The periphery bleeds and the centre becomes the protest
Updated to the early hours of 3 August 2026. Communications blackouts, restrictions on media access and conflicting official and movement accounts mean that casualty and detention figures remain provisional. Some observations come from organising conversations and public posts during the mobilisations.
"The periphery provides the suffering and the centre collects the symbolic capital," Comrade Kainat Irfan Khan Baluch remarked during a discussion around the Kashmir solidarity mobilisations: "the applause, the moral status, the image of being revolutionary." The people materially living the struggle, she added, risk becoming "background characters in someone else's revolutionary performance."
This is more than performative activism. Someone can be brave, face arrest and still end up speaking over the people whose struggle brought them there. It distributes visibility by establishing who appears as the political subject, whose words acquire authority, whose arrest becomes an event, whose photograph gets reposted, whose account explains what happened afterwards, and who remains in the background as an anonymous mass of Kashmiris, students, workers, hostel residents, injured people and detainees.
On Friday, 31 July 2026, Punjab Police dispersed a peaceful gathering outside Lahore Press Club at Shimla Pahari. The action had been called in solidarity with the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, or JK-JAAC, and the people facing lethal repression across Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir. Comrade Farooq Tariq was among dozens detained alongside members of Haqooq-i-Khalq Party, Khalq Youth Front and Progressive Students Collective. Witnesses and reporting described protesters being dragged towards police vehicles. The detainees were subsequently released, reportedly on the condition that no demonstration would be held the following day. A message then circulated asking people not to come to Shimla Pahari and saying that the protest would later be organised with official permission.
Punjab Police remain responsible for the violence. Our own failure was organisational: the gathering was easy to scatter before it had even formed.
Senior figures from several organisations had agreed upon the call. Below that layer, many of the people expected to populate the action had not been organised into a collective body. They came from different directions, often individually or in small groups, and at different times. There was no commonly understood arrival arrangement, no clearly communicated assembly process, no cross-organisational stewarding committee able to account for participants, no stable first-aid and water provision, no legal desk known to ordinary attendees, no shared transport structure, no collectively understood exit plan if the police attacked, and no fallback location.
There was a poster, a place, a time and several organisational names. What was missing was everything that would let people arrive together, stay together, respond together and leave safely.
Economic hardship, political outrage and willingness to take risks do not organise themselves. A recent movement-side account by Umair Khurshid, editor of Azam, the organ of the Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation, Farooq Sulehria and Rawalakot-based journalist Harris Qadeer makes this point directly: comparable hardship can persist elsewhere without producing mobilisation on this scale; the decisive question is how social grievances acquire organisation. The Lahore mobilisation did not lack a cause, anger or people prepared to take risks. What was missing was the organising in between: who was coming, how they would arrive, what people would do if police moved, and who would follow up afterwards.
We need to mind the gap between calling the protest and organising the movement.
This was not the first warning at Shimla Pahari. On 11 June, police detained comrades Awais Qarni, Ahsan Javed and Hammad Kakar during another Lahore action held in solidarity with the Kashmir movement. Seven weeks separated that protest from the events of 31 July. The place was familiar. The likelihood of preventive policing was familiar. The experience of tracing detainees and demanding their release was familiar. Yet the knowledge produced in June had not become common infrastructure by the end of July.
There should have been a cross-organisational debrief after 11 June, and every such action. Where had the police positioned themselves? Through which routes had people arrived? Who received the call too late? Who was left alone? How quickly were the detainees identified? Which lawyers responded? Who contacted families where contact was safe? Who stayed with first-time protesters? How did people get home? Did anybody lose anything material in the process? Which decisions had been made, by whom, and on what assessment of risk? What would exist before the next call that had not existed before this one?
We condemned the police, shared the arrest photos and then failed to turn what happened in June into a better plan for July.
For years, we have watched a similar pattern repeat. After a protest, instead of an open collective check-in and political debrief, internal circles and friendship cliques often go somewhere to drink, smoke and decompress together. Decompression matters. People need to come down from adrenaline — laugh, cry, vent, eat and feel human after facing police or watching a friend being taken away. The problem begins when private clique decompression substitutes for movement care.
The answer is not a puritan left in which pleasure, friendship, intimacy, laughter, chai, or sutta become signs of insufficient political seriousness. Raoul Vaneigem, who died in Barcelona on 28 July 2026 at the age of ninety-two, spent much of his political life fighting the mutilated conception of revolution that demands obedience, compulsory sacrifice and the postponement of living in exchange for emancipation promised at some later historical stage. The Revolution of Everyday Life opposed the reduction of life to survival and placed pleasure, creativity, communication and participation against the alienation of the commodity world. As Comrade Sher put it while reflecting on Vaneigem, "liberation cannot be built upon obedience, compulsory sacrifice and the suppression of life in the name of some promised future."
The problem with the post-protest chai-sutta circle is not pleasure after political activity. It is the enclosure of pleasure, information and recovery within the same internal circles that already possess political access, while people outside them carry fear, injury, lost wages, family consequences and uncertainty alone. Insiders receive conviviality; outsiders receive exposure. A collective check-in does not need to become another joyless meeting. People can eat, drink, smoke, joke and decompress while also accounting for those who participated. Care and pleasure do not have to be separated. The actual test is simpler: did that care reach everyone, or only the friends already inside the circle?
Who got home safely? Who is still missing? Who was arrested? Who needs legal help, medicines, transport, food, money for a lost shift, somewhere safe to stay or somebody to sit with them? Who faced sexual harassment, queerphobia, panic or a medical emergency? Who was attending their first action and has now been left alone to make sense of it? What actually occurred on the ground, rather than what senior organisers assumed would occur? What did the movement learn?
When these questions are not asked collectively, only the people already inside friendship networks receive information, care and a place to decompress. Everyone else becomes an attendee who appeared for the protest and then disappeared from the organisation.
Big leftist leaders sharing the protest poster among themselves in their inner-circle group chats does not equate organising the movement.
A movement that does not know what happened to its people after an action cannot claim to have organised them during it. The post-action check-in is part of the action. The debrief is where experience becomes collective property instead of remaining the private expertise of those closest to established leaders. It should record failures without humiliation and shame, identify state conduct and discuss counter-tactics, distribute responsibility for follow-up and materially alter the next mobilisation.
The absence of debriefing is one reason the same failures return as if each were an unforeseeable accident. The protest ends when the visible event ends. Nobody builds a movement memory capable of accumulating beyond a succession of calls.
The police raid on Islamabad's National Press Club on 2 October 2025 had already made the vulnerability of the press-club repertoire impossible to ignore. Police pursued Kashmir solidarity protesters into the building, assaulted journalists and damaged equipment. The raid prompted outrage from journalists' organisations, a government inquiry and wider alarm over the violation of a space conventionally treated as a refuge for dissent and reporting.
