In 2006, while conducting fieldwork in Muzaffarabad in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, I stayed with a local family after driving from Islamabad via Abbottabad, through a landscape of shattered houses and tent settlements. One morning, among the volunteers, I noticed a middle-aged man moving slowly on crutches. We eventually sat down together over tea, and I learnt that he had been attacked by activists associated with a rival student movement that would later become central to my understanding of the politics of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK).

In 1994, Pervaiz Shraf Magrey lost his leg in a violent encounter with members of the Jamaat-e-Tulba. His group, the Jammu and Kashmir National Student Federation (JKNSF), was challenging Jamaat-e-Tulba’s practice of letting Hizbul Mujahideen militants stay in the hostels of university. For those of us with decades-long familiarity with the nuances and actors of the conflict on the ground on both sides of the Line of Control, it was not difficult to recognise that Jamaat-e-Tulba was the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami.

Hizbul Mujahideen had acquired considerable prominence on the Indian side of Line of Control around the same time as it increasingly displaced the “pro-independence” Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) as the dominant militant organisation. Unlike the JKLF, Hizbul Mujahideen was explicitly pro-Pakistan and advocated the accession of J&K to Pakistan. It also operated with the backing of Jamaat-e-Islami.

Encounters such as these reinforced an enduring lesson: the region cannot be understood through distant observation alone. Its politics are layered, shaped by history, memory, and generations of political mobilisation.

PoK protests, a contrasting narrative

The recent protests in PoK, which unfolded around the 80th anniversary of the Independence of India and Pakistan, have generated sharply contrasting narratives on either side of the border. Within Pakistan, sections of the ruling establishment portrayed the protesters as acting at India’s behest. Meanwhile, outside Pakistan, the protests have frequently been interpreted as confirmation that it is the first major revolt of the region against the Pakistani state.

Both narratives are convenient for their respective audiences, but neither adequately explains what is unfolding on the ground, as complex realities cannot be explained in binaries. There is little doubt that some of the issues being discussed are legacies of Partition. But they have also acquired their own trajectories, shaped by the region’s distinct political, social and historical experiences since 1947.

Approaches that view PoK solely through the prism of India-Pakistan rivalry inevitably miss this complexity. Understanding PoK therefore requires sustained engagement with its evolving political, social and historical dynamics.

The immediate trigger for this latest round of violence appears to have been the killing in June of Shahzeb Habib, a JAAC activist who was travelling with the organisation’s core leader Umar Nazir Kashmiri. Their vehicle was intercepted near Barmang Bridge in Rawalakot, after which an exchange of fire took place. While authorities said armed occupants opened fire first, JAAC supporters disputed the account and alleged that Habib was killed by security-force fire and that Kashmiri was also wounded. The episode illustrates, once again, the limits and ultimately the failure of relying on coercive tactics to suppress political dissent.

In my earlier three detailed pieces on the region for this publication, I have tried to provide a more grounded reading, rather than viewing developments solely through the prism of the India-Pakistan rivalry. While I have outlined the litany of grievances expressed across the region during the protests and traced their historical background, many of these experiences are familiar to other post-colonial states. Questions of political representation, economic distribution, constitutional ambiguity and regional identity have accumulated over decades. Yet an important question remains insufficiently explored – a question I have been asked repeatedly: what explains the mobilisation itself, and why have protesters chosen central PoK as the principal site of protest?

How the movement is sustaining for months

Coming to the first question: why have these grievances, which have existed for years, now acquired the organisational capacity and popular resonance to sustain a movement for months? Who constitutes its cadre, what networks connect its leadership to ordinary citizens, and why have protesters continued to remain in the arena despite arrests, repression and the disruption of communications? The answers suggest that the present mobilisation cannot be understood merely as a reaction to inflation, electricity prices or the immediate political crisis.

The Pakistani establishment has dismissed these protests as being backed by external forces, implicitly pointing to India’s involvement. Some of the same communities that have historically been portrayed as susceptible to Indian influence have also provided substantial manpower to Pakistan’s own security institutions. This makes it difficult to explain the mobilisation simply as an externally sponsored movement.

There is a historical dimension to this mobilisation. The present movement has organisational roots going back several years, with the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee emerging in 2023 as an umbrella platform bringing together traders, civil-society groups, activists and other constituencies. Its demands have subsequently expanded from immediate economic concerns to questions of political representation, governance and the relationship between the region and the Pakistani state. The recurrence of mobilisation in 2024, 2025 and 2026 indicates the gradual construction of an organisational infrastructure rather than a series of disconnected protests.

This historical continuity matters. A protest movement becomes difficult to suppress when grievances are embedded in pre-existing social networks, when local leadership has legitimacy independent of established political parties, and when successive confrontations with the state reinforce rather than diminish collective identity. The striking feature of the present moment, therefore, is not simply the scale of the grievances but the emergence of a political constituency capable of repeatedly converting those grievances into collective action.

That is perhaps the more important story of the current unrest: not merely why people are angry, but how anger has acquired organisation, memory and staying power. The protests need to be located within the longer history of political mobilisation in the region, including the evolution of civil-society networks, the role of traders and local communities, the weakness of conventional party politics, and the unresolved question of political representation. Only then can we understand why a movement that began around economic demands has acquired a much broader political character.

