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# Bread to Power: Awami Action Committee(s) and Remaking of Politics Across Kashmir
- URL: https://azadi.asia/en/bread-to-power-awami-action-committee-s-and-remaking-of-politics-across-kashmir/
- Published: 2025-10-01T19:36:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T13:11:39.000Z
- Author: ammara
- Tags: #lang-en, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation, Gilgit-Baltistan, Ladakh, CPEC, State repression

*On bread, power, and the committees that link hydel dams to social reproduction across a militarised borderland.*

On Sunday 29 September 2025, the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) — an alliance of bazaar committees, transporters, student groups, public-sector workers and neighbourhood forums — called an indefinite, territory-wide "shutterdown and wheel-jam" in Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK). The demand sheet had swollen into what organisers call a "38-point charter" — from electricity billed at the cost of local hydropower generation, to affordable flour, curbs on elite perks, and the abolition of 12 "refugee seats" in the AJK assembly that are elected in Pakistan proper and widely criticised for letting Islamabad shape Muzaffarabad's politics at one remove. Shops shut, buses stopped, and the coalition announced a long march toward the capital.

Opponents at All Jammu & Kashmir Muslim Conference (MC) — a long-standing, pro-Islamabad party — pushed a caravan-style "peace rally" into Muzaffarabad the same day the shutdown began. It was widely read as counter-programming the strike. Gunfire followed. Initial dispatches recorded one person killed and more than two dozen injured.

By 1 October, the Associated Press revised the overall toll to four dead and 100+ injured as clashes spread, while other Pakistani outlets gave higher figures (e.g., Pakistan Today cited nine killed and 220 injured). The mobile and internet service in parts of AJK was partially suspended, compounding the uncertainty about casualties and fueling contradictory claims. Under the fog of a communications clampdown, JAAC and its critics traded blame for the Muzaffarabad shooting even as roads and shops remained shut across districts.

By 2 Oct, officials speaking to Reuters and AP were citing eight to nine deaths across several days of unrest and 150+ injuries, many among police. The federal and AJK governments opened talks and urged calm; injured protestors were moved to Islamabad hospitals facing blood-bank shortages. Phone and internet in the region stays blocked, obscuring real-time verification while deepening public fear. Businesses, schools, and transport remained largely shut.

As protests and the communications blackout hardened across AJK; Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi became second stages. Islamabad Police raided the National Press Club (NPC) to attack and detain peacefully protesting student organisers and supporters, including JKNSF comrades Omer Abdullah Khan, Sanaa'i Muhammad, Asif Rashid, and Rehana Akhtar, alongside journalists and lawyers who were present. Many in the press corps and bar stood in visible solidarity, demanding releases and accountability. Several detainees were released later after protests and legal interventions continued, but stressed that Kashmir remains under blackout and the crackdown continues. The raid at NPC became a symbolic wound that made global headlines right away and forced the Interior Ministry to order an inquiry.

Amidst the crackdown and internet blockade, alongside the price-of-life agenda, constitutional demands burst into the open from student and civic organisers:

1. Immediately dissolve the AJK Legislative Assembly
2. Abrogate the Interim Constitution Act, 1974
3. Call elections to a new, time-bound Constituent Assembly

This constitutional turn doesn't replace the bread-and-butter demands; it grounds them — arguing that prices, subsidies, dams, and royalties will keep snapping back unless the rules of representation and authority are rebuilt by an assembly answerable to the people of Jammu & Kashmir.

Two things are not in dispute:

1. The state treated this as a security problem: outside police and paramilitary units were moved in; connectivity was curbed or cut; and organisers reported detentions and raids.
2. The strike bit: the social networks built since 2023 could close towns and hold lines even under partial blackout — because the committee form (shopkeepers + transporters + students + women's neighbourhood groups) had already become everyday infrastructure. That is the thesis we build here because September 2025 is not a "riot" out of the blue; it's the predictable sequel to a price-of-life fight that forced the government to rewrite bills and budgets in May 2024 — and then tried to fence protest back in with a licensing law that was beaten back in December 2024, and that such committees with categorical presence of socialist catalysts might be the blueprints that could fill the political voids during South Asian spring 2.0.