That attack became a symbolic wound but it should also have become an organisational turning point. Kashmir solidarity organisers across cities could have established shared legal contacts, consent-based detention protocols, steward training, emergency communication systems and working relations with journalists' bodies before the next confrontation. The imagery is reposted more successfully than any self-critical lesson.
The same contradiction can be observed in Rawalpindi again on 2 August. Public posts told the people of Rawalpindi and Islamabad to reach a sit-in near Mareer Chowk and demonstrate solidarity with Jammu and Kashmir. Other posts, circulating around the same mobilisation, warned that police had initiated arrests around Liaquat Bagh and urged people not to go there until further notice.
Within a short period, potential participants were being told both to reach the sit-in and to not approach the protest site.
It is not just the confusion of a fast-changing street situation but exposes the absence of a recognised communications structure able to assess information, make a collective decision and circulate a single trusted update. One page called people forward. Another warned that the terrain was already compromised. In moments like these, people without internal contacts have no way to know which instruction and information is current, who has issued it, what it is based upon, or whether anybody would account or care for them if they follow it.
A safety plan has to be more than just posting "stay safe" after arrests have begun. It begins before the call. It establishes who is watching the site, who has authority to alter or suspend the gathering, how updates will be verified, which account will publish the definitive message, and how the info will reach people who have already left home.
Public reports and social-media posts also highlight raids and detentions involving Kashmiri students in hostels across Islamabad and Rawalpindi. There's no comprehensive, independently verified register establishing every detainee's name, hostel, police station, FIR and release status. Claims about the scale of the detentions should therefore remain attributed to student and political networks until a proper ledger exists. The absence of that ledger is itself politically revealing.
Why can the arrest of an already recognised leader be confirmed, photographed and converted into a national story within minutes, while Kashmiri students taken from hostels remain a rumour, an estimated number or a collective noun days later? Who is checking police stations and courts? Who is speaking with lawyers and families? Who is distinguishing somebody detained at a protest from somebody picked up later? Who is recording releases so that obsolete arrest claims do not continue to circulate?
A known leader is named, photographed and located within minutes. Kashmiri hostel residents remain "students detained," without names, police stations or release updates.
Announcement culture deepens this inequality. A public poster supplies the state with the date, location, time, principal organisations and likely composition of a gathering. It may reach police monitoring systems before it reaches participants through any relationship capable of organising them. The authorities occupy the terrain while most people know little beyond where they have been told to appear.
The poster can contain more useful coordination for the police than the ordinary participant has received from the movement.
Comrade Sher Ali Khan raised the tactical question directly in a conversation: "why are we not being more fugitive?" Why announce the entire action before building the relations through which it can materialise? Why not mobilise person to person through campuses, hostels, workplaces, neighbourhoods and trusted social networks, and only then determine what requires public announcement.
Fugitive organising begins through trusted relationships and keeps participants fully informed. What it withholds is unnecessary advance information from the state, not political knowledge from the people taking the risk. A movement aspiring to alter public life must become visible, assemble people, communicate demands and allow participants to recognise their collective strength. Publicness of political work should be a situational tactic, not a moral test of someone's militancy that they need to prove.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten use the idea of fugitive planning for forms of social cooperation that develop within and against institutions without waiting for permission from the structures governing them. Under conditions of surveillance and preventive arrest, a movement should be transparent downwards and strategically opaque upwards. People carrying the risk need access to the decisions, information and disagreements shaping the action. The state does not need advance access to every relationship, route and role within the movement and its organisation or orchestration.
Participants need the full political picture. Police do not need our routes, roles, lists and fallback points in advance. The first (re)produces the clique. The second makes it slightly more possible for people to meet, deliberate and act before being separated.
A public call issued before the organisation exists can become a police appointment. A secretive inner circle is no solution either. Emancipatory organising requires both protected relational work and collective public appearance at a point determined by strategic flexibility instead of habit.
Hong Kong's 2019 movement showed both the strength and limits of this approach. Protesters moved between large public channels, smaller private groups and flexible street formations under the slogan "be water." Decentralisation made rapid adaptation possible, but research later showed that group administrators acquired substantial informal authority inside a supposedly leaderless movement. Technical control over information became political leadership without a corresponding structure of accountability.
Every movement can't copy Hong Kong's technologies or street tactics. Neither formal leadership nor leaderlessness resolves the problem of power by itself. Somebody decides what enters the channel, who can speak, what gets pinned, which report is trusted and when people are told to move or disperse. We should know who has that authority, how they got it, and how everyone else can challenge or replace them.
The Rawalpindi convergence also included mobilisation through Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba networks. The state's preventive repression against its students should be opposed. That defence does not erase IJT's documented history of coercive campus politics, attacks on progressive, Pashtun, Baloch, Hindu and unaffiliated students, or gender policing. Reports and university actions have repeatedly linked alleged IJT members to violence on Punjab University campuses, including attacks on a Progressive Students Collective study circle and cultural or religious gatherings.
Working together around one democratic demand should not require us to forget IJT's reactionary campus politics. Opposing state repression does not require defending those politics either. People with profound political differences can act together around a defined democratic demand while retaining the freedom to fight one another's reactionary practices elsewhere. A shared stewarding body, legal arrangement and detainee register would have constituted more substantive unity than several organisations separately forwarding the same announcement.
The instruction to "show up" also conceals how unequally public presence is distributed. For some young women and queer people, attempting to attend a protest can trigger family surveillance, threats to education, restrictions on movement, forced relocation, marriage pressure, loss of housing or exposure of a private political and intimate life. Young supporters describe being unable to reach the mobilisation as family members react by threatening their education and future autonomy.
A young man may tell his family that he is going out and return several hours later. Somebody else must negotiate permission, conceal the purpose of the trip, secure transport, calculate when the household will notice and consider whether detention will end their ability to study.
For some people, the first act of repression happens at home, before they ever step close to the police cordon.
Patriarchal family authority determines who can enter public political space and on what terms. A movement that treats bodily attendance as the only evidence of commitment rewards those already granted social freedom and converts the restrictions imposed upon everybody else into apparent passivity.
A serious organising process asks how somebody arrives and returns, whether contacting their family will protect or endanger them, whether the name comrades know matches their legal documents, whether they need medication, who can accompany them, where they can sleep, how disability changes the route and what happens if their phone is confiscated. Political participation is reproduced through transport, food, health, privacy, housing, care and trust.
Conventional brogressive culture relegates this work to "logistics," somewhere beneath theory and leadership. Speeches, statements and negotiations are treated as politics proper. Water, first aid, childcare, accessibility, transport, legal liaison and emotional support are treated as services. The former activities produce public leaders. The latter are feminised, dispersed and often performed spontaneously by younger organisers after something has already gone wrong.
Jo Freeman's critique of "structurelessness" remains useful here because informality does not abolish hierarchy but protects informal hierarchy from scrutiny. Decisions continue to be made through friendship, reputation, private communication and unequal access to information. People outside those circles encounter the decision only when they are asked to act upon it.
