BY Salman Rafi Sheikh
In May 2023, a group of protesters in Rawalakot, in the Poonch district of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, began a sit-in. Their demands were for the regional administration of Azad Jammu and Kashmir to lower the price of electricity and provide a subsidy on wheat flour, prices of which had soared due to high inflation and were symptoms of the politically triggered economic distress that the country has been facing for more than two years. The protesters also asked that the government spend more on Kashmir’s public rather than on the political elites who get their salaries, allowances and perks from Islamabad. When the government failed to respond, many residents stopped paying their electricity bills. From the first week of August onwards, protesters began to burn their electricity bills in public demonstrations of frustration.
This simmering tension lasted a year until, on 8 May 2024, the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), an alliance of civil rights groups in the region, escalated protests, planning a march to the regional capital, Muzaffarabad. The government sent in paramilitary troops, who opened fire and lobbed teargas at protesting crowds, killing at least four people and resulting in the arrests of at least seventy activists. With the protests expected to gain further momentum after the incident, the Pakistan government agreed to provide PKR 23 billion (USD 82 million) in subsidies to the region to pacify protesters.
The decades-long armed insurgency in the India-administered region of Jammu and Kashmir, a regular source of geopolitical tensions between India and Pakistan, often makes international headlines. However, Pakistan-administered Kashmir – often referred to as Azad Kashmir, or “free” Kashmir – rarely makes the news. The events of this May were the exception and shattered the myth of the region being truly free – a myth Pakistan has carefully nurtured to burnish its image in India-administered Kashmir, which New Delhi keeps under severe repression. Both India and Pakistan lay claim to the whole of Kashmir, even while each controls only part of it.
While the protests have since been called off, most people involved in the movement who I spoke to believe it to be a temporary calm before a new storm. According to one protester, who spoke on condition of anonymity, a key reason is that Kashmiris feel relegated to secondary status within Pakistan. The protester said that Islamabad “arbitrarily violates, every now and then, concessions that we deserve and the basic autonomy we demand” – even while Azad Jammu and Kashmir is nominally an administrative unit within Pakistan.
Electricity is a crucial issue in Pakistan-administered Kashmir because of a massive imbalance between production costs, supply, demand, and the charges that consumers end up paying. The region has hydroelectricity plants that produce about 3000 megawatts of power, most of which is supplied to other parts of Pakistan. The demand within the region is only 400 megawatts. Yet it still sees long hours of load-shedding power cuts. Moreover, consumers pay a per-unit electricity price which the protesters argued should be less than three Pakistani rupees but which the government keeps much higher.
In early April, Arif Chaudhary, a prominent member of the JAAC, said to reporters, “The Pakistani constitution, in Articles 157 and 161, stipulates that the majority benefit of resources generated from any land will be given to the locals. However, our rivers produce cheap electricity at merely PKR 2.59 per unit, yet we are charged around PKR 80 per unit. This discrepancy is neither constitutional nor humanitarian.”
This discrepancy was at the heart of the May 2023 protests and the subsequent boycott of bill payments. Media reports indicated that protesters burnt several thousand bills in the boycott, which led to consumers owing more than PKR 4 billion to the electricity department.
While the Pakistan government met the protesters’ demands by announcing an additional electricity subsidy, serious questions about the future of the region and its people remain, including the question of genuine autonomy and locals’ political and civil rights. Even though the 13th amendment to the constitution of Azad Jammu and Kashmir in 2018 gave the region constitutional autonomy, it remains subject to politics in Pakistan.
The people of Pakistan-administered Kashmir do not have any representation within Pakistan’s parliament or its cabinet, leaving them excluded them from the country’s highest legislative bodies, which make decisions that affect their lives enormously. A JAAC member told me on condition of anonymity that even though the status of the region was in dispute with India, “it should not translate into a form of permanent exclusion for us.”
Who wins elections in Pakistan is, more often than not, an outcome of pre-election deals between political parties and the military establishment. Elections in Pakistan-administered Kashmir are directly affected by such deals as well. Although the territory has its own assembly and government, and its electoral process is supposedly independent of Pakistan’s, electoral winners in the region are often determined by Islamabad. In 2021, for instance, the ruling party in Islamabad was the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), led by Imran Khan. Accordingly, the 2021 general elections in Kashmir saw the PTI end up as the largest political party. In 2016, the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML–N) was in power and it won that year’s election in the region. In 2011, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) was in power and ended up winning in the region. This near-perfect match between the politics of Islamabad and Kashmir is “part and parcel of the Pakistani military establishment’s grand strategy of maintaining strict control in the region,” said a former member of Pakistan’s parliamentary committee on Kashmir.
The former member of parliament also said that the dispute between Pakistan and India over the whole of Kashmir has been central to the Pakistan military’s political economy. Wars with India have been central to the politics of maintaining an almost “unaccountable defence budget”, the former committee member added. Therefore, frequent demands for real autonomy and large-scale protests explode the myth of Pakistan-administered Kashmir’s autonomous status and severely compromise Pakistan’s overall stand vis-à-vis India’s “occupation” of Jammu and Kashmir.
This explains why Islamabad chose to deploy paramilitary forces in Azad Kashmir to suppress protesters. Its decision to agree to increased subsidies stemmed not so much from a willingness to accept Kashmiris’ legitimate demands as from a desire to maintain a sense of calm and peace. “Islamabad can continue to play its usual game with India, contrasting the ‘peace’ of this Kashmir with the turbulence of the Indian-held Kashmir,” said the protester I spoke to. He argued that Islamabad must make space for the people of Pakistan-administered Kashmir “to become internally autonomous”. One mechanism for this is for the region to become a province of Pakistan and be given provincial autonomy. He pointed out Islamabad’s hypocrisy by saying that it cannot ask India to allow self-determination for India-administered Jammu and Kashmir without first offering the same to the territory under its control.
In the early hours of 15 May, Ahmad Farhad, a popular poet from Pakistan-administered Kashmir, was abducted by security agencies from his home in Islamabad. Farhad has been vocal in his criticism of the forced disappearances of Baloch, Pashtun and Sindhi activists – all from communities battling Islamabad for more autonomy and rights – and in his support for the protest movement in Azad Kashmir. Farhad later surfaced near the border between Kashmir and Khyber Pakhtunkhwah provinceon 29 May, even as the Islamabad High Court was hearing a petition seeking his recovery. In police custody, he has been denied bail by an anti-terrorism court.
Farhad’s case demonstrates a violation of basic rights of a kind that has become common in Azad Kashmir, like elsewhere in Pakistan. Across the country, recent developments, including the amassing of power by extra-political institutions, shows a lack of will to follow the provisions of the constitution of Pakistan. Given that the question of autonomy for Pakistan-administered Kashmir is constitutional in nature, the prospects of its true implementation are poor in a political atmosphere that lacks basic respect for the constitution.