Silencing Azad Kashmir: Internet Cuts and Roadblocks

For two months, the authorities in Pakistan-administered Kashmir have answered a peaceful demand for bread-and-butter reforms with bans, bullets, and blackouts. What should have been a manageable political dispute over wheat subsidies, electricity prices, and refugee representation has instead become a case study in how not to govern: a government choosing repression over negotiation, and paying for it in lives.

Banning Dissent, Then Crushing It

The Jammu and Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JKJAAC) was, by most accounts, exactly what it claimed to be a grassroots coalition organising strikes and rallies over economic grievances. The government’s response was not to negotiate but to outlaw it. On 5 June, AJK authorities declared the JKJAAC a “proscribed organisation” under anti-terrorism law, a designation Amnesty International called “a dangerous escalation,” warning it would deepen an already alarming deterioration in human rights in the region. Branding a civic movement as a terrorist entity did not make its grievances disappear; it simply removed the group’s ability to raise them through legal channels, all but guaranteeing confrontation.

That confrontation came quickly. When JKJAAC defied the ban and held its planned rally in Muzaffarabad on 9 June, security forces met protesters with lethal force. At least 11 people were killed and more than 70 injured in clashes in Rawalakot alone that weekend. Federal paramilitary troops were deployed into the streets of a region ostensibly governed by its own elected assembly, hardly the mark of a state confident in political persuasion over coercion.

Killing Did Not Stop There

The bloodshed did not end with a single crackdown in June. Violence resurfaced through the summer as protests continued, with at least nine more deaths reported in mid-July clashes and further casualties in Rawalakot again in late July, just days before elections opened. A death toll spread across three separate months of unrest is not an isolated policing failure it is a pattern, and it raises a hard question the AJK government has yet to answer honestly: why lethal force was treated as a routine response to demonstrators rather than a last resort.

Silencing the Territory to Control the Narrative

Beyond the killings, the government reached for tools that punish an entire population. Internet shutdown imposed alongside the crackdown cutting off residents’ ability to communicate, organise, or simply tell the outside world what was happening to them. Roads into and around protest hubs like Muzaffarabad and Rawalakot were blocked and travel advisories imposed ahead of planned rallies, restricting the movement of ordinary residents, not just demonstrators. Mass arbitrary arrests followed, sweeping up activists under terrorism statutes for what amounted to organising and speech.

These are not the tools of a government trying to keep the peace. They are the tools of a government trying to prevent scrutiny of its security forces’ conduct, and of the underlying grievances it has left unresolved for years. Blocking roads and cutting internet access does not defuse anger over the price of flour and electricity; it only ensures fewer people are watching when force is used to suppress it.

An Election Cannot Substitute for Accountability

That this crisis has unfolded alongside AJK’s legislative election, now proceeding in phases since 27 July, makes the government’s conduct harder to excuse, not easier. Holding a vote under heavy security, after a campaign season in which dozens were killed, does not erase the question of who authorised the use of force against protesters, why a civic organisation was branded a terrorist group, or why residents were cut off from the internet and confined by roadblocks in their own towns. A ballot cast under those conditions cannot substitute for an honest reckoning with how this crisis was handled.

The people of Azad Kashmir deserved a government that listened when they raised grievances about the cost of living and political representation. Instead, they got proscription, paramilitary deployment, internet blackouts, and roadblocks and, ultimately, funerals. That record deserves scrutiny, not silence.