Pakistan’s Not-So-Azad Kashmir

U.K. High Commissioner to Pakistan Jane Marriott’s visit to Mirpur on January 10 prompted a formal protest from India. New Delhi had similarly relayed its concerns to Washington following U.S. Ambassador Donald Blome’s trip to Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) in October. Mirpur is the second-largest city of the region Pakistan describes as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), which along with GB forms the Pakistan-administered sections of Kashmir, the subject of the 77-year dispute between the two nuclear armed South Asian neighbors.

India claims both AJK and GB as part of its territory, in addition to its own administered Kashmir, which New Delhi bifurcated into two union territories – Jammu and Kashmir, along with Ladakh – revoking their special status in 2019. The territories governed by India are, likewise, claimed by Pakistan.

Pakistan commemorates every February 5 as Kashmir Solidarity Day across the country, in addition to GB and AJK. Ubiquitous rallies customarily echo slogans deeming united Kashmir as Pakistan’s “jugular vein,” with much of the national discourse aimed at condemning India’s rule. Meanwhile, addressing the plight of the Kashmiris under Pakistan’s control isn’t a part of any such vows or deliberation.

Multifaceted protests have exploded in Gilgit-Baltistan, which Islamabad has longed carved into a geopolitical loophole for its strategic interests. However, it is the part of Kashmir that Pakistan describes as “azad,” meaning free, where a volatile rupture with Islamabad is most palpable. A civil disobedience movement led by the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) has been underway in AJK over the past eight months, protesting inflated electricity and wheat prices. A significant percentage of the AJK population hasn’t paid their electricity bills since the summer of last year, with observers asserting that the majority of local households are partaking in the boycott.

The JAAC maintains that given AJK’s contribution to Pakistan’s power generation, the locals should be the first beneficiaries of the region’s hydroelectric projects.

“AJK contributes up to 3,500 MW worth of electricity to Pakistan. Our peak consumption is around 400 MW. We should be given electricity at the production cost,” Shaukat Nawaz Mir, the president of the local traders’ body, and a member of the JAAC, told The Diplomat. A lowered electricity cost is one of the 10 points that the committee has penned in its charter of demands.

As per a Senate committee review in 2021, AJK provides 2,700 MW to Pakistan’s power grid, with the region’s hydroelectric potential deemed to be triple that amount. Led by the Mangla Dam and the Neelum-Jhelum plant, AJK is responsible for over a third of Pakistan’s around 8,000 MW hydropower generation.

However, with AJK supplied electricity by Pakistan’s Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA), the locals in the region are asked to pay tariffs as per the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority’s (NEPRA) formula. This has seen AJK residents being charged an electricity rate of over 30 Pakistani rupees per unit, despite hours of load-shedding, whereas the power production cost is lower than 2 rupees per unit. (NEPRA’s tariff has faced massive agitation in the four Pakistani provinces of Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, and Sindh as well.)

“Our bills have various taxes and fuel adjustment charges. NEPRA’s tariff should only be reserved for those that are a part of Pakistan, which we are not. It is the locals who will determine the future – whether it’s the fate of electricity and wheat prices, or the fate of Kashmir,” added Mir.

AJK’s fiscal crisis is also compounded by the lack of industrial development in the region, with commercial activity heavily reliant on remittances sent by an estimated 700,000 “overseas Pakistanis” from a total population of 4 million. The escalating climate crisis has impacted agriculture and other economic activities, as Islamabad builds hydropower projects and tourism sites atop fluctuating water levels and amid haphazard deforestation, with AJK losing over 400 hectares of tree cover since 2001. The locals’ misery is aggravated by subpar health facilities, requiring patients to often be taken to Rawalpindi or Islamabad. Education remains in dire straits as well, with government schools lacking even basic provisions.