The solidarity mobilisations under question are not literally structureless. They contain organisations, leaders and private coordination. The structure is vertically incomplete though. Those above are coordinated enough to issue a call. Those expected to assemble below are left to improvise the collective action.
The people making the call keep most of the authority. The people answering it carry most of the risk.
Risk externalisation goes deeper than just bad planning. A prominent activist, a Kashmiri hostel resident, a daily-wage worker and a young queer participant can enter the same police vehicle while facing radically different consequences. The prominent activist may have lawyers, journalists and hundreds of people demanding their whereabouts. The hostel resident may have devices seized, education interrupted and family frightened. The worker may lose the income on which a household depends that night. The queer participant may be outed to relatives, landlords or educational institutions.
The movement assigns equal rhetoric to unequal bodies, and the state exploits the difference.
A stewarding committee should start by asking who is taking which risk, and what support each person needs. It would not function as an internal police force or a group ordering demonstrators around. It would be an openly mandated body responsible for the collective conditions under which people can participate. Its work would include arrival communication, accessibility, buddy groups, water, first aid, legal contacts, transport, anti-harassment support, consent around photography, detention records, safe family liaison and post-action care.
Its members would need enough political authority to question a reckless decision by senior organisers, delay an action that is not ready, alter a location that has become untenable and refuse to send unprepared participants into a situation whose risks have not been collectively assessed.
Preparation cannot mean that only the stewards know the plan. Knowledge must be distributed. Participants should know who is responsible for what, how decisions can change and where accountability sits. Functions should rotate so that experience does not become the private property of another specialist layer.
ACT UP set a useful precedent. Much of its direct-action work was organised through affinity groups, committees, caucuses and working groups. Civil-disobedience training allowed participants to decide who was prepared for arrest and who would take support, legal or care roles. Arrest was placed inside a collective plan rather than treated as a spontaneous test of everybody's courage.
A stewarding committee today also needs a deliberate communications architecture. WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram do not organise people by themselves. They reproduce the political relationships placed inside them. A group administered permanently by one person, filled with people who do not know one another and used mainly to transmit decisions made elsewhere remains hierarchical even if every message is encrypted.
The movement does not need one enormous group in which announcements, rumours, legal information, personal details, tactical arguments, arrest reports and memes disappear into the same stream. Different channels should have defined functions. People should know why they are members, who administers the space, what information belongs there and when it will be closed or archived.
WhatsApp is usually the broadest common denominator. It can work for public or semi-public updates, participant information, accessible check-ins and general mobilisation. Personal WhatsApp messages and calls are end-to-end encrypted by default, while encrypted cloud backups require the relevant backup protection to be enabled. Encryption protects messages in transit but does not protect a conversation displayed on an unlocked or seized device, copied through screenshots or forwarded by a participant.
Signal is better suited to smaller role-specific groups carrying more sensitive information. It offers end-to-end encryption by default, disappearing-message settings and usernames that can allow contact without initially sharing a phone number. Disappearing messages reduce retained history; they cannot prevent a participant from photographing, copying or otherwise preserving the screen.
Telegram can be useful for large public channels, rapid broadcasts and material meant for wide circulation. Its ordinary cloud chats and groups are not end-to-end encrypted in the same way as Signal conversations. Telegram reserves end-to-end encryption for device-specific one-to-one Secret Chats, making regular Telegram groups a poor default for sensitive legal, medical or stewarding coordination.
Every organiser can't be on one supposedly perfect app. Tools should be assigned according to function. A movement might use one public announcement channel; a smaller stewarding group; separate legal, first-aid, accessibility and transport groups; temporary buddy chats; and a post-action accounting space. No single administrator should control every channel, every participant list and every piece of sensitive information.
The public channel should carry only what is intended to become public. It should not expose participant lists, accommodation details, vulnerable people's phone numbers, private travel arrangements or the identities of those for whom visibility creates additional danger. The stewarding group needs enough information to coordinate the action, not a permanent archive of everybody's life. The legal team requires a restricted and consent-based detainee ledger. The medical team needs information relevant to care, not access to unrelated political discussion.
Data minimisation means refusing to create a complete map of the movement on one device.
A detainee ledger should remain separate from ordinary chat. It can record the minimum required information: chosen and legal names where necessary, time and place last seen, reported police station, lawyer, medical needs, safe contact and current status. A public version should contain only information approved for circulation. Reports should be marked as verified, probable, disputed or unresolved. Releases and corrections should be logged. Sensitive personal data should be removed when no longer required.
Before an action, the communications structure can distribute role assignments, accessibility information, legal numbers, buddy arrangements and procedures for changes. During it, simple status reports — arrived, accounted for, leaving safely, home, detained, requiring transport, requiring medical help — allow the committee to understand the condition of the collective body. When mobile data or the internet is cut, the digital plan must give way to relationships already established offline: phone trees, printed emergency numbers, physical check-in points and people who know whom they are responsible for.
Afterwards, everybody should be accounted for before the movement dissolves into private circles. Who reached home? Who remains detained? Who requires legal support, medicine, money, accommodation, transport or emotional care? The longer political debrief follows: what happened, which reports were accurate, which routes became unsafe, which unassigned people quietly carried the work, where harassment occurred, what the police learned and what the movement must change.
The apps are not the committee. The committee is the relation among people who have agreed to become responsible for one another.
Private friendship groups will still decompress together. They should. The problem begins when the friendship group is the only place where care, information and tactical reflection occur. Digital stewarding can make the check-in available to everybody who participated rather than only those invited for chai sutte afterwards.
Group administration is itself a political role. The person who controls entry, removal, posting rights, pinned messages and the flow of incident reports can become an unelected coordinator even inside a formally horizontal formation. Administrators need mandates, rotation and review just like physical stewards. Important decisions cannot disappear into private inboxes.
The movement should know more about how it works than the state does. Too often, the reverse is true.
Jail is not a communist credential. Sometimes arrest follows from serious struggle; getting arrested is not itself the strategy. Arrest may become unavoidable while defending a strike, sustaining an occupation, stopping an arrest, protecting a community or breaking a prohibition that must be broken for a struggle to advance. Its meaning comes from the collective relation around it. What did the action accomplish? What did it protect? What contradiction did it expose? What structure remained after the arrests? Could the movement continue?
A movement that turns arrest, exhaustion, broken relationships and preventable exposure into compulsory evidence of commitment reproduces the sacrificial morality Vaneigem opposed. Revolutionary courage cannot be measured by how much life somebody is prepared to suppress. It has to be measured through the collective capacities people build to resist domination while enlarging the possibility of living differently in the present.
On 31 July, the state dispersed the Lahore gathering before it acquired substantial duration and reportedly obtained cancellation of the following day's action as a condition of release. The photographs travelled farther than the assembly. People acted courageously, but the police still dispersed the gathering, imposed conditions on release and stopped the following day's action.
