Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir: Elections, State Repression, and the Collapse of the 'Azad' Narrative

Violence, disputed elections, and growing unrest expose a deepening crisis of legitimacy in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

 The gunfire that echoed through the streets of Rawalakot and Mirpur in the final week of July 2026 did not merely shatter the fragile calm of a mountainous Himalayan territory. It shattered, with far greater finality, the carefully constructed edifice upon which Pakistan has built its Kashmir narrative for nearly eight decades. In Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), a region Islamabad has long branded "Azad Kashmir (آزاد جموں و کشمیر)" — "Free Kashmir" — security forces opened fire on unarmed civilians protesting a contested legislative election, killing at least thirty people in two days, forcibly removing corpses from hospitals, and imposing a communications blackout that has rendered independent verification nearly impossible. The violence, which erupted on the margins of a three-phase electoral exercise that began on July 27, represents the bloodiest chapter in a confrontation between the Pakistani state and its own Kashmiri subjects that has been building, with gathering force, for more than three years. What began as a grassroots agitation over the price of flour and electricity has metastasised into an existential challenge to Islamabad's authority over a territory it claims to champion, exposing contradictions so fundamental that no amount of constitutional engineering or military coercion appears capable of resolving them.
The roots of the present conflagration stretch back to 2023, when the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC, جموں کشمیر جوائنٹ عوامی ایکشن کمیٹی), emerged as a coalition of civil society groups in PoK's Poonch Division. Its original charter was modest, almost prosaic: subsidised flour, electricity priced at cost rather than at the punitive rates imposed on a region that generates cheap hydroelectric power for the rest of Pakistan through the Mangla and Neelum-Jhelum dams, and a share in the revenues those projects produce. These were the grievances of a population long accustomed to economic extraction without reciprocal investment. Yet as the movement matured, its demands expanded to a thirty-eight-point charter that struck at the architecture of Pakistani control itself. Chief among the new demands was the abolition of twelve seats in PoK's forty-five-member Legislative Assembly reserved for Kashmiri refugees — individuals who migrated from Indian-administered Jammu during the 1947 partition violence and now reside in cities across Pakistan, including Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Sialkot. These twelve constituencies, accounting for roughly 439,000 registered voters scattered far beyond PoK's borders, have long been viewed by residents as instruments through which Islamabad's political parties manipulate government formation in Muzaffarabad, the regional capital. The JAAC argued, with considerable logical force, that individuals with no residence in, and no material stake in, the territory should not determine its governance.
For a time, it appeared that dialogue might prevail. In October 2025, the JAAC and the federal government reached a negotiated agreement, and the movement's leadership harboured cautious optimism. That optimism proved illusory. On May 30, 2026, the JAAC submitted written proposals offering two compromises: retaining symbolic refugee representation until the broader Kashmir dispute was resolved, or converting the twelve assembly seats into four seats on the Kashmir Council, the Islamabad-chaired body that exercises legislative authority over PoK's federal-facing affairs. Both proposals were rejected at an All-Parties Conference in Muzaffarabad on June 3. Two days earlier, on June 1, PoK's Supreme Court had ruled that the seats were constitutionally protected and could be abolished only through a formal amendment — a process rendered impossible by the fact that the outgoing assembly's term had already expired. Federal Advisor on Political Affairs Rana Sanaullah reinforced the judicial position on June 10, declaring before the Senate that the twelve seats would not be abolished.
The state's response to continued agitation was swift and severe. On June 5, PoK's Home Department officially banned the JAAC, designating it a terrorist organisation. Mobile and internet services were suspended across the territory that same day — a shutdown that, as of late July, remains largely in effect. During the intervening night of June 6 and 7, law enforcement agencies attacked JAAC core committee members: senior leader Umar Nazir Kashmiri survived with injuries, but his associate Shahzaib Habib was killed. The regional government requisitioned approximately 14,000 paramilitary personnel to quell the unrest. In the weeks that followed, a Long March toward Muzaffarabad drew thousands, sit-in camps proliferated in Rawalakot, and clashes between protesters and security forces produced a steady toll of casualties. By the time polling commenced on July 27, nearly forty people had been killed since early June, according to Al Jazeera's tally. Banks had remained shuttered for two weeks. Poonch Division, the epicentre of the unrest and the area bordering India, had been effectively sealed off, disrupting the supply of flour, medicine, and other essentials to a population already enduring severe hardship.
