When Pakistani security forces opened fire on demonstrators in Rawalakot on the night of 7 June 2026, they did more than kill civilians gathered around a hospital. They exposed, in the harshest light, the bankruptcy of the model of governance Islamabad has imposed on the parts of Jammu and Kashmir it has illegally occupied since 1947. The official account speaks of eleven dead, seven civilians and four policemen. Local activists and the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) say the toll exceeds thirty, with around two hundred injured. The number is contested. But if one looks at Pakistan’s actions in the past in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK), 30 deaths is a conservative estimate. However, what is not contested is the trajectory: a grassroots civic movement met with bullets, anti-terror laws and paramilitary deployment.
A Homegrown Revolt over Bread and Power
These protests are not a foreign conspiracy. They are the predictable consequence of years of deprivation. The JAAC, formed in 2023, is a coalition of traders, transporters, lawyers and students. Its 38-point charter is strikingly mundane: cheaper wheat flour, electricity billed at the cost of local hydro generation, an end to the perks of a bloated political elite, and the abolition of twelve seats in the 53-member Azad Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly reserved for “refugees” settled in Pakistan, seats that the mainstream Pakistani parties use to engineer pliant governments in Muzaffarabad.
On 5 June, the same day it announced regional elections for 27 July, the so-called AJK government declared the JAAC a “proscribed organisation” under the first schedule of the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Anti-Terrorism Act, 2014, branding a civil-rights movement as terrorists. Some seventy-two people were arrested; sedition cases and a ten-million-rupee bounty against its leaders followed. Amnesty International called the designation a “dangerous escalation.” Its deputy regional director for South Asia, Isabelle Lassee, was unambiguous: “The proscription of JAAC under anti-terror laws is disproportionate, unlawful and a violation of the right to freedom of association.”
Here lies the central irony. Pakistan claims to champion self-determination for Kashmiris, yet it will not permit the Kashmiris to protest peacefully against the price of flour in occupied PoJK.
Two fronts, One Fragile State
Rawalakot did not bleed in isolation. The same week, neighbouring Gilgit-Baltistan held assembly elections on 7 June that descended into chaos. The Pakistan Peoples Party emerged ahead, leading in ten of the twenty-four directly elected seats, but both it and Imran Khan’s PTI alleged systematic rigging, from withheld Form-45 vote tallies to overnight relocation of polling stations. The Election Commission was forced to bar consolidation of results pending re-polling. Protesters blockaded the Karakoram Highway, the arterial link of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, for a third straight day. PTI’s information secretary denounced the deployment of over 13,000 outside security personnel, including 11,000 from Punjab Police, against just 5,600 local officers for a population of roughly 900,000, as naked electoral engineering.
Hundreds of kilometres south, Pakistan’s army is fighting a far bloodier war. In late January 2026, the Balochistan Liberation Army launched coordinated assaults under the banner “Operation Herof 2.0,” briefly seizing the desert town of Nushki and holding it through a three-day battle that ended only after Pakistan’s Army deployed helicopters and drones. The insurgency is fuelled by grievances over the exploitation of Baloch resources and Chinese projects at Gwadar for the benefit of others. This is Islamabad’s predicament: civil unrest in PoJK, electoral breakdown in Gilgit-Baltistan, and an armed insurgency in Balochistan, all stretching a military that prefers to project power outward but is increasingly unable to its own periphery together.
The China Factor Deepens the Trap
Pakistan’s answer to economic fragility has been deeper dependence on Beijing and that dependence is itself a source of the unrest. Gilgit-Baltistan has an estimated 40,000 megawatts of hydroelectric potential by Pakistan’s own WAPDA reckoning, yet an installed capacity of barely 150 MW. Residents of Skardu and Gilgit endure up to twenty-one hours of load-shedding a day in winter. The water and the dam sites are exploited; the electricity and the royalties flow elsewhere.