Charles Tilly used repertoire of contention for the historically learned forms through which people make collective claims: protests, petitions, marches, strikes, occupations and boycotts. Repertoires make action possible because people do not have to invent politics from nothing every morning. They become restrictive when inherited routines continue after the state has learned how to contain them.
The Pakistani press-club repertoire has become painfully familiar. Organisations assemble their logos on a poster. A call circulates. Participants arrive separately. Recognisable figures speak, or police move before they can. Arrest becomes the principal image. Statements demand release. Lawyers intervene. The visible detainees return. The action is remembered through the most prominent person taken away. Then the same structure is repeated during the next emergency.
A press-club protest can be one tactic but should not become a liturgy.
Repeated detention can also produce what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic capital: socially recognised honour that can later be converted into authority. Within radical politics, public evidence of sacrifice authenticates the activist. The photograph of a person being dragged into a police van may increase their legitimacy to speak, represent and lead — provided they already possess the organisation and visibility through which the photograph can circulate.
The same arrest can work in the opposite direction for an unknown Kashmiri student. It can remove them from public life, expose their relationships, interrupt their studies and reduce them to a number in somebody else's statement.
The centre converts repression into political capital. The periphery experiences repression as disappearance.
To quote Comrade Sher:
"The problem with brogressive politics isn't simply that it's performative. Its performativity is a way of establishing dominion over the language of dissent. By continually producing itself as the visible progressive subject through slogans, protests, arrests and statements, it monopolizes the representation of radical politics. Other struggles then become things to be incorporated into, or interpreted through, this political repertoire rather than autonomous struggles capable of transforming the terms of politics themselves."
Brogressive politics is gendered, though it cannot be reduced to individual men having bad personalities. It is a method of political mediation. The recognised progressive places himself between a struggle and the public. He calls the demonstration, supplies the accepted language, becomes its photographed detainee and later explains what happened. The affected community supplies the death, injury and moral urgency. The established progressive remains the actor.
Good intentions do not change who gets to speak, decide and become visible. The person may genuinely oppose repression and accept real personal risk. The question concerns the political relation formed around the act. Does solidarity expand the autonomous capacity of the affected movement, or does it reproduce the metropolitan activist as the person through whom that movement must become intelligible?
Linda Martín Alcoff's account of speaking for others begins from the fact that representation changes the position of the people represented regardless of the representative's intentions. Lahore has to speak about Kashmir during a blackout. But who decides how we speak, whose knowledge shapes the action, and what power or resources actually move towards Kashmiris?
Were Kashmiri organisers and students involved in defining the solidarity action's language, form, timing and acceptable risk? Did urban left organisations learn anything from the committee structures that made JK-JAAC powerful? Did the mobilisation leave behind legal support, medical provision, a hostel network, a detainee register or stronger direct relationships with organisers inside the region? Did unknown Kashmiri workers and students acquire greater political visibility? Or did Kashmir enter an existing repertoire through which established figures reproduced themselves once again as the visible left?
JK-JAAC's own development offers a sharp contrast. It also emerged through the limits of earlier attempts to construct a broad political alternative. Khurshid, Sulehria and Qadeer trace one part of this prehistory to the People's National Alliance, formed in 2019 after India's revocation of Article 370 sharpened questions of sovereignty and political representation across the divided state. The alliance generated real enthusiasm and exposed a constituency beyond the established parties, but it could not develop durable organisational roots because it failed to fuse the constitutional question with the immediate material concerns of workers, students and the urban poor.
The later movement acquired mass force where these questions converged. Sovereignty stopped appearing only as a distant constitutional abstraction and became visible inside the electricity bill, wheat price, university fee, declining wage and shrinking opportunity. JK-JAAC did not emerge because several famous men announced that they represented "the Kashmiri people." Its roots lie in local action committees formed around uneven but connected material pressures. Mirpur faced loadshedding, rising electricity prices, hydropower extraction, displacement and unfulfilled promises associated with Mangla Dam. Poonch faced the price and allocation of wheat. Other localities organised around water, roads, healthcare, land, environmental damage, public services and bureaucratic privileges.
Rawalakot became one of the earliest laboratories of this convergence. The city had long been a centre of secular democratic and radical-left politics, and its wheat-price demonstrations developed into prolonged occupations that repeatedly frustrated attempts at dispersal. Holding public space over time showed that disciplined mass mobilisation could withstand routine repression. Each successful mobilisation encouraged similar initiatives elsewhere and enabled people entering struggle through different local grievances to recognise themselves as parts of a wider territorial movement.
Local sit-ins spread through 2023 and people began burning electricity bills. In September, organisers of tehsil-level struggles created a wider action-committee structure. The initial programme centred on wheat subsidies and a ten-point electricity agenda. The May 2024 long march forced reductions in flour prices and household power tariffs. When the government later introduced an ordinance restricting public assembly, the movement fought the ordinance because the freedom to assemble had become inseparable from defending the economic gains. Further consultation expanded the programme into the 38-point charter carried into the 2025 and 2026 struggles.
Its form was a federation of local action committees, traders, transporters, students, workers, lawyers and neighbourhood organisers.
Its content began with the price of life: flour, electricity, water, health facilities, roads, education, local government and the privileges of political and bureaucratic elites.
Its political essence increasingly concerned who possessed the authority to organise collective life.
Haq-i-Malikiyat, the right of ownership, connected electricity prices to control over land, forests, water, hydropower contracts and development. Haq-i-Hukmarani, the right to govern, connected public services to representation, bureaucratic authority and the twelve legislative seats reserved for refugees living elsewhere in Pakistan. The movement's argument developed from "what should electricity cost?" towards "who owns the resource and who has the right to decide?"
The disputed refugee seats became the immediate centre of the 2026 confrontation. JK-JAAC argues that constituencies elected outside the territory allow Pakistan-based political parties to shape governments in Muzaffarabad and dilute the authority of people living under those governments. Officials defend the seats as constitutionally protected and integral to the claim of a united Kashmir. The dispute therefore exceeds electoral arithmetic. It concerns whether political authority flows from people inhabiting and reproducing a territory or can be administered through arrangements controlled elsewhere.
Local institutions carry responsibility for conditions they do not have the power to change. Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir possesses elected institutions and the formal appearance of self-government, while decisive authority over fiscal policy, energy, natural resources and major administrative questions remains concentrated in Islamabad. Local governments and assemblies are expected to absorb public anger while lacking effective control over many of the structures producing it. Khurshid, Sulehria and Qadeer describe this as a colonial-style political economy in which democratic forms coexist with the denial of popular sovereignty, and economic extraction, austerity and political subordination reinforce one another.
