As Pakistan-administered Kashmir once again grinds to a halt under strikes and security crackdowns, the current unrest is best understood not as a sudden eruption, but as the latest chapter in a slow-building crisis of representation and neglect. Attique Ur Rehman looks at the background to these developments.
A Region Born of Compromise
Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) occupies a strange constitutional space. Carved out after the first India-Pakistan war of 1947-48, it was designed to be “self-governing,” with its own prime minister, legislative assembly, and courts — yet real sovereign authority has always rested with Islamabad. For decades, that arrangement was tolerated, even embraced, because AJK’s political identity was built around a single unifying cause: solidarity with Kashmiris across the Line of Control in Indian-administered territory.
A significant shift occurred on 5 August 2019, when the Indian government revoked Article 370 of the Constitution, ending Jammu and Kashmir’s special autonomous status and facilitating its full constitutional integration into India. The revocation of Article 370 also had important political and psychological consequences in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), despite producing few immediate material changes because AJK lies on the Pakistani side of the Line of Control. The decision reinforced perceptions that the Kashmir dispute was gradually being resolved in India’s favour, generating frustration with AJK’s political leadership, which many viewed as ineffective in responding to the changing political context. Among younger generations, political mobilisation has increasingly shifted away from cross-Line-of-Control solidarity and the wider Kashmir conflict towards demands for accountability, economic justice, and better governance within AJK itself.
Pakistan’s entry into a new International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme in 2023 had significant socioeconomic consequences for Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), whose economy is closely integrated with Pakistan’s. As part of the IMF’s fiscal adjustment conditions, the Pakistani government reduced subsidies on electricity and fuel while implementing measures to curb public expenditure and increase revenue. These reforms contributed to sharp increases in the prices of essential commodities, electricity, and fuel, substantially raising the cost of living in AJK. Given the region’s high levels of unemployment, dependence on remittances, and limited industrial base, many households struggled to absorb these price increases.
The Spark: Flour, Electricity, and a New Kind of Movement
In May 2023, the AJK government doubled the price of flour. Weeks later, electricity tariffs followed suit. For a mountainous region that depends almost entirely on wheat shipped in from Punjab, and that hosts some of Pakistan’s largest hydropower stations while still paying steep power bills, the moves felt like adding insult to injury. Protests broke out first in Rawalakot, then Muzaffarabad, then Mirpur. Out of that anger came the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) — not a political party, but a coalition of traders, transporters, lawyers, and students with no single leader and no formal ideology beyond economic fairness and an end to what it called “elite privilege.”
That leaderless, cross-class character is precisely why the movement has proven so difficult for successive governments to negotiate away. It cannot be co-opted the way a party can, and it cannot easily be discredited as a proxy for any one political faction — though the government has repeatedly tried, at various points, to accuse it of doing India’s bidding, an allegation JAAC has firmly denied. But the movement needs a leadership that not only cannot be co-opted or discredited but is capable of developing a class conscious leadership with a socialist programme.
May 2024: The Movement Comes of Age
The first true mass mobilisation came in May 2024. A six-day wave of shutter-downs and wheel-jam strikes culminated in a long march toward Muzaffarabad that, by some local estimates, drew over a million participants from a regional population of roughly 4.5 million. The government’s decision to arrest JAAC leaders ahead of a planned demonstration backfired badly, triggering violent clashes that left at least three protesters and a police officer dead. Order was restored only after Islamabad extended a Rs23 billion (roughly $83 million) relief package and rolled back the price increases.
It was a pattern that would repeat and economic concessions bought calm. Still, it did nothing to resolve the underlying question the movement kept returning to: who governs Azad Kashmir, and for whom?
October 2025: From Subsidies to Structural Reform
By September 2025, JAAC had transformed from a subsidy-focused protest group into something closer to a reform movement, tabling a sweeping 38-point Charter of Demands. Alongside familiar economic asks — cheaper electricity priced off the actual cost of production at the Mangla Dam, restored flour subsidies — sat far more ambitious structural demands: a smaller cabinet, merged anti-corruption bodies, judicial inquiries into police conduct, and, most controversially, the abolition of the 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees living outside AJK. They are disproportionately influential because they are filled by representatives elected outside AJK, yet they participate fully in forming governments and shaping legislation affecting the region. Many AJK residents therefore perceive the arrangement as diluting the political representation of the local population and enabling Islamabad to influence electoral outcomes and maintain control over AJK’s government. Consequently, the refugee-seat system has become a contentious issue in debates over democratic representation, political autonomy, and self-governance in AJK.
Furthermore, these refugees residing in Pakistan already enjoy political representation through Pakistan’s electoral system while continuing to elect representatives to the Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) Legislative Assembly. They also contend that these constituencies receive financial allocations and other benefits from AJK’s public resources, despite their residents living outside the territory. Consequently, many in AJK perceive this arrangement as creating unequal political representation and an inequitable distribution of public resources.
