Written after the June–July 2026 crackdown on the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JK-JAAC). Casualty and detention figures cited below come from movement-side, press and human-rights sources as noted in the text and remain provisional given ongoing communications restrictions.
Kashmir is not one place. It is at least three: the Indian-administered valley and Jammu region under direct military occupation; the Pakistan-administered west, formally self-governing but substantively controlled from Islamabad; and the diaspora, scattered across Pakistan, the Gulf, Britain and North America, from where much of the world's "Kashmir solidarity" is actually spoken. Each fragment produces its own political common sense. The valley's occupation dominates how the world imagines Kashmir. Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) is treated, even by much of the Pakistani left, as the "resolved," "loyal," or simply less urgent half of the dispute. The last three years have made that assumption impossible to sustain.
Since May 2023, a coalition of local traders, transporters, students, lawyers and workers organised as local action committees, and later federated as the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, has built one of the most sustained mass mobilisations Pakistan-administered Kashmir has seen since 1947. It began over the price of flour and the cost of electricity. It has since become a direct confrontation over who owns Kashmir's resources and who has the right to govern its people. The state's answer has been escalating violence: killings in 2024, killings in 2025, a proscription under anti-terrorism law in June 2026, and by the most recent count, dozens more dead through late July 2026, alongside mass arrests, communications blackouts and a spreading crackdown on solidarity protests across Pakistan itself.
This essay traces that movement's development, its internal contradictions, and what it should mean for socialists — in Pakistan, in the diaspora and internationally — who claim solidarity with Kashmir but too often organise that solidarity around themselves.
From flour to sovereignty
The movement's origin lies in Rawalakot, capital of Poonch district and long a centre of secular, left-leaning politics in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. On 8 May 2023, residents held a sit-in against a sharp rise in the price of government-subsidised flour. That local grievance produced the district's first organising body. Weeks later, when electricity bills arrived showing bills roughly doubled for higher-usage households, the same organisational form spread across Azad Jammu and Kashmir. What began as a wheat protest in one district became a territory-wide movement joining flour and electricity into a shared programme, sustained by shutter-down strikes, wheel-jam actions and prolonged sit-ins.
The committee form mattered as much as the demands. Action committees were rooted in existing social relationships — bazaars, transport unions, village councils, professional bodies — rather than built from a pre-existing party structure. Shopkeepers who closed their shutters had organised each other. Drivers who stopped their vehicles were embedded in the movement themselves. This is why the movement could act under conditions — internet shutdowns, curfews, mass arrest — that would break a purely digitally coordinated mobilisation.
Victory came in 2024: flour and electricity prices were reduced after sustained pressure, including a May 2024 escalation in which three protesters and one police officer were killed and more than ninety people were reported injured. That victory did two things. It proved, to a population long told it had no power, that organised disruption could force concessions from the state. And it raised the horizon of the movement's demands, from prices to structure: the 38-point charter that followed connected electricity and flour to Haq-i-Malikiyat (the right of ownership over land, water, forests and hydropower) and Haq-i-Hukmarani (the right to govern, including representation, bureaucratic privilege and the disputed refugee seats in the AJK Legislative Assembly).
That last demand deserves particular attention. Twelve of the assembly's forty-five seats are reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir living elsewhere in Pakistan. JK-JAAC argues this allows Pakistan-based political parties to determine the government of a territory whose actual residents they do not represent. The state defends the arrangement as constitutionally protected and central to the claim of a united Kashmir. Underneath the constitutional argument is a straightforward question of sovereignty: does political authority in AJK belong to the people who live there and reproduce its economy, or can it be administered by arrangements decided elsewhere?
This is what Pakistan-administered Kashmir's "formal autonomy" actually means in practice. AJK possesses elected institutions and the appearance of self-government. Decisive authority over fiscal policy, energy, natural resources and major administrative questions remains concentrated in Islamabad. Local government absorbs public anger over conditions it lacks power to change. Hydropower extracted from Kashmiri rivers, at Mangla Dam and elsewhere, generates cheap electricity that Kashmiris themselves pay expensive tariffs to receive. This is not incidental maladministration. It is a colonial-style political economy: democratic forms coexisting with denial of popular sovereignty, resource extraction paired with austerity, local institutions made to answer for decisions taken without them.
The crackdown
The state's response has escalated in direct proportion to the movement's success at connecting these questions. In September–October 2025, at least eight and likely nine people were killed as mobilisation spread, including civilians and police personnel, with communications blackout extending the confrontation into solidarity protests in Islamabad. A further agreement followed. Its terms, as in 2024, were not fully implemented.
