholders are required to swear loyalty to this cause. According to Human Rights Watch’s 2006 documentation, government employment, including appointment to the judiciary, requires candidates to express loyalty to the ideology of accession to Pakistan.

Under Section 56 of the Interim Constitution Act, the Pakistani government retains the power to dismiss any elected government in PaK regardless of the support that government enjoys in the AJK Legislative Assembly. This power has been exercised repeatedly and has established a pattern in which electoral outcomes are subordinate to federal political decisions in Islamabad.

A former president of PaK told Human Rights Watch researchers, in a statement that has been quoted in subsequent analyses of the territory’s governance: “The document referred to as the constitution of PaK is a sham. It’s a biased document. These laws and practices are in contradiction to the pledges made by the government to the international community and the UN. On the one hand, the Pakistan government says that UN Security Council resolutions must apply. On the other, the constitution prohibits it.”

The infrastructure of displacement

The clearest illustration of what this arrangement has meant for ordinary people is the history of the Mangla Dam. Between 1961 and 1967, its construction on the Jhelum River drowned more than 280 villages in Mirpur and surrounding districts and displaced somewhere between 100,000 and 110,000 people. Britain was an international guarantor of the project and offered work permits as part of the compensation package, which is the historical origin of the large Pakistani communities in British industrial cities; an estimated sixty to seventy per cent of British Pakistanis today trace their family origins to Mirpur, Kotli and Bhimber.

Between 2004 and 2007, the dam was raised by nine metres to restore capacity lost to sedimentation, submerging a further 15,780 acres across 118 villages and displacing tens of thousands more. A compensation package of 26 billion rupees was agreed in 2003, but disbursement has been extraordinarily slow: in May 2026, Pakistan’s own Ministry of Defence warned the Prime Minister’s Office that of 449 outstanding compensation cases, only forty-six families had received even partial payment, with roughly 4.4 billion rupees still unreleased more than twenty years after the project’s completion.

The second wave of refugees

A related crisis concerns the roughly 45,000 Kashmiri refugees who crossed the Line of Control during the 1989 uprising and have spent the decades since living in camps across PaK. According to testimony given to the National Assembly in November 2024, these 45,210 people are spread across eighteen camps, mainly in Muzaffarabad and Bagh, allotted roughly 75 sqmt per family since the 1990s, an allocation never expanded in the intervening thirty-five years. Most live in mud and corrugated-iron dwellings; thousands still live in tents. Shehbaz Sharif, while in opposition, promised to raise their monthly subsistence allowance from 3,500 to 5,000 rupees per person once in office. That promise remains unmet.

These refugees have asked for two assembly seats, one for Jammu and one for the Valley. They have been granted zero. Meanwhile, the twelve contested seats are reserved for 1947 refugees and their descendants, almost all of whom live in Punjab and Sindh, not PaK. The territory reserves twelve seats for refugee representation for people who live in Lahore and Karachi, and none for the 45,000 living a forty-minute drive from the assembly building in tents and makeshift dwellings. Representation here is allocated not by residence but by who benefits from allocating it.

The logic of obedience

In June 2026, as that week’s clashes between security forces and protesters claimed twenty lives, Defence Minister Khawaja Asif wrote on social media platform X to articulate the underlying logic of Islamabad’s approach to the crisis. “Dialogue begins with loyalty and complete obedience to the state,” he stated, and he directed the protesters to read Article 5 of Pakistan’s 1973 Constitution, which requires that all citizens maintain “unwavering loyalty” to the state.

The irony, which Asif did not acknowledge, is that Article 5 is part of a constitution whose parliament does not include a single seat from PaK. Dialogue requires loyalty to a state whose parliament does not include the voice of those whose dialogue is being demanded.

Obedience first, then dialogue. It is the same sentence the territory has been hearing since the Karachi Agreement was signed in April 1949, when the Government of Pakistan, the Government of PaK, and the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference agreed that Pakistan would assume control over defence, foreign affairs, communications, and negotiations with the United Nations regarding Kashmir’s future status. That agreement, kept secret until the 1990s, established the template for the relationship: subordination first, autonomy only to the extent it serves federal interests.

What happens next

Elections for the AJK Legislative Assembly are being held in three phases: Muzaffarabad division and the twelve refugee seats voted on 2 August, and Poonch division, the mountainous southern district where most of the recent killings have concentrated, voted on 10 August. The banned JAAC movement and its supporters are absent from the ballot in any form.

Some members who attempted to contest as independents had their nomination papers rejected because their names appear in police First Information Reports and on Pakistan’s anti-terrorism watchlist. The movement’s leadership has openly called for a boycott of the elections.

The conditions that produced this movement the discretionary grant, the variable rate on hydropower, the broken promises, the reserved seats that do not represent refugees actually living in camps – will survive the election meant to settle them. Until those structural arrangements change, and until PaK obtains the same constitutional standing and fiscal entitlement that the four provinces possess, the crisis will return in new forms, because the underlying contradiction remains unresolved.