It was against this backdrop of siege and suppression that Pakistan proceeded with elections for PoK's Legislative Assembly — an exercise originally scheduled for a single day on July 27 but split into three phases, ostensibly for security reasons. The first phase covered thirteen constituencies in Mirpur Division, encompassing the districts of Mirpur, Kotli, and Bhimber. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party founded by imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan that had won the 2021 elections, boycotted the vote entirely, citing electoral fraud. JAAC members were barred from contesting as independents. The Pakistan Army was deployed alongside civil security agencies, with Punjab Police contributing approximately 14,000 personnel, roughly thirty per cent of whom were armed while the remainder carried anti-riot equipment. The results, when declared, gave the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz nine of the thirteen seats, with the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی) finishing second. Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz hailed an "outstanding victory," while the PPP alleged rigging. Yet these inter-party recriminations were almost incidental. The election's legitimacy had already been hollowed out by the absence of the principal opposition force, the exclusion of the protest movement's leadership, and the atmosphere of terror in which voting occurred.
The violence that accompanied and followed polling day was of a different order entirely. On July 28 and 29, clashes in Rawalakot and Mirpur produced what the JAAC described as a massacre: at least thirty civilians killed, with security forces allegedly firing on thousands of peaceful protesters and subsequently removing bodies from local hospitals to destroy evidence. "Security forces have taken away the bodies and locked away the hospital in Mirpur," JAAC spokesperson S.A. Khan told The Guardian. "We have the photos and video evidence of bodies lying on streets in a pool of blood. The security forces abducted the bodies to erase the evidence." Authorities acknowledged one security personnel killed and five injured, while an anonymous official confirmed at least three protester fatalities in Mirpur. The discrepancy between official and movement figures could not be reconciled, owing to the ongoing internet blackout that has severed PoK from the outside world and rendered independent journalism virtually impossible. PoK police held a press conference on July 29 claiming that sophisticated weapons had been recovered from arrested suspects and that the JAAC was operating under a broader "agenda." JAAC leaders, for their part, maintained that the movement remained peaceful and that organisers had explicitly instructed supporters not to carry weapons.
Perhaps no single utterance more starkly revealed the Pakistani state's posture toward its Kashmiri subjects than the words of Defence Minister Khawaja Asif. In a video posted on the social media platform X, Asif declared: "I put the protesters of Azad Kashmir in the same category as India and consider them also as enemies like India." The equation of civilian demonstrators with a nuclear-armed adversary was not merely inflammatory; it was an admission that the state views the exercise of political dissent in PoK through the lens of national security rather than democratic governance. Information and Broadcasting Minister Atatullah Tarar similarly labelled the protests "India-sponsored," an allegation for which no evidence was presented and which India has categorically rejected. The framing is familiar: any expression of Kashmiri agency that does not align with Islamabad's strategic narrative is attributed to foreign instigation, thereby absolving the state of the obligation to address legitimate grievances.
India's response was pointed and multilayered. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) condemned the violence in unequivocal terms, with spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal stating that the protests were "a direct consequence of Pakistan's decades-long systemic exploitation, denial of fundamental rights, and administrative oppression in areas under its illegal and forcible occupation." New Delhi accused Islamabad of responding to legitimate grievances with "extreme police brutality, including against helpless women and children," and called upon the international community to hold Pakistan accountable. In a separate diplomatic intervention, the Indian Embassy in Washington publicly challenged a New York Times headline that described the unrest as occurring in "Pakistani Kashmir," calling the phrasing "misleading and incorrect" and asserting that "there is no Pakistani Kashmir, only Pakistan-occupied Kashmir." The terminological dispute is not merely semantic; it reflects a fundamental contestation over sovereignty, legitimacy, and the legal status of a territory that Pakistan has administered since 1947 but which India maintains was illegally seized following the accession of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian Union.
Within Pakistan itself, the opposition broke ranks to condemn the crackdown. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI, پاکستان تحريکِ انصاف) Secretary General Salman Akram Raja, addressing a joint press conference in Islamabad on July 29 alongside Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen Chairman Allama Raja Nasir Abbas, alleged that the situation in PoK was being concealed by state-run media, that bodies of victims had not been returned to their families, and that "fascism, repression and the absence of constitutional and legal supremacy" had taken root in the region. Abbas went further, asserting that PoK was "not part of Pakistan but a separate state" — a remarkable statement from a Pakistani political leader that inadvertently underscored the constitutional ambiguity Islamabad has cultivated for decades. The territory's own political architecture reinforces this ambiguity: candidates seeking public office must swear allegiance to PoK's "accession to Pakistan," a requirement that, as historian Anam Zakaria has observed, "in itself contradicts the right to self-determination" that Pakistan claims to champion on the international stage.