JKNSF: Growing strong since 1967

With the exception of a few figures, namely the traders, the protests were driven largely by a younger generation of activists associated with the Jammu and Kashmir National Students Federation (JKNSF), an organisation that has long unsettled the Pakistani establishment because of its ideological orientation and advocacy of an independent Jammu and Kashmir.

In the Pakistani context, when a group invokes the term “national” or “nationalist,” it can imply a prioritisation of ethnic and linguistic identities over the foundational identity of Islam shared by South Asian Muslims that underpinned the creation of Pakistan. This is often viewed negatively by the Pakistani state, which has historically regarded ethnic or regional nationalism as a potential challenge to the country’s overarching national identity rooted in Islam.

The origins of the JKNSF date back to the early 1960s. Following the partition of the princely state in 1947, student politics in PoK had largely remained dormant. In 1962, a group of pro-independence student activists began touring colleges across PoK to encourage political participation in shaping the future of Jammu and Kashmir. Their efforts culminated in the formation of the JKNSF, whose first convention was held in 1964.

Several pioneers of the movement later entered mainstream politics. One notable example was Mumtaz Hussain Rathore, who eventually became Prime Minister of PAJK in 1990. Ironically, his son, Faisal Mumtaz Rathore, is now presiding over a government as outgoing Prime Minister confronting protests that have resulted in dozens of deaths. This highlights both the historical continuity and the contradictions within PAJK’s political elite.

From its inception, the JKNSF claims that they drew inspiration from socialist and progressive ideas. It viewed the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir as a distinct political entity. The federation also developed close links with progressive student organisations in Pakistan that challenged the political status quo. Many of the individuals active in today’s protests belong to families that participated in earlier waves of mobilisation, illustrating how political activism has often passed from one generation to the next.

The federation’s history is marked by repeated confrontation with the authorities. One of its earliest major agitations occurred in 1967, when students protested against PoK President Abdul Hameed Khan during his proposed visit to the Mirpur College convocation. The state responded with arrests under sedition charges. Several activists were imprisoned for extended periods; Mirpur-born Sabir Ansari, for instance, reportedly spent more than a year in jail. Provisions ordinarily invoked against enemy agents were applied to student activists, reflecting the degree to which the state viewed organised nationalist politics as a security challenge. Now his son Sabar Ansari is now one of the leaders of the current agitation and reports confirm that his family has again faced the crackdown in Mirpur.

The JKNSF also played an important role in the anti-Mangla Dam movement during the 1960s, when many residents opposed displacement and inadequate compensation arising from the construction of the dam on the Jhelum River. Parallel organisations emerged in Pakistan itself, where large numbers of students from PoK were studying. The Jammu and Kashmir Students Organisation, established in Lahore in 1962, sought to mobilise support among progressive and left-leaning Pakistani students for the cause of an independent Jammu and Kashmir. Students from PoK subsequently participated in Pakistan’s wider democratic movements, including the campaign against General Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime during the 1980s.

The JKNSF’s influence gradually came under challenge with the rise of the Jamaat-e-Tulaba. Rivalry between the two organisations frequently spilled onto university campuses, where clashes became a recurring feature of student politics. The balance shifted further during General Zia-ul-Haq’s rule, when independent student unions were banned across Pakistan and PoK. Although the restrictions affected all organisations, the Jamaat-e-Tulaba retained a significant organisational advantage through the institutional, ideological, and financial support of its parent party in Pakistan.

The recent protests therefore did not emerge in a political vacuum. They brought to the surface longstanding grievances, as I’ve outlined in earlier pieces, that have persisted within sections of PoK society for decades. More significantly, they demonstrated that the organisational backbone of much of the mobilisation continues to come from student networks whose political lineage stretches back more than 60 years. Any serious assessment of current developments must therefore examine not only the immediate triggers of the protests but also the historical traditions of political activism that continue to shape the region.

One of the prominent faces of this agitation and its subsequent repression was Sardar Osama Jameel, a PhD scholar at Islamabad-based Quaid-i-Azam University and a prominent JKNSF activist. He died on July 27–28, 2026, after reportedly being shot during protests and security-force crackdowns in Rawalakot. His sloganeering, rooted in progressive political tradition, points to another important dimension of the mobilisation: the presence of a politically conscious student movement with a longer ideological and historical lineage. His participation also suggests that the agitation cannot be understood solely as a response to immediate economic grievances; it draws upon an older tradition of progressive, anti-establishment politics in the region.

A lesser-known aspect of the agitation has been the support it received from various parts of Pakistan. Protesters of PoK origin in several Pakistani cities expressed solidarity with the movement, while 88 of them were arrested and charged under terrorism-related provisions. This wider support is significant because it suggests that the agitation cannot simply be dismissed as a geographically confined or externally sponsored movement.