By June 2026, after talks over the composition of the legislature collapsed, the state moved from negotiated containment to criminalisation. On 5 June, AJK authorities designated JK-JAAC a proscribed organisation under anti-terrorism law. Amnesty International documented more than one hundred arrests over 6–7 June, the sealing of the organisation's office, and the detention of journalist Sohrab Barkat for reportedly endorsing the movement online. Activist Shahzaib Habib, closely associated with the movement's leadership, was killed on the night of 6 June; JK-JAAC says security forces opened fire on the vehicle he was travelling in, while police say they intercepted a "suspicious vehicle" whose occupants fired first. Curfew was imposed on Rawalakot; internet and mobile signals were cut across much of AJK; the paramilitary Pakistan Rangers were deployed. Protests were met with lethal force. Usama Jamil, deputy secretary general of the Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation and a PhD student at Quaid-i-Azam University, was among those killed, shot while marching in Rawalakot on 27 July.
Casualty figures for this period vary by source and remain genuinely uncertain under blackout conditions, and this essay treats them accordingly rather than presenting a single reconciled total. Reuters reported at least twenty-four people killed during nearly two weeks of unrest by 19 June, including twenty civilians and four police officers, with ninety-seven police personnel wounded and more than five hundred people detained. Local estimates in mid-July placed the death toll since June at around thirty. Movement-side accounts place the toll considerably higher across the same period, and JK-JAAC now maintains a public Martyrs List naming those it records as killed — an important act of movement memory against a blackout designed to keep casualties uncertain and unaccountable, though its entries, like any wartime record, require ongoing verification against hospital, family, journalist and human-rights documentation rather than being treated as a final count.
The pattern by which the state has treated JK-JAAC is not unique to Kashmir. It follows a repertoire already used against the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, proscribed in October 2024 shortly before a planned national jirga, and the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, whose leaders Mahrang Baloch and Sibghat Ullah Shah Jee received life sentences in June 2026 after an expedited trial that Amnesty International said lacked direct evidence connecting them to the violence for which they were convicted. Deny that the grievance is political. Recode organisation as terrorism. Cut communications. Multiply criminal cases until self-defence becomes a full-time occupation. A technique normalised against one periphery becomes administratively available against the next.
What solidarity from Pakistan's cities has actually looked like
Solidarity protests spread quickly from AJK into Lahore, Islamabad, Karachi and Rawalpindi. They also revealed how unevenly organised that solidarity has been. On 31 July, Punjab Police dispersed a peaceful gathering outside Lahore Press Club, detaining dozens including well-known left activists, reportedly on condition that no further protest be held the following day. In Islamabad, eighty-eight people were sent into judicial remand after a solidarity protest the same day. These are not isolated incidents of police overreach; they are evidence that the state now treats solidarity itself, not only the movement in AJK, as a target requiring suppression.
They also exposed a weakness that predates the current crackdown and cannot be blamed on police violence alone. Protests called through public posters, without the underlying organisational infrastructure to receive, brief, protect and account for the people who show up, are easy for the state to scatter. A demonstration that lacks a stewarding structure, a legal desk, an agreed fallback point and a plan for what happens if the police move will struggle regardless of how just its cause is. Repeated confrontations at the same sites — Lahore Press Club, Islamabad's National Press Club, raided by police in October 2025 in an incident that damaged equipment and assaulted journalists — should have produced accumulated organisational learning. Too often they have instead produced repetition: the same vulnerable site, the same public announcement, the same dispersal, the same arrest photographs, and no discernible change in method before the next call.
There is also a harder question about who becomes visible in this solidarity. Kashmiri students detained from hostels in Islamabad and Rawalpindi rarely acquire names, verified locations or public accounting in the same way that the arrest of an already-known Lahore-based activist does. The imbalance is not simply about media interest. It reflects who already possesses the organisational relationships, legal contacts and public profile through which an arrest becomes a documented, followed, campaigned-for event rather than a rumour. Solidarity that reproduces this imbalance — in which the people already visible before the protest remain the ones spoken about afterwards, while Kashmiris carrying the actual risk disappear into an undifferentiated count — is not yet solidarity with Kashmir. It is solidarity with an image of Kashmir, organised around people who are not Kashmiri.
This is a criticism made in a constructive spirit, including of political circles this author has stood alongside. It is also, in significant part, self-criticism, aimed at habits of representation that come easily to anyone writing, publishing or speaking about a struggle they are not living through directly.
What actual solidarity would require
If solidarity with Pakistan-administered Kashmir is going to mean more than an occasional press-club protest and a circulated statement, several concrete shifts are necessary.
Resources, media access and organising capacity need to move towards Kashmiris rather than accumulate around already-recognised spokespeople elsewhere in Pakistan. That means direct platforms for JK-JAAC's own organisers, students and, crucially, the women who reporting consistently identifies as central to the movement's ability to sustain sit-ins, marches and shutdowns under conditions of repression — not as a supporting detail, but as a fact that should shape who is invited to speak and lead.