Despite numerous vows, the AJK government has failed to provide basic infrastructure to remote parts such as the Neelum Valley or to districts such as Haveli, with volatile areas around the Line of Control (the de facto border with India) especially devoid of development owing to security challenges. The crisis is further multiplied by the lack of telecommunication services, with AJK’s internet connectivity a mere fraction of what’s available in Rawalpindi or Islamabad, cities that are less than 100 miles away. Both AJK and GB receive telecommunication services from the Pakistan Army-run Special Communication Organization, headquartered in Rawalpindi.

“Private cellular companies are not allowed to operate in certain parts of Azad Kashmir. Even the government isn’t allowed to openly talk about this,” said Jalaluddin Mughal, a local filmmaker and photographer.

Many locals insist the army’s control over the telecommunication network is designed to keep tabs on any dissenting voices, given the turbulent nature of the region. As a result, AJK has long been deprived of basic communication facilities, at times with devastating results – the limited cellular coverage undermined relief work following the 2005 earthquake.

The military’s stranglehold over AJK is also reflected in the governance model imposed on the region. Despite Islamabad’s protests over India’s revocation of Kashmir’s special status in 2019, Pakistan had bifurcated its part of the region in 1949 through the unilaterally imposed Karachi Agreement, with the 1974 AJK Constitution and the Northern Areas Council Legal Framework Order facilitating the region’s demographic change. Since then, despite the evolution of rights on paper, GB continues to be legally controlled by the center, while AJK’s ostensibly sovereign setup is still run by Islamabad.

Locals maintain that AJK has a completely broken governance system, without any transparency or accountability. Even the funds allocated by the center, which receives all collected taxes with AJK’s budget at its disposal, are not utilized properly because of rampant corruption. As a result, dissent has become widespread in AJK, aimed at all governing authorities from the local government to the Pakistan Army. This has prompted a more authoritarian crackdown.

After AJK residents threw their electricity bills in the river in September, security authorities launched an operation against the protesters. Clashes have continued, with dozens of activists arrested. Amid the action against dissenters, the state has further quashed fundamental human rights in AJK, such as freedom of expression. While the 13th Amendment in 2018 to the 1974 AJK Constitution theoretically granted locals the right to access information, without passing a law that right continues to be undefined, and hence unattainable.

“If the right to information is granted, the government would have to make many things public, such as financial data and budget allocation. That would unravel the loopholes and the scale of corruption,” said Mughal.

In this regard, the AJK government has further doubled down on stifling criticism by introducing a defamation bill. Critics believe this is aimed at not just intimidating demonstrators and journalists – in line with the long history of coercing local media, including through the use of violence – but also silencing citizens who are using the internet to raise their voices.

Among those wary of the bid to subjugate dissidents is journalist Haris Qadeer, chief editor of the Rawalakot-based Daily Mujadala, a publication that has had its offices locked up.

“Without the right to information, the defamation bill will further compromise local journalists’ ability to report facts while protecting our sources. This will also curb freedom of expression on social media,” Qadeer said.

Such actions are further exacerbating AJK’s deteriorating relationship with Islamabad, as animosity against Pakistan among the locals grows in tandem. Observers say that a vast majority of the people of AJK do not want to be a part of Pakistan, and envision an independent Kashmiri state. A Chatham House survey in 2010 put popular support for an independent Kashmir at between 74 and 95 percent in the Kashmir Valley division, including AJK. In 2017, an independent survey of 10,000 people from AJK revealed that 73 percent of the locals wanted freedom and a separate country.

It was publishing this survey in his newspaper, Qadeer said, that resulted in the Daily Mujadala being shut down.

“I received the survey results early and reported it as the lead story. The deputy commissioner was asked to shut down the newspaper with the instructions to arrest the chief editor. Our offices and accounts were sealed. Even today, I cannot find work in any mainstream newspaper,” maintained Qadeer.

Quelling any pro-independence sentiments is critical to Pakistan reaffirming its hegemony over the resource rich, and geopolitically significant, AJK and GB. Control over the region is also integral to the military’s security policy. As a result, all political parties and government officials in AJK are required to take an oath supporting “the ideology of Pakistan… [AJK’s] accession to Pakistan… and integrity of Pakistan.” This effectively bans pro-independence ideologues, believed to echo the majority’s sentiment, from AJK’s politics and governance machinery.