The international response, however, has been conspicuously muted relative to the scale of the crisis. In the United Kingdom, where a substantial Kashmiri diaspora has staged demonstrations marching from Parliament Square to the Pakistani High Commission, more than sixty Members of Parliament, led by Labour MP and All-Party Parliamentary Group on Kashmir Chair Imran Hussain, raised concerns about food blockades, media blackouts, and arbitrary arrests, urging Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper to seek clarification from Islamabad. Yet no Western government has issued the kind of sustained condemnation that comparable crises have historically provoked. The relative silence from Washington is explicable in strategic terms: Pakistan has regained utility as a diplomatic partner amid the widening conflict in the Middle East, and geopolitical necessity has, as it so often does, tempered the language of human rights. The United Nations urged an investigation into the deaths, but the call carried little operational force.
The human cost of the crisis extends well beyond the death toll. In Poonch Division, the prolonged internet shutdown — now entering its eighth week — has paralysed education, commerce, and healthcare. Masood Khan, principal of a postgraduate college in the Pallandari area, described how his students' medical college entrance examinations were postponed indefinitely, leaving an entire academic cohort in limbo. "No exam means no result, which means no admission," he told Al Jazeera. "For an entire generation of students here, this is a wasted academic year." Public transport has become prohibitively expensive, groceries scarce, and the movement of patients to tertiary hospitals a logistical ordeal requiring neighbours to siphon petrol from motorcycles. JAAC leader Sardar Aman Khan alleged that Pakistan had blocked the supply of food and medicines for three weeks, creating a humanitarian crisis, and warned that people might "consider the option of turning to India" if the blockades continued.
What, then, lies ahead? The second and third phases of the election — scheduled for August 2 and August 10 — will proceed under conditions that make a credible democratic outcome exceedingly difficult. Political analyst Hasan Askari noted that the PML-N would likely require the support of some of the twelve refugee representatives to form a regional government, asking: "When their government is dependent on those 12 controversial seats, how would it be able to find a solution for this issue?" The structural contradiction is self-reinforcing. The very mechanism through which Islamabad exercises political control over PoK is the mechanism that generates the grievances driving the unrest. Constitutional amendment, the only legal pathway to abolishing the refugee seats, requires a functioning legislature whose legitimacy is contested by a significant portion of the electorate. The Gilgit-Baltistan Assembly's recent unanimous resolution demanding provisional provincial status adds a further complicating dimension, raising the spectre of cascading constitutional demands across Pakistan's northern territories.
A sustainable resolution demands, at minimum, three concurrent interventions. First, the immediate restoration of communications infrastructure and the lifting of movement restrictions, without which no political process can claim legitimacy and no humanitarian situation can be adequately assessed. Second, an independent, internationally supervised investigation into the killings of June and July, with accountability for those who ordered and executed the use of lethal force against unarmed civilians. Third, a genuine constitutional dialogue — not conducted under duress, as the Supreme Court rightly cautioned, but also not deferred indefinitely behind the fiction that only a future legislature can act. The JAAC's compromise proposals, particularly the conversion of refugee assembly seats into Kashmir Council representation, offer a pragmatic starting point that preserves symbolic recognition of displaced populations while restoring electoral integrity to the territory's own governance. Nevertheless, there is little evidence to suggest that altering the composition of representative institutions alone would resolve the deeper questions of political autonomy, civil liberties, and federal oversight that underpin the current crisis. Pakistan's security establishment, which JAAC leaders have identified as the true locus of authority, must recognise that coercion has reached the limits of its efficacy. A population that has endured eight weeks of digital silence, food shortages, and lethal force has demonstrated that the cost of submission now exceeds the cost of resistance. The fiction of "Azad Kashmir" cannot survive the reality of what its people have endured. The question is no longer whether the narrative will unravel, but whether the unravelling will be managed through political accommodation or through further bloodshed. The evidence of the past two months suggests that the window for the former is narrowing rapidly.

IndraStra Global is now available on
Apple News, Google News, Feedly, Flipboard, and  WhatsApp Channel

DISCLAIMER: This is a developing story. The information presented in this article reflects events and statements available at the time of writing. As the situation continues to evolve, subsequent updates and official statements may alter the context and understanding of these developments.

COPYRIGHT: This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

REPUBLISH: Republish our articles online or in print for free if you follow these guidelines. https://www.indrastra.com/p/republish-us.html