## From "what's on the bill" to "who sets the price of life?"

In early–mid 2024, something that had simmered for months in Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJK) boiled over into a simple, material question: who sets the price of life? After a week of strikes and a "wheel-jam" (transport shutdown) that blanketed the territory, Pakistan's federal cabinet rushed through a relief package for AJK — Rs 23 billion in fiscal support on May 13, 2024 — after negotiations with a grassroots coalition calling itself the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC). Within hours the AJK government issued written notifications: flour would drop from roughly Rs 3,100 to Rs 2,000 per 40-kg bag; and household electricity would shift to three "slabs" — bracketed per-kWh prices tied to usage — of Rs 3 for the first 1–100 units, Rs 5 for the next 101–300, and Rs 6 above 300 (commercial tariffs: Rs 10 up to 300 units, Rs 15 thereafter). The point of spelling out those numbers is the politics inside them: "slabs" are not a slogan, they're a rule you can hold a bill up against. JAAC called off its then-march after written notifications were issued.

The state's first counter-move wasn't economic but legal. In late October–December 2024, a "Peaceful Assembly and Public Order" ordinance tried to shove protest back behind a permit regime. Marches, strikes and court petitions followed; violence flared in Kotli (dozens injured), and the AJK Supreme Court suspended the ordinance before an eventual withdrawal — after which the government publicly handed JAAC a withdrawal notification mid-negotiations. The movement learned a durable lesson: civil liberties are not a "separate" front — they defend gains on flour and power by preserving the capacity to meet, march, and monitor implementation.

## The AJK and GB continuum

There's a spatiotemporal continuity. GB's Awami Action Committee (AAC) — a federation of traders, transporters, student and neighbourhood committees — has for years articulated a class-rooted charter: restore the wheat subsidy at 2022 prices; roll back new indirect taxes; deliver electricity at local generation cost from GB's hydropower; halt land and resource dispossession without representation. A January 2024 "15-point" charter crystallised this into demands that could shut towns and open negotiations. It wasn't born yesterday. In spring 2014, the AAC mobilised a region-wide "Chalo Gilgit" (Let's go to Gilgit) long march over the wheat subsidy; highways were blocked, and leaders like the socialist lawyer Ehsan Ali (long-time defence counsel for movements, and organizer with Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) Pakistan) became public faces of an explicitly class-framed agitation. In January–February 2024, sit-ins stretched past a month and, after talks, the GB government suspended enforcement of several Finance Act taxes and moved to restore the wheat subsidy — partial wins wrung from a hard street. That winter and again in 2025, protesters also blocked the Karakoram Highway at Aliabad over outages and pricing — pinching a key artery of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Baba Jan — Awami Workers Party (AWP) leader from Hunza — is the other pole of this memory. Jailed for nearly a decade after Attabad-affectees protests (2011), convicted by an anti-terrorism court, and released in 2020 under pressure, his case became shorthand for the criminalisation of social protest in GB's hybrid legal order. The movement's older militants and younger organisers alike learned both the cost of dissent and the uses of a disciplined committee form.

If these campaigns resonate, it's because the political economy beneath them is legible at the meter and the ration shop. Hydropower is generated in these mountains and sold into national markets downstream. In AJK, the Neelum–Jhelum project's repeated shutdowns and cost overruns became public scandal (a 2024 shutdown was estimated to cost tens of billions of rupees in replacement power; auditors later called the project a "failure"). Meanwhile, annual "water-use charges" tied to reservoirs like Mangla — inter-governmental transfers owed to AJK for the river it hosts — have been a long-running fiscal tug-of-war with Islamabad, spotlighting who captures value from dams. When JAAC says "electricity at generation cost," it isn't romantic hydro-localism; it's a demand to re-peg end-user tariffs to the actual cost at source instead of to national accounting that bakes in capacity payments to private power producers and system losses.

## What about Beijing and "multipolarity"?

A common dodge on parts of the global left is that because Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) finance hydropower along the Jhelum under CPEC, criticism "objectively" helps Washington. The record says otherwise. In AJK, the 1,124 MW Kohala Hydropower Project (sponsored by China Three Gorges) and the 700 MW Azad Pattan project (led by China Gezhouba) are formally CPEC projects; both have been entangled in land-acquisition and environmental-regulatory controversy on the AJK side, financing delays, and in 2025 were even excluded from Pakistan's IGCEP 2025-35 due to failure to reach financial close. At Karot (720 MW, downstream on the Jhelum, majority-owned by a China Three Gorges affiliate), labour-rights complaints reached international accountability mechanisms, alleging anti-union practices and mistreatment of workers. In other words: Chinese capital and Pakistani authorities have together shaped land, labour and security arrangements around these schemes. Ignoring those facts because they complicate "camp" narratives would be the opposite of internationalism; the AAC/JAAC have targeted the local state-capital nexus precisely because that's where prices and wages are set. (And when GB protesters choke the Karakoram Highway, they are very concretely pressing on a CPEC-era chokepoint.)

