I keep refreshing my phone at two in the morning like it is going to change something. It does not. Rawalakot is still Rawalakot, Muzaffarabad is still Muzaffarabad and people are still getting shot in streets that most of the world could not point to on a map.
Let me back up.
This year Azad Kashmir has not just had protests, it has had a slow-motion uprising that the government keeps trying to bury under paperwork and batons. The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, known as JAAC, has been at the centre of it, and if you do not know who they are by now you have not been paying attention, which honestly is fair, because barely anyone made you pay attention. JAAC is not some fringe outfit either. It is traders, transporters, students, lawyers, ordinary shopkeepers, the kind of coalition that forms when enough regular people get pushed far enough. According to background compiled by researchers, the group emerged out of an earlier wave of protests in 2023 over subsidised flour and electricity that the government promised to fix and then quietly did not.
By June this year it hit a boiling point. The Supreme Court of Azad Jammu and Kashmir ruled that twelve reserved assembly seats, set aside for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who now live elsewhere in Pakistan, are constitutionally protected and cannot be scrapped without a constitutional amendment. On paper that sounds like a technical legal footnote. On the ground it meant local residents felt, once again, that their own representation was being handed to people who do not actually live there and vote there day to day. As Al Jazeera reported, JAAC is calling for those seats to go entirely, arguing that every seat in a 45 seat legislature should belong to people who actually live in the territory, not to constituencies scattered across the rest of Pakistan.
And then the government did what governments like this tend to do when they do not want a conversation. JAAC was banned outright under the Anti-Terrorism Act, with local authorities accusing the group of “creating anarchy” and “intimidating the public.” Its leader Shaukat Nawaz Mir was arrested from the Dhirkhot area of Bagh district, with a reported ten million rupee bounty on him beforehand, something close to thirty five thousand dollars for a man who spent his time organising sit-ins and strikes.
Security forces flooded into Muzaffarabad. Federal paramilitary troops were deployed and a strict travel advisory went up telling tourists to leave before a scheduled rally, and the rally happened anyway because people were done waiting. NetBlocks, the internet monitoring group, found that web access across the region stayed severely restricted for three days straight around that period, which tends to be exactly the kind of detail that makes a story harder to follow from outside and easier to bury from inside.
People died, and they kept dying as the summer went on. At least eleven were killed in Rawalakot in early June, before a major rally even started, with more than seventy injured on both sides according to Al Jazeera’s reporting at the time. That was not the end of it. By mid-July, after another long march toward Muzaffarabad and fresh clashes, officials put the overall death toll from weeks of unrest and the security crackdown at twenty eight, including five police officers, with a separate confrontation in Sudhnoti district alone killing seven protesters and an officer, according to Al Jazeera’s later coverage. Read that back. Twenty eight people dead this year over subsidised wheat, electricity bills and a vote that actually counts for something.
Here is the part that eats at me. Kashmiris on both sides of a border most of them never chose have been vocal in their support for what is happening in AJK, because they understand better than most what it means to be spoken for instead of spoken to. But go looking for wall to wall live coverage of any of this on major international channels and you come up mostly empty. There is solid reporting if you go looking, wire pieces from Reuters, an AFP photograph here and there, a genuinely thorough explainer from Al Jazeera. What is missing is the sustained, camera-in-the-street, top-of-the-hour treatment that other crises get automatically. It is not that nothing got written. It is that hardly anyone outside the region was made to sit with it the way you sit with a story when it is on your screen every single night.
And this is bigger than one bad summer.
AJK is not a province of Pakistan. It runs its own local government, complete with a prime minister and a legislative assembly, but under a 1974 interim constitution that keeps defence, foreign affairs, currency and communications firmly under Islamabad’s control. Same story in a different accent plays out in Gilgit-Baltistan. GB is not a province either. There is no full seat count in the National Assembly, no Senate representation to match the actual provinces, none of the constitutional guarantees that Punjab or Sindh get to take for granted. People there have spent years watching land disputes drag on, watching CPEC projects roll straight through their region while feeling like the benefits roll off somewhere else, watching glaciers melt and roads wash out and hospitals stay understaffed while the real decisions about their own future get made somewhere far away.
Unemployment runs high in both places. Electricity is unreliable. Flour and basic goods cost more than they reasonably should. Healthcare is thin on the ground and getting thinner in the more remote valleys. And when people organise to say something about any of it, the pattern repeats itself almost exactly, protest, government stalls, government makes promises, promises get shelved, protest again, this time bigger, this time angrier, this time somebody does not go home. It happened in May 2024 too, when a long march toward Muzaffarabad ended with at least five dead, one of them a police officer, before the government agreed to a subsidy package and the protests paused for a while. That pause did not last, which tells you most of what you need to know about how seriously the promises were meant.
Pakistan’s official reasoning for withholding provincial status is that Jammu and Kashmir remains internationally disputed territory, and that turning GB or AJK into permanent provinces could look like Pakistan settling that dispute on its own terms. A journalist quoted in the Al Jazeera piece, originally from a village near the Line of Control, put the government’s logic plainly, warning that scrapping the reserved seats would weaken Pakistan’s own case for Kashmiri self-determination at the United Nations while strengthening India’s. There is a legal logic to that argument if you squint hard enough at it.
But it is cold comfort to someone in Skardu whose kid cannot get proper medical treatment, or someone in Bagh who just buried a neighbour killed over subsidised wheat and honest representation. You cannot ask people to carry the weight of an eighty year old geopolitical stalemate on their own backs while they wait for a resolution that never quite arrives. That is not diplomacy. That is a burden getting handed down to the people least able to refuse it.
I will say plainly what I think, because that is what a column is for. Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan should be provinces, or at the very least should carry full constitutional rights equal to provincial status, whatever eventually happens with the wider dispute. Equal citizenship should not be a bargaining chip held hostage to a negotiation that has been stuck for generations. You can hold whatever position you want on the larger Kashmir question and still believe the people living there right now deserve real representation, real accountability and a government that does not answer a sit-in with a bounty and a bullet.
What people in these regions are actually asking for is not radical. JAAC’s own charter, a detailed 38-point list released in late 2025, reads as almost boringly reasonable once you sit with it: subsidised electricity, an end to flour smuggling, investigations into corrupt officials, better infrastructure and social welfare, and the abolition of those reserved seats. Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, head of the Pakistan Peoples Party, claimed in June that thirty five of those thirty eight demands had already been met, with the rest blocked by court order or simply unworkable. Whether that number holds up to scrutiny is exactly the kind of thing worth watching closely in the months ahead, because promises met on paper and promises felt in a household’s monthly budget have not always been the same thing in this region’s recent history.
That is the whole ask, in the end. Lower bills. Real seats. Accountable officials. Roads that survive a monsoon. The freedom to organise without getting labelled a terrorist for it. And the response, over and over across three years now, has been delay, then deny, then deploy.
I do not have a tidy ending here because there is not one yet. Voting in Mirpur division opened today. Muzaffarabad division, along with those same twelve contested seats, votes on August 2, and Poonch follows on August 10, staggered partly because the authorities themselves admit the security situation could not handle it any other way. JAAC is still banned. People are still out in the streets. And somewhere tonight, someone else is scrolling their phone at two in the morning too, wondering why the rest of the world changed the channel.
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