To the north lies the Shaksgam Valley, 5,180 square kilometres of Jammu and Kashmir that Pakistan illegally ceded to China under the 1963 Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement, which India has never recognised. Indian Army Chief reaffirmed in January 2026 that “India considers the 1963 agreement between Pakistan and China as illegal,” adding that New Delhi regards Chinese infrastructure activity there as “an illegal action.” Far from resolving Pakistan’s legitimacy crisis, China’s deepening footprint, through CPEC, Gwadar and Shaksgam, entrenches the very extractive dynamic driving locals into the streets.
The Contrast Across the Line of Control
The comparison with Jammu and Kashmir is now impossible to ignore. In autumn 2024, India held the Union Territory’s first assembly elections in a decade. Turnout reached 63.88 per cent, polling was peaceful, and an elected government under Chief Minister Omar Abdullah was restored. Across the Line of Control, Pakistan bans a protest committee and postpones democracy behind an internet blackout.
The developmental gap is equally stark. In June 2025, India’s Prime Minister inaugurated the Udhampur–Srinagar–Baramulla rail link, walking across the Chenab Bridge, at 359 metres the world’s highest railway arch bridge and flagging off Vande Bharat services that connect the Kashmir Valley to the national rail network for the first time in history. Tens of thousands of crores have been committed to highways and tunnels. Tourism hit record levels, roughly 2.95 million visitors to the Valley in 2024, up from 2.71 million in 2023, before the April 2025 Pahalgam terror attack, itself a grim reminder of the cross-border terrorism India still confronts, temporarily set the sector back.
Conclusion
The unrest in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir cannot be read apart from the strategic doctrine that has defined the Pakistani state for four decades. Since the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s, Pakistan’s military establishment has treated jihadist militancy not as a threat to be eliminated but as an instrument of statecraft, a low-cost lever for “strategic depth” in Afghanistan and for bleeding India through proxies it could plausibly deny. The pattern was open enough that when the Financial Action Task Force placed Pakistan on its grey list in 2018, it did so because the country’s powerful military harbours Islamist terrorists to use as proxies against India and neighbouring Afghanistan. Pakistan spent four years working its way off that list, removed only in October 2022 and even then the watchdog cautioned that delisting does not make a country immune to money laundering or terror financing, a warning that landed alongside reports of Jaish-e-Mohammad moving money through digital wallets.
The warning had been delivered plainly a decade earlier. Standing beside Pakistan’s foreign minister in Islamabad in 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton observed that a state cannot keep snakes in its backyard and expect them only to bite its neighbours. That prophecy has now come due. In the Institute for Economics and Peace’s (IEP) Global Terrorism Index, Pakistan ranked first in the world for the first time, with terrorism-related deaths rising to 1,139 in 2025, the highest since 2013, capping a sixth consecutive year of rising fatalities. The single deadliest actor is the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, an ideological heir of the very militancy Islamabad once nurtured. The IEP was explicit about the mechanism: the rise of the Afghan Taliban, a movement Pakistan spent decades sponsoring, has handed the TTP greater operational space, resources and motivation.
The contrast with India could hardly be starker. While Pakistan invested in an architecture of proxies, India invested in roads, railways and ballots. In Jammu and Kashmir, New Delhi held assembly elections in 2024 with turnout near 64 per cent, opened the Chenab rail link binding the Valley to the national network, and presided over record tourist seasons. Two states inheriting the same contested geography made opposite wagers: one on development and democratic process, the other on coercion and clandestine violence, and the ledgers have come back. The crisis in PoJK is that same doctrine turned inward. A state accustomed to governing through force rather than consent reaches instinctively for the anti-terror statute, the paramilitary baton and the internet blackout the moment its own citizens ask for affordable bread and an honest vote. Islamabad now finds itself besieged on every front at once: civil revolt in occupied Kashmir, armed insurgency in Balochistan, and a terrorism epidemic in its frontier provinces fed by forces of its own making. India need not manufacture this reckoning. It need only let the contrast speak: a neighbour that chose to build, set against one that chose to breed snakes, and is now being bitten by them.
