Dr Abhijit Jasrotia
Something is burning in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and the world is looking away.
Since early June, the towns of Rawalakot, Muzaffarabad, and Kotli have been convulsed by protests that began with the most modest of demands: affordable electricity, subsidized wheat, a fair share of royalties from the hydropower generated on their own rivers, and an end to decades of political marginalization. These were not separatist slogans or calls to arms. They were demands for bread, light, and dignity. Pakistan’s answer, by every account that has escaped the region’s communications blackout, has been delivered through the barrel of a gun.
Even the official version is damning. Islamabad concedes roughly eleven dead and more than seventy injured in clashes that began on June 8. But the official version is almost certainly not the whole story. Protest organizers from the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, eyewitnesses, and diaspora networks put the civilian toll between 27 and over 100, with hundreds injured and more than 500 detained — including, reportedly, children. Videos smuggled past the internet shutdown show crowds fired upon near hospitals. We cannot independently verify every figure, precisely because Pakistan has cut the phone lines, throttled the internet, and barred the press. A state confident in its restraint does not need to silence the witnesses.
Consider how this crisis was manufactured. The JKJAAC is a civic coalition built around utility bills and flour prices — about as far from terrorism as political organizing gets. Yet rather than negotiate, authorities banned it as a “terrorist” organization, placed bounties on its leaders, and deployed paramilitary Rangers against its marches. The killing of activist Shahzeb Habib turned grievance into grief, and grief into a region-wide uprising. At every fork in the road, the state chose escalation. When a government’s first instinct toward its own citizens is shoot-at-sight orders, the question is no longer whether the protesters have a case. It is whether the state has any legitimacy left to lose.
There is a bitter irony here that deserves to be named. For seven decades, Pakistan has positioned itself as the global advocate of Kashmiri self-determination, raising the issue at every international forum, draping itself in the language of human rights. Yet in the portion of Kashmir under its own control, it tolerates no dissent, shares no resources, and permits no genuine self-government. The territory it calls “Azad” — free — Kashmir is run as a strategic buffer and a hydropower colony, its assemblies subordinate to Islamabad, its economy starved, its protesters branded traitors. The hypocrisy is not incidental; it is structural. A state cannot champion the rights of Kashmiris on one side of the Line of Control while shooting them on the other and expect the contradiction to go unnoticed forever.
It has not gone unnoticed by the people themselves. Residents of the region can see across the LoC, and what many of them see — highways, tourist arrivals, functioning administration in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir since 2019 — sharpens their sense of abandonment. One can debate the politics of Article 370’s revocation; Kashmiris on the Indian side have their own grievances, and honesty requires admitting that. But the comparison protesters themselves are drawing is about governance and opportunity, and on those measures Islamabad’s record in the territory it administers is indefensible. Sunil Sethi, the BJP’s chief spokesperson in Jammu and Kashmir, put the Indian view bluntly: the people’s “only crime” is asking for development and fundamental rights, and in return they are getting bullets. Strip away the partisanship, and the core observation stands. People asked for wheat. They received gunfire.
History offers Pakistan a warning it seems determined to ignore. In 1971, in what was then East Pakistan, Islamabad answered economic grievance and political exclusion with military force, convinced that repression could substitute for legitimacy. The result was the bloody birth of Bangladesh. The circumstances today differ in scale and geography, but the playbook is unnervingly familiar: deny, blackout, criminalize, shoot. States that mistake silence for stability tend to learn, too late, that the silence was only the sound of the world not listening.
And the world must start listening. The United Nations human rights machinery, which has produced detailed reports on Indian-administered Kashmir, owes the people of Pakistan-administered Kashmir the same scrutiny. International media that amplify every confrontation in Srinagar should be asking why they cannot get a correspondent into Rawalakot. Western governments that lecture the subcontinent on human rights should be demanding that Pakistan restore communications, release detained protesters, allow independent investigation of the casualty figures, and prosecute those who ordered live fire on civilians. The test of human rights advocacy is whether it survives inconvenient geography.
India, for its part, must respond with discipline as well as sympathy. The Ministry of External Affairs is right to condemn the killings and seek accountability. New Delhi should also heed the warning that a cornered establishment in Islamabad may seek diversion through violence across the LoC; vigilance, not adventurism, is the proper posture. The most powerful argument India can make to the people across the Line of Control is not rhetorical but demonstrative: governance that delivers, rights that are real, development that reaches the last village.
None of this requires pretending the Kashmir dispute is simple, or that any side’s hands are entirely clean. Pakistan rejects India’s territorial claims; India rejects Pakistan’s; the people of the region, on both sides, have too often been treated as instruments rather than citizens. But whatever one’s position on maps and resolutions, there should be no dispute about this: unarmed civilians demanding flour and electricity must not be met with live ammunition, and a blackout is not an answer to a body count.
The protesters of Rawalakot have already answered the only question that matters to them — they have decided they will no longer be silent. The question now is for the rest of us. Oppression breeds resistance; that much history guarantees. What history does not guarantee is that the world will pay attention before the toll climbs higher. It should start now.
