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Pakistan’s crackdown on protesters in Rawalakot exposes a devastating contradiction at the heart of its Kashmir policy: Islamabad champions self-determination against Delhi while suppressing Kashmiri agency under its own administration.
By PROFESSOR JUNAID S AHMAD
For more than 70 years, Kashmir has stood as the subcontinent’s most damning moral indictment: a people denied self-determination, a land suffocated by militarisation, and a political question answered by India with prisons, pellets, disappearances, curfews, censorship and graves.
India supplied the brutality. Pakistan supplied the speeches.
Now Islamabad has supplied the betrayal.
In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, a movement born from electricity bills, food prices, unemployment, political manipulation and the accumulated humiliation of unaccountable rule has been met with the standard vocabulary of frightened power: bans, arrests, blackouts, barricades, tear gas and bullets.
Citizens demanded dignity. The state issued notifications.
This is the bureaucratic sorcery of the security regime: dissent becomes sedition, a procession becomes insurgency, and a protester becomes a terrorist by the movement of a pen.
The current Pakistani regime has therefore achieved what decades of Indian diplomacy and propaganda could not. It has not merely weakened Pakistan’s moral case on Kashmir. It has taken a hammer to it.
This is no longer ordinary hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the distance between principle and practice. What is unfolding in Rawalakot and across Azad Jammu and Kashmir is more devastating: the principle itself has been exposed as conditional, selective and counterfeit.
Pakistan has spent generations proclaiming that Kashmiris possess an inalienable right to determine their political future. Yet when Kashmiris under Pakistani administration organise independently, challenge electoral arrangements and march toward Muzaffarabad, their political adulthood is suddenly cancelled.
Self-determination, apparently, is sacred when aimed at Delhi. When aimed at Islamabad, it becomes terrorism carrying an electricity bill.
The Joint Awami Action Committee did not descend from some foreign intelligence laboratory, despite the establishment’s bottomless supply of imaginary conspiracies. It emerged from inflated tariffs, unaffordable necessities, unemployment, elite privilege, broken promises and a political structure designed to keep Kashmiri agency ornamental rather than decisive.
Its supporters have demanded accountable government and reform of an electoral arrangement they believe allows Pakistan-based political forces to shape governments through 12 assembly seats reserved for refugees living outside the territory.
The refugees are not the enemy. They are the instrument.
Their suffering is polished for speeches, wrapped in sacred rhetoric and converted into political machinery. One Kashmiri wound is used to discipline another. Anyone objecting is then accused of betraying Kashmir.
Only a bureaucracy of exceptional cynicism could turn representation into disenfranchisement and call the result constitutional virtue.
The regime’s response has been to designate a grassroots civil rights movement a terrorist organisation. This is the security state’s favourite intellectual shortcut because it abolishes the exhausting burden of answering citizens.
Terrorism ceases to describe a violent method. It becomes an administrative synonym for disobedience.
Opposing punitive electricity tariffs becomes subversion. Electoral reform becomes conspiracy. A march becomes insurgency. A citizen demanding accountability becomes, by decree, an enemy of the republic.
The method is brutally simple.
Refuse reform. Criminalise organisation. Cut communications. Arrest leaders. Block roads. Prevent assembly. When people gather anyway, unleash force. Then cite the chaos created by repression as proof that repression was necessary.
The state lights the fire and submits the smoke as evidence of arson.
The damage extends far beyond Rawalakot. Pakistan’s Kashmir case has always rested not merely on law and history, but on moral contrast.
That contrast once appeared stark because Indian rule in Kashmir has been defined by overwhelming military force, mass detention, torture allegations, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, collective punishment, internet shutdowns and the systematic strangulation of political life.
India has treated an entire people as a security problem and then cited their resistance as justification for treating them as a security problem.
Its occupation rests upon one of the modern world’s most obscene inversions: the occupier claims self-defence against the occupied.
That indictment remains true. Indian repression does not become less savage because Pakistan has chosen imitation. India’s denial of Kashmiri self-determination does not become legitimate because Islamabad has disgraced itself.
But Pakistan has forfeited the right to present itself as India’s moral opposite.
A state cannot condemn blackouts across the Line of Control while imposing them at home. It cannot denounce arbitrary detention by India while imprisoning its own Kashmiri dissenters. It cannot demand that Delhi tolerate protest while answering marches under its own administration with force.
Kashmir’s rights do not depend upon Pakistan’s virtue. A right remains a right even when its loudest advocate is fraudulent.
But advocacy without consistency becomes propaganda. And propaganda, however loudly broadcast, eventually collapses beneath lived experience.
For decades, Pakistan cultivated the politically useful Kashmiri: heroic when condemning India, grateful when addressing Pakistan, eloquent abroad and obedient at home.
The Kashmiri was permitted a voice, provided Rawalpindi wrote the script.
Rawalakot has torn it up.
Its protesters have exposed the central fraud in Pakistan’s Kashmir policy: Islamabad wants the symbolism of Kashmiri resistance without the substance of Kashmiri agency. It celebrates resistance as an export commodity and criminalises it as a domestic practice.
That is not solidarity. It is custodianship disguised as brotherhood.
The present regime has squandered seven decades of moral capital for the temporary pleasure of controlling an assembly, suppressing a march and teaching an angry population the etiquette of submission.
No Indian propagandist could have designed a more useful spectacle.
Pakistan will continue invoking Kashmir at the United Nations. Its diplomats will speak of justice, occupation and self-determination. Their sentences will remain polished. Their outrage will arrive punctually.
The words will simply weigh less.
For moral authority is not destroyed when an enemy contradicts you. It is destroyed when your own conduct proves the enemy’s point.
In Rawalakot, Pakistan did not merely fire upon protesters.
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It fired upon its Kashmir case—and, with the precision of a regime destroying what it never truly believed, struck it through the heart.
Prof Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan.