The committee form allowed immediate needs to develop into questions of ownership and government because it connected political discussion to the relations through which everyday life was already organised. Markets could close because shopkeepers had organised one another. Transport could stop because transporters were embedded in the movement. Localities could act during blackouts because political relationships existed before digital access disappeared. People could feed marchers because neighbourhood and family networks had become part of the struggle.
These shutdowns worked because shopkeepers closed markets, drivers stopped routes and communities sustained the interruption. The people who normally keep everyday circulation moving were the ones who stopped it.
The movement's gains and setbacks explain its evolution. In May 2024, three protesters and one police officer were killed, and more than ninety people were reported injured. The federal government approved a multibillion-rupee relief package and reduced flour and electricity prices. The victory demonstrated that organised disruption could force material concessions. It also exposed the fragility of concessions when people lack permanent power over their implementation.
During the September–October 2025 mobilisation, at least eight people had been reported killed by 2 October, while subsequent accounts placed the toll at nine. More than one hundred people were injured, with later official and movement figures running higher. Another agreement followed, while the communications blackout and police violence spread the confrontation into solidarity actions in Islamabad and elsewhere.
By 2026, the struggle had reached the limit of repeated agreements without enforcement. On 5 June, after talks over the composition of the legislature collapsed, the regional authorities designated JK-JAAC a proscribed organisation under anti-terrorism law, suspended internet and mobile signals and intensified arrests. Amnesty International reported more than one hundred arrests over 6–7 June, the sealing of the organisation's office and the detention of journalist Sohrab Barkat for allegedly endorsing or promoting the movement online.
The state initially answered a price movement through negotiation and subsidies. It later delayed implementation, restricted assembly, criminalised organisers, shut communications and translated a mass civic organisation into terrorism. A demonstration can be dispersed. A social infrastructure capable of closing markets, stopping transport, monitoring agreements, distributing food, coordinating districts and claiming authority over resources poses a more durable challenge.
The struggle has consequently moved beyond a contest over separate policies. Every concession exposes the structure that decides whether the concession will be implemented, reversed or made dependent upon another negotiation. Khurshid, Sulehria and Qadeer locate the present confrontation at the level of sovereignty: the ruling class is defending an order whose stability depends upon preventing the people of Jammu Kashmir from acquiring effective control over their political and economic future. Every successful mobilisation shows that collective organisation can impose limits upon that order and gives people previously excluded from decision-making the confidence to demand more.
The casualty record reveals the cost, although no fully reliable cumulative ledger exists. The responsible method is to present the dated episodes, identify the source of each figure and explain where counts may overlap.
In May 2024, four people were killed: three protesters and one police officer. In September–October 2025, at least eight and probably nine people were killed, including civilians and police personnel. By 19 June 2026, Reuters reported at least twenty-four people killed during nearly two weeks of unrest, including twenty civilians and four police officers; ninety-seven police personnel had been wounded, civilians had also been injured in significant numbers, and more than five hundred people had been detained. On 14 July, a further nine people were reported killed in Tararkhal and Rawalakot; local estimates then placed the overall number killed since June at around thirty.
The same movement-side account places the toll higher: at least forty-five people killed between 5 June and 27 July, followed by twenty-one deaths on 27 July, fourteen on 28 July and two on 29 July, giving at least thirty-seven deaths in what they call the latest crackdown. Their opening chronology leaves the degree of overlap between the forty-five-person figure and the 27 July deaths unclear, so these numbers cannot simply be added.
Reuters separately reported that JK-JAAC leaders said more than thirty people had been killed around Rawalakot during the late-July clashes. Communications remained restricted and independent reporters could not verify the movement's account. Authorities acknowledged at least three protester deaths in Mirpur and one security-force death while alleging that armed actors had entered the protests, an account contested by JK-JAAC and its supporters.
Totals show the scale of the killing. They can also erase the people inside them. JK-JAAC now maintains a public Martyrs List 2026, naming people it records as having been killed in the uprising and providing available details. This is an important movement-built archive. It returns names and localities to a record otherwise fragmented across blackouts, hospitals, family testimony, official denials and changing press totals.
The list is a living movement-side record rather than a fully reconciled final count. Its entries need to be checked alongside families, hospital documentation, local journalists, human-rights organisations and independent reporting, with spelling variations, duplicate reports, changing statuses and overlapping periods made visible rather than silently corrected. Checking names, dates and overlapping reports is part of defending the movement's own history, especially when blackouts produce confusion.
A conservative reading of separately dated public reports still places the movement-wide toll at around fifty since 2024, while locally informed and movement-side accounts place it considerably higher. No single figure can yet be defended as final. The injury burden runs into several hundreds and may be much greater. The early-June Rawalakot violence remains one of the most firmly reported mass-casualty episodes; the movement's account of 27–29 July would make those the deadliest days in JK-JAAC's history if fully substantiated.
The blackout produces this uncertainty. Communications blackouts prevent families from locating people, isolate hospitals, obstruct journalists and allow authorities to dispute events inaccessible to independent observers. They also encourage distant supporters to circulate dramatic figures faster than they can be checked.
A movement-built casualty and detention committee would therefore be an organ of counter-power rather than a clerical appendix. It would connect families, hospitals, lawyers, local journalists, action committees and diaspora networks. Each record would distinguish confirmed death, credible report, disputed case, injury, detention, disappearance, release and unresolved status. Corrections would remain visible. Consent and safety would determine what could be made public.
This accounting is not for bureaucratic correctness. A named and verified ledger resists both state disappearance and the conversion of the dead into social-media content.
The blackouts and shutdowns also created a humanitarian crisis. Markets closed, roads were blocked, fuel became scarce, banking and ATMs were disrupted, medicines became harder to obtain, and daily-wage workers and taxi drivers lost the income through which food and rent are purchased.
People are losing food, medicine, fuel, cash and income because roads have been sealed, communications cut and the movement repressed. An earthquake does not proscribe a movement, seal roads, suspend communications, arrest journalists or fire upon protesters. Here the interruption of food, medicine, transport and income developed through political confrontation and state coercion. A humanitarian response that erases this causality reduces a struggle over power to an unfortunate emergency awaiting benevolent relief.
Organisers in Rawalpindi have been discussing and planning an aid convoy towards Kashmir. At the time of writing, this could not be independently verified — whether a convoy departed, what it carried, which route it used or how supplies were distributed. The proposal still opens an important question: what would emancipatory aid look like?
The paternalistic version is familiar: outsiders decide what people need, distribute it, photograph it and leave. People with money and visibility decide what recipients require, deliver it as a gift, photograph the distribution and return having accumulated moral authority. The community living through the crisis appears as an object of compassion.
Mutual aid puts local committees in charge of identifying needs and controlling distribution. Resources are collected and accounted for transparently. Food and medicine are connected to legal support, transport, communications, detainee documentation, blood donation and replacement of income lost through shutdowns. The people giving and receiving aid understand themselves as participants in a common political process rather than benefactor and beneficiary.