Casualty and detention documentation needs to be treated as political infrastructure, not just a number cited once in a statement. Names, dates, locations, hospital records, family testimony and legal status should be maintained, cross-checked and corrected over time — including cross-checking JK-JAAC's own Martyrs List against independent sources as access allows — precisely because blackout conditions make erasure of the dead and disappeared a deliberate feature of the state's strategy, not an accidental side effect.
Solidarity actions in Pakistani cities need the same organisational seriousness the AJK movement itself has built: stewarding, legal support, accessible participation, communication structures that do not depend on a single administrator or a single public announcement, and above all, a debrief after every action that turns what was learned into what changes next time — rather than repeating the same vulnerable format at the same site until the state's response to it becomes routine.
And critically, the relationship between AJK's committee-based movement and the wider Pakistani and Pakistan-administered-Kashmiri left needs to be built as a genuine exchange, not a one-way act of solidarity performed at a safe distance. JK-JAAC has generated real political knowledge over three years: how flour and electricity prices can open into questions of ownership and government; how defending economic gains requires defending the right to assemble in defence of them; how a federation of local committees rooted in bazaars and transport networks can function under communications blackout in ways a purely digitally organised movement cannot. Socialists elsewhere have as much to learn from this as to offer it.
Sovereignty, not just relief
None of this reduces to a request for charity or a humanitarian appeal, though the blackout and shutdowns have produced a real humanitarian emergency — disrupted markets, scarce fuel, interrupted access to medicine, lost daily wages for transport workers and traders unable to operate under curfew. That emergency has a cause: state repression of a movement that was winning. A response to it that erases this cause, treating the crisis as an unfortunate natural event awaiting benevolent relief, depoliticises what is actually a confrontation over power.
The demand at the centre of JK-JAAC's charter — Haq-i-Hukmarani, the right to govern — is the demand that should organise how the rest of the Pakistani and diaspora left relates to this movement. Pakistan-administered Kashmir's formal autonomy has functioned, for decades, as a way of assigning responsibility to local institutions while withholding from them the power to act on it. The movement's three years of struggle have made unmistakably clear what its own people think should replace that arrangement: not better-administered dependency, but popular sovereignty — the effective capacity of people living in this territory to govern its resources, its economy and its political future.
That is a demand the international and Pakistani left should organise around directly, not translate into a more comfortable, less specific language of general sympathy. It requires naming who benefits from AJK's current arrangement — the political and bureaucratic elite whose privileges the movement's charter explicitly targets, the state structures administering hydropower extraction, the parties whose position depends on refugee-seat arithmetic decided outside the territory it governs. And it requires organising in solidarity with the people, structures and demands the movement has already built, rather than substituting for them.
The periphery has supplied the casualties in this struggle for three years. What it has not yet received, consistently, is an international and Pakistani left willing to organise around its own political terms rather than absorbing it into terms set elsewhere.
Glossary
AJK / Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir: The western part of the disputed former princely state, administered by Pakistan under a formally self-governing structure with limited substantive autonomy over fiscal, resource and major administrative policy. "Azad Jammu and Kashmir" is its official Pakistani designation.
Colonial-style political economy: The combination of local elected institutions with externally concentrated political authority, resource extraction and the denial of effective popular control — used here to describe the structural relationship between AJK and the federal government in Islamabad.
Committee form / action committee: The organisational model through which JK-JAAC developed — federated local bodies rooted in existing social relationships (bazaars, transport unions, professional and student networks) rather than built as a top-down party structure.
Haq-i-Hukmarani: "Right to govern." JK-JAAC's demand for substantive popular authority over representation and public decision-making in AJK, as opposed to formal institutions lacking real power.
Haq-i-Malikiyat: "Right of ownership." The demand for local and popular control over land, forests, water, hydropower and the terms of development in AJK.
JK-JAAC / JAAC: The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, a federation of local action committees, traders, transporters, students, workers and lawyers formed during the 2023 struggles over electricity, wheat, public services, resources and representation, and proscribed under Pakistan's anti-terrorism law in June 2026.
Martyrs List: A public record maintained by JK-JAAC naming people it records as killed in the movement's confrontations with the state — a movement-built act of documentation against a communications blackout that otherwise leaves casualties uncertain and unaccountable.
Popular sovereignty: The effective capacity of people living in a territory to determine its political institutions, resources, economy and collective future, as opposed to formal representation within structures whose decisive powers remain external.
Refugee seats: Twelve of the forty-five seats in the AJK Legislative Assembly, reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir living elsewhere in Pakistan — a central point of contention in JK-JAAC's charter, which argues the arrangement allows external parties to shape the territory's government.