## Women and students on the frontlines

From October 10, 2023 — when women and children heeded a JAAC call and poured onto streets across AJK — to the strike kitchens and bill-boycott logistics of 2024–25, women's work has been organisational, not ornamental. Students, especially the Marxist current inside the Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation (JKNSF), supplied a repertoire: mass meetings, neighbourhood committees, disciplined pickets, a language that connects power bills and wheat quotas to demilitarisation and free cross-LoC movement. The JKNSF's own arc maps this: a radical student organisation since the 1960s, it rebuilt itself in the 2000s–2010s around Marxist cadre politics, held mass conventions (e.g., Muzaffarabad 2014; Rawalakot 2017; Muzaffarabad 2021; a 22nd "Intifada Jammu Kashmir Convention" in Rawalakot on September 20, 2025), and has long memorialised earlier attempts to dramatise the Line of Control (the "Chakothi martyrs"). Cross-border student solidarity hasn't been abstract either: in 2014, India's AISA sent greetings to the JKNSF convention, one instance of a fragile but real habit of practical solidarity.

On 2 October 2025, amid the blackout, JKNSF issued a statement — "The Roads of Kashmir are Burning with Resistance" — claiming eleven protesters killed and dozens wounded, denouncing the deployment of Islamabad Police, FC, Punjab Constabulary and Rangers, and rooting the uprising in the 38-point charter. This is not a neutral source (it is their own), but it captures how the rad-bloc inside the wider coalition reads the moment: as a price-of-life fight fused to a democratic fight for popular control over resources.

## Across the LoC: Article 370, elections, and Ladakh's "statehood" fight

On December 11, 2023, India's Supreme Court upheld the Union's 2019 abrogation of Article 370 and did not set aside the reorganisation that split the former state into the Union Territories of J&K and Ladakh. Under that new constitutional ceiling, J&K held long-delayed assembly elections (September–October 2024). The National Conference–Congress alliance emerged with a majority and Omar Abdullah was sworn in as Chief Minister on October 16, 2024 — opening a narrow parliamentary space inside a still-centralised order. Whether that space yields material redress is the metric that matters.

Ladakh, carved out in 2019, has moved on its own track. In September 2025, during a joint Leh Apex Body (LAB) and Kargil Democratic Alliance (KDA) agitation for statehood and Sixth Schedule protections, police firing in Leh killed four and injured dozens; activist Sonam Wangchuk (inspiration for the lead character of "3 Idiots" — a culturally iconic film) was arrested days later; curfew and mobile-internet suspensions followed as New Delhi scheduled another negotiating round. The idiom in Ladakh — constitutional safeguards for land, jobs, and culture — differs from AJK/GB's tariff-and-subsidy focus. But strip away the forms and the essence rhymes: democratic control over the resources and conditions of life in a frontier militarised for someone else's maps.

## East of the watershed: Aksai Chin and the long border economy

For outsiders it helps to widen the map. Aksai Chin — the high, bleak plateau that formed part of the old princely state's eastern edge — has been under Chinese control since the 1962 war, when Beijing defended the Xinjiang–Tibet road (today's G219) it had driven across the plateau in the 1950s. That road, and successive rounds of border infrastructure on both sides of the Line of Actual Control, are the hard-edged backdrop to "development" across the region. The hydropower corridors, military garrisons and restricted zones in Ladakh (and the "security-first" development mode in AJK/GB) aren't quirks — they are a border political economy stretching from the Karakoram down to the Pir Panjal.

## What the committees teach us

For socialists (including the JKNSF's Marxian current inside the wider JAAC/AAC "big tent"), four takeaways have moved from theory to practice:

**Committees give us the tools and tech.** JAAC/AAC stitched market, transport, student, women's, and neighbourhood committees into district-level coordination that could negotiate, strike, and monitor implementation. That is how AJK's abstract "relief" turned into an actual Rs 2,000 flour bag and a tariff you can read on a bill.

**Civil liberties are bread and butter politics by other means.** The 2024–25 fight to beat back AJK's protest-licensing ordinance was as important as any budget line because it protected the movement's capacity to meet, march, and babysit implementation when bureaucracies backslide.