The Indian farmers' encampments around Delhi were sustained through langars, medical services, water, shelter, charging points and supplies moving between villages and protest sites. These were not charitable decorations around the "real" politics of speeches and negotiations. They made prolonged mass participation materially possible.
Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms offer a more recent and severe example. They grew partly from neighbourhood resistance committees involved in the 2019 revolution and have organised communal kitchens, medical assistance, water, evacuation and shelter during the country's war. Many of the "rooms" first developed through WhatsApp networks, but their power comes from neighbourhood relationships and local decision-making rather than the app itself.
Mutual aid can become overburdened, depoliticised or incorporated into humanitarian systems that extract unpaid local labour while retaining control elsewhere. Its emancipatory potential lies in connecting survival with political autonomy. The people feeding a neighbourhood also develop knowledge of supply, distribution, vulnerability and collective decision-making.
Comrade Sher described this as the difference between paternalistic and destituent solidarity.
Paternalistic solidarity begins with the recognised helper. The helper possesses the platform, vocabulary, lawyers, press contacts and fundraising capacity. The affected movement supplies the suffering that gives the intervention moral urgency. Representation and strategy remain with the helper.
Giorgio Agamben uses destituent power for activity that renders an apparatus or relation of domination inoperative instead of simply capturing its commanding position. We use destituent solidarity here for solidarity that works to deactivate the hierarchy between helper and represented victim.
The task is not to make Lahore's left a better spokesperson for Kashmir. The task is to move legal access, money, media reach, information and organising capacity towards Kashmiris themselves.
Destituent solidarity transfers access. It gives media space to people from the struggle. It places Kashmiri students and workers inside the body designing solidarity actions. It lets those facing the greatest risks determine acceptable exposure. It uses the arrest of a famous activist to direct attention towards unnamed detainees rather than allowing the unnamed to disappear behind them. It seeks to make the representative hierarchy progressively unnecessary.
Destitution alone cannot feed people, administer funds or sustain a strike. Relations of domination must be deactivated while new capacities are built. Kitchens, legal teams, transport networks, documentation groups, first-aid structures, communications networks, political-education spaces and democratic committees form the constructive side of emancipatory solidarity.
This is what prefiguration should mean in practice: building, inside the struggle, the relations and institutions we claim to be fighting for. It is the contested development of institutions through which people can reproduce life and exercise power differently.
A water team is practising collective provision. A legal group tracing detainees is building an informational capacity against disappearance. A consent rule around photography resists the conversion of vulnerable people into movement content. An accessible exit establishes that disabled people belong inside political struggle. An open debrief socialises tactical knowledge. A transparent aid fund begins to place resources under collective scrutiny.
The committee form does not automatically guarantee emancipation. JK-JAAC is socially heterogeneous. Traders, transporters, wage workers, lawyers, students, professionals and precarious households do not occupy the same class position or share an automatic long-term programme. The small merchant class has supplied major disruptive power through shutter-down strikes, while workers may not possess equivalent authority inside negotiation structures. A non-party identity can protect autonomy from discredited parties and still allow informal authority, reformism and ideological ambiguity to develop.
The movement has also produced workers', women's and writers' committees and locally specific campaigns around water, displacement, ownership and environmental damage. Women have not appeared only as supporters of a struggle designed elsewhere. They have organised demonstrations, addressed public meetings, sustained sit-ins, marched alongside men and faced arrest and live ammunition. Khurshid, Sulehria and Qadeer argue that their participation has changed the movement's social composition and widened its democratic horizon. Patriarchal authority and political subordination are distinct structures, but each restricts who may legitimately exercise political agency, and they reinforce one another in practice.
This development remains uneven. Conservative tendencies inside the movement have attempted to marginalise women's leadership or contain their participation below the level of decision-making. These contradictions arise from the movement's broad social composition and must be fought within it. Its activists have likewise acknowledged that the movement's breadth has outpaced its political education and revolutionary organisation.
It needs elected and recallable delegates, local mandates, public reports from negotiations, transparent finances, autonomous workers' organisation, and real authority for women and oppressed groups, mechanisms against harassment and sustained political education.
A committee becomes an organ of popular power through what people can do with it and how answerable it remains to them, not through the name "committee" alone.
The repression of JK-JAAC belongs to a wider state repertoire developed across Pakistan's peripheries. The Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) and JK-JAAC have distinct histories, social compositions and political horizons. They cannot be collapsed into one formation. The methods used against them nevertheless show a clear continuity: deny that the grievance is political, recode organisation as a security threat, obstruct travel, suspend communications, identify public organisers, multiply criminal cases, impose preventive detention and eventually use anti-terror legislation to place a whole movement outside legitimate political life.
PTM emerged around landmines, checkpoints, extrajudicial killings, missing persons and the collective punishment of Pashtun communities shaped by decades of imperial war and militarisation. The federal government proscribed it in October 2024 shortly before the Pashtun Qaumi Jirga. Amnesty reported nearly one hundred preventive detentions, the arrest of sixteen University of Malakand students preparing for the gathering and the rearrest of Ali Wazir after bail.
BYC grew through the struggles of families searching for forcibly disappeared relatives and resistance to the militarised extraction and governance of Balochistan. Mahrang Baloch and Sibghat Ullah Shah Jee received life sentences in June 2026 after an expedited prison trial. Amnesty reported that no direct evidence linked them to the violence for which they were convicted and described the proceedings as a misuse of anti-terror law against dissent.
A technique normalised against one periphery becomes available against another. Shutdowns used to isolate Baloch and Pashtun gatherings are reproduced in Kashmir. The proscription of PTM makes the anti-terror designation of JK-JAAC more administratively imaginable. Lists of prescribed persons restrict movement before conviction. Criminal cases multiply until defending oneself becomes a full-time occupation.
The centre often recognises this apparatus only when police drag a known Lahore activist into a van. In the peripheries, the van is one component of a wider order of checkpoints, disappearances, blackouts, sealed offices, inaccessible courts, blocked roads and the permanent possibility of being named an enemy before being permitted to speak as a political subject.
Across the border, India's 2026 "Cockroach" movement gave dramatic expression to a regional Gen-Z crisis. It grew after the cancellation of the NEET medical entrance examination following paper leaks affecting around two million students. Beginning as online satire, the Cockroach Janta Party developed protests at Jantar Mantar and across several cities, a hunger strike joined by Sonam Wangchuk and a march towards parliament met by force. The mobilisation forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation and commitments to examination reform.
The movement demonstrated the speed with which digital ridicule can become material revolt when it touches a common experience: examination scandals, unemployment, credential inflation, competitive pressure and the collapse of promised mobility. India's youth unemployment rate remained substantially above its overall rate, while millions of applicants competed for a small proportion of professional places.
Its victory also exposed unequal repression inside the category "Gen Z." Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam remained imprisoned after more than five years without trial over cases associated with the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act movement, even as the government negotiated with the nationally visible student mobilisation.
