Arfeen Wani
Every crackdown depends on silence. When Pakistani authorities switched off the internet across Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir on 5 June 2026, and moved Rangers, Frontier Constabulary and police from mainland Pakistan into the region, the intent was plain: whatever followed would happen out of sight. That it did not stay hidden is owed to a determined group of people who chose to speak, many of them at real personal risk. This piece honours them.
The first and bravest voices belong to the people of PoJK themselves. The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) began in 2023 as a coalition of traders, lawyers, students, civil society activists and ordinary families pushed to the edge by daily hardship. They asked why a region that generates hydropower pays some of the steepest electricity tariffs around. They asked why flour had become a luxury, why prices kept climbing while jobs disappeared, and why 12 assembly seats were reserved for “refugees” living outside the region, seats that serve Islamabad’s control more than any local mandate. Their methods were sit-ins, long marches and general strikes. Their 38-point charter asked for affordable bread and power, work for the young and a genuine say in their own governance.
For making these demands, JAAC was banned under the Anti-Terrorism Act. Entry points were sealed, curfews imposed and mobile networks shut down. Local monitors and JAAC leaders report anywhere from dozens to nearly 90 civilians killed since the June clashes, with hundreds more injured, many by live ammunition fired into protest gatherings, funeral processions and areas near hospitals. Families describe security forces occupying hospitals, and shortages of food, medicine, milk and baby formula. Scores of activists have been detained or placed on the Fourth Schedule, the list Pakistan reserves for suspected militants. Activist Shahzaib Habib lost his life.
And still the people did not go quiet. Sit-ins continued under curfew. Strikes were called and observed. Word slipped out through every gap in the blackout. That persistence is the foundation on which every other voice in this story stands, and it deserves to be recognised first.
Those voices carried all the way to the 63rd Session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. During the Item 3 General Debate on civic space and democratic participation, an Indian civil society representative laid out the scale of the escalation in PoJK since June: brutal and disproportionate force, arbitrary violence, heavy civilian casualties, digital censorship and sweeping restrictions aimed at peaceful protesters and human rights defenders. The statement made the essential point that the authorities had chosen to punish the outrage rather than address its causes: economic distress, runaway inflation and mass unemployment. It placed PoJK within a wider regional pattern of restrictive laws and intolerance of dissent, and called for accountability, dialogue and the protection of basic freedoms.
Yash Kashyap of Rajasthan Samgrah Kalyan Sansthan (RSKS India) took the demand a step further. In a virtual intervention, he urged the Council to order an immediate, independent and transparent investigation under UN auspices. He tied the nearly 90 documented deaths directly to the modest demands that preceded them: cheaper electricity, cheaper flour, a greater local voice. His central argument was simple and hard to dispute. No political disagreement can justify unlawful force or the denial of the right to life, assembly and expression. He asked for unrestricted access for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Special Procedures, journalists and independent medical observers, and for protection of witnesses and evidence.
Narender Kumar, Executive Director of Shivi Development Society, has been a steady presence in Geneva. Alongside chairing a side event on community water rights and the Indus Waters Treaty, his organisation’s work at HRC63 has kept the question of civic space in PoJK on the Council’s agenda.
Voices from Kashmir itself have been just as persistent. Sardar Shaukat Ali Kashmiri of the United Kashmir People’s National Party (UKPNP) and Mirza Shafiq of the Swiss Kashmir Human Rights Commission have documented mass arrests, road blockades that stopped essential supplies, and the humanitarian toll of a region cut off from the world. UKPNP supporters have demonstrated outside the UN, demanding the withdrawal of paramilitary forces and an end to the siege of areas such as Rawalakot.
International organisations have added weight. Amnesty International has repeatedly condemned the terrorism designation of a non-violent movement as disproportionate and unlawful, warning that it strikes at freedom of association, assembly and expression. It has called for the communications blackout to end, noting that it obstructs the documentation of abuses, and has pressed for prompt, independent investigations into the use of lethal force, including the killing of Shahzaib Habib. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has, in some instances, raised concerns from within the country, which carries its own significance. Diaspora activists in the United Kingdom and Europe have kept up pressure through protests, petitions and lobbying.
What binds these voices together is a refusal to accept a lie: that citizens asking for bread and electricity are terrorists. They have exposed a model of rule in PoJK built on military land acquisition, demographic engineering, denial of control over local resources and the steady sidelining of local aspirations. When an administration answers hunger with bullets and questions with blackouts, it shows how little consent it rests on.
Their demands of the world are specific and reasonable. Grant OHCHR, Special Procedures, journalists and medical observers unrestricted access. Restore communications. Lift the ban on JAAC. Release those detained for peaceful protest. Open real dialogue on the 38-point charter. None of this is radical. It is the minimum any government owes the people it governs.
A blackout is a violation in itself. It keeps families from learning the fate of their loved ones, blocks humanitarian relief and shields those responsible from scrutiny. Every statement read in Geneva, every placard raised outside the UN, every report smuggled past the shutdown pushes back against that darkness.
The organisers on the ground, the delegates at the Council, the rights groups and the diaspora campaigners have each done what the authorities hoped no one would do. They spoke. The people of PoJK are not voiceless, and thanks to those who stood with them, they are not alone. The world now has no excuse for not knowing.