**Campism misreads the periphery.** CPEC-era hydro in AJK (Kohala, Azad Pattan) is led by Chinese SOEs but governed, policed and permitted by Islamabad and Muzaffarabad. It has thrown up land-law tweaks, environmental anxieties, financing delays, and worker-rights disputes. The answer isn't to swap flags; it's to side with workers and residents where they actually live.

**"Stagism" underestimates what exists.** Those who say "first national democracy, then socialism" miss that committees around electricity, wheat, and municipal powers already function as embryonic organs of working-class leverage. The practical program writes itself: deepen committee coverage across workplaces and localities; build transparent strike funds that can sustain price fights; link dam-affected villages, utility workers and shopkeepers; and develop cross-LoC dialogues that treat independence as a social project — wages, tariffs, land, mobility — not just a flag.

The practical program writes itself:

1. Extend committees across workplaces and localities;
2. Build transparent strike funds to sustain price fights;
3. Link dam-affected villages, utility workers, shopkeepers, peasants, students, women, factory workers, diaspora, etc., into common steering sub-committees (mimicking soviets in case the masses need to take over power);
4. Coordinate across the LoC where feasible (student unions, labour bodies), treating independence as a social project — wages, tariffs, land, mobility — not just a flag.

## What does near-term victory look like?

- **AJK:** lock in the slab structure without "adjustments," regulate a cost-of-service principle tied to local hydel (so bills don't creep back via fees), and ring-fence flour at Rs 2,000 per 40 kg with transparent budget lines.
- **GB:** codify a wheat-subsidy framework indexed to low-income household need; roll back regressive Finance Act taxes; and institute binding consent mechanisms for land transfers and energy corridors.
- **Ladakh:** win statehood or, failing that, a Sixth Schedule settlement with teeth — actual fiscal and land-use vetoes, not consultative fig leaves.

None of this requires waiting on UN resolutions or "great-power realignments." It requires committees that can shut towns, reopen them, and then defend gains at the meter and the depot — and movements frank enough to criticise any state–capital nexus, Pakistani, Indian, or Chinese, that stands in the way.

**Knowledge! Struggle! Victory!**

*Disclaimer: this piece draws on organising by comrades from Pakistani Administered Kashmir over years of close collaboration, compiled from a reading of developing social-media updates by comrades on the grassroots amid a communications blackout. There would be unintentional errors and omissions; corrections and updates are welcome.*

## Glossary

**AJK (Azad Jammu & Kashmir):** Pakistan-administered western part of the former princely state; has its own government but with limited fiscal/sovereign autonomy.

**GB (Gilgit-Baltistan):** Pakistan-administered northern region; lacks representation in Pakistan's parliament; protest slogan "no taxation without representation" targets this gap.

**LoC (Line of Control):** The de facto military line dividing Indian- and Pakistani-administered parts of the former state.

**JAAC/AAC:** Joint/General "Awami Action Committee" coalitions of traders, transporters, students, neighbourhood committees coordinating strikes and negotiations in AJK and GB.

**"Slab" tariff (AJK 2024):** Three usage brackets — Rs 3 per kWh (1–100 units), Rs 5 (101–300), Rs 6 (>300); commercial: Rs 10 (≤300), Rs 15 (>300).

**NEPRA / WAPDA:** Pakistan's power regulator and its federal water-power authority; key to tariff-setting and dam governance.

**Water-use charge (WUC):** Inter-government transfers owed to AJK for hosting reservoirs; a recurring dispute that shapes AJK finances.

**IPP & capacity payments:** Private power producers are guaranteed returns via long-term contracts; capacity payments can inflate national tariffs regardless of actual generation.

**Muslim Conference (MC):** AJK party historically aligned with Pakistan's establishment; currently led by Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan.

**Hurriyat Conference:** A separatist alliance in Indian-administered Kashmir; and an AJK political party historically aligned with accession to Pakistan.

**Refugee seats (12):** Directly elected AJK assembly seats reserved for refugees from J&K settled in Pakistan (6 "Jammu," 6 "Kashmir"); critics say they distort local representation. JAAC's 2025 strike call centred their abolition.

**CPEC:** China–Pakistan Economic Corridor; includes hydropower like Kohala, Azad Pattan, and Karot on/around the Jhelum.

**LAB/KDA & Sixth Schedule:** Leh Apex Body and Kargil Democratic Alliance lead Ladakh's statehood push; the Sixth Schedule grants tribal areas local autonomy and land safeguards.

**Aksai Chin / G219:** High plateau east of Ladakh under Chinese control since 1962; China's G219 highway crosses it — part of the long "border economy" that shapes the region.