Wangchuk's presence connected the examination revolt to another peripheral struggle. In September 2025, four people were killed during protests in Ladakh over statehood, constitutional safeguards, land, employment and local authority. Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir remains governed through a still more entrenched security regime, with Khurram Parvez imprisoned under the UAPA and journalists facing raids, questioning, travel restrictions and criminal cases.
A young person at Jantar Mantar, a Muslim activist held without trial, a Kashmiri journalist working under counterterrorism law, a Ladakhi organiser demanding land protections, a Kashmiri hostel resident in Rawalpindi and a queer student trying to reach Shimla Pahari may belong to one broad generation while inhabiting radically unequal political worlds.
"Gen Z" becomes useful only when it can account for class, caste, religion, nationality, gender and geography. Otherwise, the most visible centre once again speaks for the entire generation.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi grasped part of the danger. Speaking at the Pakistan Economic Summit on 30 July, he said young people wanted employment and merit rather than tablets and stipends. "If these 'cockroaches' get united, they can turn everything upside down," he remarked. At the same event, he described the assembled business chambers and associations as those who run and finance the political system.
Naqvi's joke was also an admission. Isolated, indebted and unemployed young people can be governed through competition, family dependence, migration fantasies, online fragmentation and despair. The danger begins when their separate injuries become a common explanation of society and acquire durable structures through which people can act.
The state attacks the connective tissue: student collectives, unions, action committees, jirgas, neighbourhood networks, press camps and communications channels. It seeks to prevent scattered suffering from becoming political composition.
The economic context intensifies this possibility. Pakistan entered the summer of 2026 under another IMF-directed fiscal squeeze, compounded by the US-Israeli war on Iran. Higher energy prices placed fresh pressure on inflation and imports, while the federal budget increased pressure on salaried workers and registered businesses, raised defence spending and constrained development expenditure.
The war did not start Pakistan's structural crisis. It added to the misery through an existing system of imported energy, Gulf finance, remittances, external debt, unequal taxation and the protection of landed, commercial, military and real-estate power. A disruption in the Strait of Hormuz appears later as a more expensive bus journey, higher electricity costs, reduced food consumption and another justification for austerity. The World Bank expected South Asian growth to slow in 2026 amid energy-market disruption and identified job creation, low female employment and widespread informality as central regional problems.
The socialist position cannot collapse into support for either side in an inter-state war. The United States and Israel cannot bomb Iranians into emancipation. Reuters found that US attacks on southern Iran deepened economic hardship without producing the uprising imagined by regime-change strategists.
The Iranian state cannot invoke imperial attack to erase the independent struggles of workers, women, students, Kurds, Baloch, Arabs and others living under its authority. Iranian authorities have continued repression associated with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and later protest waves, while using national-security conditions to intensify domestic control.
Imperialist assault and domestic authoritarianism reinforce one another. War strengthens executives, militaries, censorship, borders and emergency powers across rival camps. The independent organisation of workers and oppressed people is not an appendix to geopolitical rivalry. It is the alternative to it.
From an autonomist Marxist angle, the central question is how scattered people become capable of acting together. Class composition concerns more than the number of formally employed factory workers. It asks how people separated through work, migration, gender, geography, technology and status develop a capacity to act together. Capital continually reorganises labour and daily life to fragment that capacity. Movements produce new forms of cooperation from within the fragmentation.
Mario Tronti and later autonomist writers described the social factory as the extension of capitalist command through the whole organisation of society: campuses, households, transport, debt, migration, communications and reproductive labour as well as conventional workplaces.
JK-JAAC has composed political power across spaces conventional organisation often separates. The shopkeeper closing a bazaar, driver stopping transport, household refusing an electricity bill, student circulating information, neighbourhood feeding marchers and public worker interrupting a service are not supporting characters surrounding the political event. Their coordinated withdrawal and redirection of everyday activity constitute the event.
Bill refusal, shutdown and blockade interrupt the existing order while releasing capacities ordinarily subordinated to it. People redirect transport, food, information and care towards the struggle. A shutdown can move from disruption towards administration: the capacity to close a town, sustain people through the closure, reopen under collectively determined conditions and monitor the agreement afterwards.
Guy Debord's critique of the spectacle helps explain what happens when these lived relations are compressed into their most marketable image. The spectacle is not merely vanity or excessive media coverage. It is a social relation in which people encounter their collective activity as a representation produced and controlled elsewhere.
Thousands of hours of organisation return as a photograph of one leader. The crowd encounters itself through an arrest video. Organisations believe solidarity occurred because their logos appeared on a poster. The public sees the body entering the police vehicle while the people providing water, finding lawyers, tracing detainees and arranging transport disappear.
The arrest photo is real, but it hides most of the labour that made the action possible. Brogressive politics thrives in this separation. The recognised man represents dissent. Women, queer organisers, students and peripheral communities reproduce the action beneath the threshold of representation.
Even this critique can become another performance. We can produce sharper words about bad organising and still fail to organise differently. The purpose is not to become the most sophisticated observer of organisational failure. It is to alter the material distribution of speech, knowledge, care, risk and decision-making.
That is also why we have to be socialists in the big 2026 and every moment from here on.
Bread, electricity, land, water, transport, employment, care, housing, digital communication and political freedom form one social totality. The same political economy that makes electricity unaffordable extracts hydropower from Kashmir. The state protecting that arrangement criminalises the committees challenging it. IMF austerity converts public debt into household deprivation while preserving the property and privileges through which landlords, financiers, developers and military enterprises retain power. Imperial war travels through energy markets into food, transport and utility costs. Patriarchal households reproduce labour and regulate who can participate politically. The security state defends these relations as separate questions of order.
Liberal politics separates electricity, repression, gender, debt and war into different policy problems. Humanitarian responses manage the casualties, nationalism recruits them behind one ruling class, campism points them towards another, and brogressive politics speaks in their name.
Socialism connects these struggles without subordinating them to one metropolitan centre. Its purpose is to place the means of sustaining life — energy, land, workplaces, finance, housing, healthcare, transport, communication and ecological planning — under collective and democratic control.
Socialism here means expanding and federating people's capacity to produce, deliberate, refuse, care and govern.
A committee organised around an electricity bill is not yet socialism. A shutter-down strike is not yet socialism. A mutual-aid convoy is not yet socialism. Each can remain reformist, patriarchal, nationalist, commercially dominated or administratively narrow. Their importance lies in what people can learn and build through them: social coordination need not belong exclusively to employers, landlords, bureaucrats, police and professional politicians.
Socialists have to learn from the movement while also arguing inside it over class power, democracy, patriarchy and political direction. It is to enter a reciprocal struggle with it: learn from the forms people have generated, argue openly over class and political direction, strengthen workers and oppressed groups within the movement, and allow the movement to transform socialist practice in return.