Islamabad continues to call out India by citing the United Nations Security Council’s 1948 resolution on Kashmir, which requires Pakistan to withdraw its army from the region as a first step. Yet in practice, the military has long made peace with limiting itself to enforcing its authority within the Pakistan-controlled parts of Kashmir. This became apparent in the 1980s when the Pakistan Army, with the help of the United States’ bid to thwart the Soviet Union, and Saudi Arabia’s push to counter Iran by proliferating Sunni jihad, transformed Kashmir into a jihadist hub.

Among those that experienced the Pakistan Army’s jihadist machinations firsthand was the Yasin Malik-led Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF).

“We should accept that JKLF’s armed struggle was all the Pakistan Army’s doing. But as the movement was becoming purely nationalistic in the 1980s, they launched their fundamentalist groups such as Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. We were crying that you will get the label of terrorism slashed on our independence movement,” the JKLF chairman in AJK, Sardar Saghir Ahmad, told The Diplomat.

Since then, the Pakistan Army has launched jihadist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), which continue to maneuver attacks both across the LoC and in India. Despite officially banning these groups, and announcing actions against them, Islamabad allows the radical Islamist outfits to resurface under new labels and even take part in elections. The LeT-affiliated Pakistan Markazi Muslim League will contest the upcoming general elections in Pakistan, while another affiliate, the Jammu Kashmir United Movement, is functioning in AJK, openly flying the flags of LeT and its founder Hafiz Saeed.

“These are assets used by the army, which is the colonizing force in Pakistan occupied Kashmir. The ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] and MI [Military Intelligence] run the territory. Everything is practically governed by the GOC [General Officer Commander] in Murree or a brigadier in Muzaffarabad. The occupying force has taken over our land, resources, tourism,” added Ahmad.

Despite the absolute control over its portion of Kashmir, Pakistan has been working on arbitrarily mainstreaming the region to further legitimize its authority. While the push to transform GB into Pakistan’s fifth province came from Beijing, given that the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor enters Pakistan through the disputed territory, Islamabad has been working on transforming AJK into its sixth province as well.

Military officials told me in 2020 that a briefing was given to the then-AJK government on mainstreaming the territory as a province. Diplomatic sources shared that this came as a result of backdoor diplomacy and understanding with India, as both New Delhi and Islamabad look to formalize their constitutional control over their respective parts of Kashmir. On July 15, 2020, the AJK government issued a press statement rejecting an unspecified constitutional amendment and asking that AJK be more empowered instead.

“That [statement] was a reply to [then-Pakistani Prime Minister] Imran Khan [so] he couldn’t change the status. [The governments of] Khan and [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi had agreed to settle the Kashmir dispute like this,” Attiq Ahmed, an advisor to the AJK government at the time, told The Diplomat.

Despite the various stumbling blocks en route to that move over the past couple of years, including Khan’s fallout with the army, and in turn the military’s falling out with the Pakistani masses, military and diplomatic sources maintain that the mainstreaming AJK and GB remains on the cards.

Of course, none of this will be a part of the national discourse on February 5, when banned jihadist outfits take part in rallies to express “solidarity with Kashmir.” Meanwhile, the Joint Awami Action Committee has announced a general strike across AJK on the day, calling on shops and businesses to remain closed.

“If Pakistan actually stands in solidarity with Kashmir, they have the opportunity to demonstrate that by giving AJK electricity at production cost and letting us take charge of the taxation and tariffs,” said Shaukat Nawaz Mir,  the JAAC member.

Local activists and stakeholders confess that they don’t see the army’s stranglehold over AJK easing any time soon and hence Pakistan’s mainstreaming of its administered Kashmir remains an inevitability. However, JKLF chairman Sardar Saghir Ahmad insists the Kashmiri nationalist sentiment wouldn’t be erased by any unilateral moves.

“That road won’t lead to peace. The issue will persist and simmer,” he said. “Our resistance will continue till the people achieve their wish, and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir will be the epicenter of that movement.”