The ensuing “lockdown,” a six-day communications blackout and region-wide shutdown beginning September 29, again turned deadly — estimates of the dead range from nine to fifteen, with well over a hundred injured, including more than 170 police officers. A negotiated agreement, signed in Muzaffarabad on October 3 and later dubbed the “38-Point Agenda,” committed both the federal and AJK governments to compensation for victims, judicial commissions, cabinet downsizing, infrastructure spending, and — critically — a joint committee to review the refugee-seats question.
The Unresolved Fault Line
That last commitment is where the current crisis originates. By mid-2026, the AJK government reported that 24 of an expanded 44-point list of demands had been fully implemented, with most of the rest in progress. But the refugee seats remained untouched, and JAAC insisted the government was overstating its own progress.
The seats themselves are a legacy of partition: six reserved for refugees from the Jammu division, six for those from the Kashmir Valley, elected not by AJK residents but by hundreds of thousands of registered voters scattered across Punjab, Sindh, and beyond. Supporters call them a constitutionally protected symbol of an unresolved dispute — proof that Pakistan has not abandoned the cause of displaced Kashmiris. Critics call them an instrument of outside control, noting that seat-holders who have never lived in AJK routinely become kingmakers in a chamber of only 53 members, while drawing government salaries, job quotas, and development funds spent entirely outside the territory they nominally represent.
In early June 2026, the AJK Supreme Court settled the legal question, if not the political one: the seats are protected under Article 22 of the 1974 Interim Constitution and cannot be abolished by anything short of a formal constitutional amendment. Within days, the government declared JAAC a proscribed organisation under anti-terrorism law and arrested dozens of its members. Clashes in Rawalakot on June 7 and 8 left at least eleven more people dead.
A Cause Gone International
The unrest has also attracted considerable attention from the Kashmiri diaspora, particularly in Britain, where demonstrations have been organised in London, Birmingham, Bradford and other cities in support of JAAC and its demands. British parliamentarians have increasingly raised concerns about the situation in AJK. In June 2026, an Early Day Motion in the UK Parliament, supported by dozens of MPs, expressed concern about reports of communication blackouts, mass arrests, restrictions on peaceful assembly, and the detention of protesters, and called for dialogue and respect for human rights. Although the motion is not legally binding, it reflects growing parliamentary scrutiny of developments in AJK and demonstrates how diaspora mobilisation has internationalised what was previously regarded as a largely domestic political dispute.
An Uncertain Future
What distinguishes this phase of the crisis from its predecessors is that it no longer has an obvious resolution. Subsidies can be restored with a federal grant; a cabinet can be trimmed by decree. But a constitutional amendment requires the same assembly that just voted, in an all-parties resolution, to preserve the seats JAAC wants gone — and doing so, opponents argue, would hand India a symbolic victory in the broader Kashmir dispute that Pakistan cannot afford to concede.
Caught between a legally settled question and an unresolved political one, AJK now heads toward scheduled elections in an atmosphere of banned organisations, jailed activists, and a population that has spent much of the past three years alternating between the streets and the negotiating table. Whether the vote offers a genuine reset or merely another pause before the next round of unrest may depend less on what happens at the ballot box than on whether either side is prepared to treat the refugee-seats question as a matter for genuine constitutional debate — rather than either street pressure or judicial finality alone.
The AJK uprising is more than a protest against inflation or poor governance. It reflects a deeper system of economic dependency and political control. The crisis manifests IMF-driven austerity, rising living costs, and the region’s constitutional arrangements are interconnected, enabling local elites and Islamabad to benefit from AJK’s resources while ordinary citizens bear the economic burden. From this perspective, lasting change requires more than restoring subsidies; it calls for public ownership of hydropower resources, the abolition of the 12 reserved refugee seats, greater local control over political and economic institutions, and stronger grassroots organisations capable of challenging entrenched power structures. However, JAAC supporters favour constitutional reform and negotiated settlements over systemic economic transformation, while the Pakistani government rejects claims that AJK’s constitutional framework represents a form of colonial control, arguing instead that it reflects the unresolved status of the wider Kashmir dispute.
What Direction Should the Movement Take?
Protest and opposition in Azad Kashmir are significant and, as explained, rooted in economic demands and in a desire for independent political control. However, these demands cannot be met simply through constitutional reforms or by abolishing seats controlled by the Pakistani state. Who controls resources and makes decisions is a key question. Major sectors of the economy—education, health, electricity, water, and so on—should be brought under the democratic control and management of workers. These economic demands are intertwined with the demand for the political independence of Azad Kashmir. Achieving that goal requires clear organizational steps. Support for JAAC suggests potential, but we must go further by establishing democratically organised committees in workplaces and across all parts of Kashmir to advance these demands. This can be done by building organized strength. Appeals should be made to workers, farmers, youth, and activists in all parts of Pakistan, in India (including Indian-occupied territory), and to Chinese workers for solidarity and joint action. Such an appeal, and winning over workers across the region to forge a united struggle, is necessary to confront the capitalist states that are interlocked in geopolitical competition and seek to exploit the region. Therefore, the fight for socioeconomic freedom and for the right to self-determination for Azad Kashmir should be linked to building a united struggle and to the establishment of a voluntary socialist confederation of nationalities in South Asia and beyond.