JK-JAAC has already produced political knowledge. It has shown how flour and electricity can open questions of ownership and representation; how defending economic gains requires defending assembly; how committees rooted in everyday life can act under blackout; and how local struggles can develop into a claim over government itself.
Solidarity with JK-JAAC should change how we organise here.
Before every action, organisers should collectively establish its political purpose, likely state response, participant composition, accessibility, transport, legal support, first aid, water, communications structure, photography rules and acceptable risks. During the action, stewards, buddy groups, legal observers, medical support and reliable information channels should remain visible to participants. Afterwards, the movement should immediately account for everyone, provide practical and emotional support, verify arrests, communicate safely and hold a debrief whose conclusions alter the next mobilisation.
The periphery cannot continue supplying the dead while the centre collects the image.
People should know who understands first aid, who has transport, who can contact a lawyer, who can verify a name, who can safely house somebody, who administers the fund, who can translate a statement, who understands digital security and who will still be present when the cameras leave. Roles should rotate. Decisions should be recorded and reviewable. Casualty and detention documentation should persist between emergencies. Aid should be directed by affected communities. Organisers carrying the greatest risks should possess real authority over how actions are conducted.
Leadership remains necessary. Its meaning has to change. A useful leader distributes knowledge, trains others and multiplies the number of people capable of taking responsibility. The measure is not how indispensable they appear at the microphone. It is how capable everybody else becomes when police remove them.
Going to jail may become a consequence of political struggle. It cannot become the act around which communist identity is organised.
The purpose is to build relations through which repression cannot silently isolate people, erase their names or terminate the organisation around them.
The periphery cannot continue supplying the dead while the centre collects the image. We have to know one another's work, understand one another's vulnerabilities and become one another's infrastructure.
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. "Azad Jammu and Kashmir" is its official Pakistani designation.
Announcement culture: A mode of political activity in which publishing a poster, time and location is treated as equivalent to organising the people expected to carry out the action.
Brogressive politics: A gendered mode of progressive politics in which recognised men or "bros" accumulate authority through radical language, visibility and demonstrations of militancy while reproducing patriarchal, representational and organisational hierarchy.
Class composition: An autonomist Marxist concept concerning both the material organisation of a class and the political processes through which fragmented workers and oppressed people become capable of collective action.
Colonial-style political economy: Term for the combination of local administrative forms with externally concentrated political authority, resource extraction and the denial of effective popular control.
Communications architecture: The deliberate arrangement of public channels, sensitive groups, responsibilities, access levels and information flows through which a movement communicates.
Counter-power: Organised capacity developed by workers or oppressed communities outside established institutions, allowing them to resist, interrupt or partially replace the functions of existing authority.
Data minimisation: Collecting and retaining only the personal information genuinely required for a task, reducing the damage caused by device seizure, account compromise, internal misuse or careless circulation.
Destituent power: Activity that renders an existing apparatus or relation of domination inoperative rather than merely capturing its commanding position.
Destituent solidarity: Solidarity that deactivates the hierarchy between recognised helper and represented victim by transferring resources, access, visibility, knowledge and decision-making capacity towards people directly engaged in struggle.
Digital stewarding: Communications and information work accompanying physical stewarding, including verified updates, participant check-ins, secure administration, legal and medical coordination, consent-based documentation and post-action accounting.
Formal or symbolic autonomy: A constitutional arrangement in which a territory possesses elected institutions and the appearance of self-government while decisive authority over finance, resources, administration or security remains concentrated elsewhere.
Fugitive planning: Collective organisation developed partly beyond the permission and advance visibility of governing institutions. It requires accountability to participants rather than secrecy from them.
Haq-i-Hukmarani: "Right to govern." In JK-JAAC's politics, the demand for substantive popular authority over representation and public decision-making.
Haq-i-Malikiyat: "Right of ownership." The demand for local and popular control over land, forests, water, hydropower and the terms of development.
JK-JAAC / JAAC: The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, a federation of local action committees, traders, transporters, students, workers, lawyers and community organisations formed during the 2023 struggles over electricity, wheat, public services, resources and representation.
Martyr / shaheed: The political and commemorative category used by JK-JAAC and movement participants for people killed in the struggle.
Militant symbolic capital: Political prestige accumulated through acts recognised as evidence of sacrifice or militancy, including arrest and imprisonment. Existing visibility determines who can convert repression into authority.
Mutual aid: Collective provision through which people meet immediate needs while building reciprocal relations, political understanding and community capacity rather than preserving a permanent hierarchy between donor and recipient.
Operational security: Collective practices for limiting unnecessary exposure of people, plans and sensitive information. It means accountable control over information, not secrecy from participants.
Paternalistic solidarity: Support organised through a relationship in which an established person or organisation retains control over representation, resources and interpretation while the affected community appears primarily as a recipient.
Political debrief: A collective process after an action that accounts for participants, addresses immediate legal and care needs, reconstructs events, identifies failures and turns experience into shared movement knowledge.
Popular sovereignty: The effective capacity of people living in a territory to determine its political institutions, resources, economy and collective future rather than merely voting inside structures whose decisive powers remain external.
Prefigurative politics: The construction within present struggles of social relations and institutions that develop capacities required for a different society.
Relational mobilisation: Mobilisation built through established relationships in campuses, workplaces, neighbourhoods and social organisations rather than relying mainly upon public announcements and algorithmic circulation.
Repertoire of contention: The historically learned forms through which people make collective political claims, including demonstrations, strikes, occupations, marches, petitions and boycotts.
Representational capture: The process through which an established actor or organisation monopolises the public meaning of another movement and turns its autonomous struggle into material for an existing political repertoire.
Revolution of everyday life: Raoul Vaneigem's insistence that emancipation must transform ordinary experience — work, time, pleasure, desire, friendship, communication and participation — rather than postpone freedom until after the seizure of power.
Risk externalisation: The transfer of the material consequences of political decisions from people possessing authority towards participants with less influence, information or protection.
Social factory: The autonomist Marxist idea that capitalist command, value production and discipline extend across social life, including households, education, transport, communication and reproductive labour.
Social reproduction: The work and institutions through which people and society are sustained: food, care, housing, health, education, transport, emotional support and the reproduction of labour-power.
Spectacle: In Situationist theory, a social relation in which lived collective activity becomes separated from people and returns to them primarily as an image or representation.
Stewarding committee: A democratically accountable group responsible for the collective conditions of participation in an action, including communication, accessibility, first aid, legal liaison, water, transport, anti-harassment work, detention records and post-action support.
Structurelessness: The appearance that a movement lacks hierarchy. Informal friendships, reputations and unequal access to information continue to organise power when explicit democratic procedures are absent.
Substitutionism: The replacement of mass self-activity by the actions of a smaller group that assumes it can act politically on behalf of the wider class or community.
UAPA: India's Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a counterterrorism law repeatedly criticised for enabling prolonged pre-trial detention and the criminalisation of dissent.