PoK elections reaffirmed institutional flaws

In this light, the 2026 electoral process in PoK has merely reaffirmed the institutional flaws of the territory’s political system, validating many of the grievances that have fuelled the protest movement. While there were allegations of rigging, mainly raised by the PPP, there was a turnout of 46% in the first phase and 53% in the second phase. The JAAC leadership stopped short of calling for an electoral boycott, but neither did it encourage local residents to participate in the electoral process.

Across the three phases of the election, the ruling PML-N has emerged as the largest beneficiary, securing at least 25 of the 38 seats for which results have so far been announced, much as the party in power in Islamabad has historically tended to perform well in PoK elections. The contrast with 2021 is instructive. Then, the ruling PTI won 26 of the 45 general seats, followed by PPP with 11 and PML-N with six. The third phase, held in Bagh and Haveli, however, has also underscored the unsettled and contested nature of the 2026 process. PPP won LA-17 Bagh-IV, while an independent candidate captured LA-14 Bagh-I; the results in LA-15 and LA-16 remain unresolved, with the Election Commission ordering re-polling at 23 polling stations on August 15. Seven further constituencies in Poonch and Sudhnoti have also been postponed because of the ongoing protests.

The election also produced a striking generational and political turnover: three former Prime Ministers, including Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan, who heads the regional party with a long history, the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, were defeated, underscoring the extent to which established political figures and traditional parties have lost their electoral hold. On 19 July 1947, the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference passed a resolution in Srinagar advocating the State’s accession to Pakistan. This contrasted sharply with the position of Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference, which had rejected the Muslim League’s politics and was politically aligned with the Congress.

The 12 refugee constituencies remain a particularly contentious feature of the electoral system and of the current agitation. Reserved for people who migrated from the Indian side of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947 and now live elsewhere in Pakistan, these seats, six for Jammu and six for the Kashmir Valley, give voters outside PoK a significant role in determining its government. In 2026, PML-N won 10 refugee seats, while PPP secured 2 seats overall in the currently declared results. Given that the 12 refugee seats constitute nearly 26% of the 45-member elected seats in the Assembly, their political weight is disproportionate to their direct connection with the territory they help govern.

The 2026 election has merely reinforced the protesters’ assertion that retaining these seats in their present form is a negation of democratic representation. The disconnect was particularly visible during the polling for the refugee constituencies on August 2. Although these 12 seats together had nearly 439,000 registered voters, their electorates are scattered across Pakistan, with some individual constituencies representing only a few thousand voters. In LA-43 (Valley-IV), for instance, there were just 3,346 registered voters, while LA-44 (Valley-V), covering refugees in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, had 3,754. LA-39 (Jammu-VI), the largest of these constituencies, had only 20,807 registered voters. The limited participation in these constituencies further exposed the anomaly: legislators elected by small and geographically dispersed electorates, many of whom live hundreds of kilometres outside PoK, can nevertheless exercise the same legislative power as representatives elected by tens of thousands of voters actually living in the territory. This is precisely the democratic contradiction at the heart of the protesters’ objection and not the representation of refugees as such, but the continued use of a non-territorial electoral arrangement to determine the government of a territory whose residents themselves have no say in those constituencies. The fact that the determining composition of the Assembly remains dependent on refugee constituencies only reinforces the broader perception of an electoral system whose institutional design is part of the political grievances being expressed within PoK itself.

These developments have yet again reaffirmed that they are a part of a continuing trend of institutional deceit and falsified claims about the region’s status as an “independent country”. Practically, its political status does not even equal other provinces of Pakistan.

Why are the protests happening in central PoK?

The second question is why central PoK, and particularly hilly Rawalakot, has emerged as one of the main sites of protest. Rawalakot lies within the former Poonch estate, a region with a long history of rebellion against the Maharaja, including the 1955 uprising against the Pakistani state, but it is also an important recruitment ground for Pakistan’s armed forces and has produced several senior military officers. This creates a striking historical paradox: a region that has contributed substantially to Pakistan’s security establishment has also repeatedly been a centre of political dissent.

The social composition of the recent protests reinforces this paradox. One of those reportedly killed during the recent protests was the father of serving Pakistani Air Force officers, while another person killed in firing by security personnel was the son of a former member of the Pakistani army. These connections complicate any simple portrayal of the protests as externally driven. They suggest instead that dissent is emerging from communities deeply intertwined with Pakistan’s own military and security institutions.

The recent protests also offer broader lessons that extend well beyond Pakistan-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir. Across many post-colonial states and developing countries, the political and administrative periphery is often viewed primarily through a security lens rather than as a source of political knowledge and lived experience. As a result, policies are frequently framed in distant capitals with limited appreciation of local realities. The knowledge systems that evolve within peripheral societies deserve greater recognition and accommodation in policymaking. Capitals inevitably become centres of political and bureaucratic power, but they can also develop insulated narratives that overlook the complexities of the regions they govern. This disconnect often delays policy correction and deepens mistrust.

The fact that the epicentre of the protests, including this latest round, has been in central PoK suggests that some of the structural advantages Pakistan enjoyed in this area, as compared to other parts of PoK, have not translated into enduring political legitimacy.

Protesters from other parts of the region have also flocked to the area, turning it into a focal point for mobilisation. One reason may be its geography: the hilly terrain and forested terrain provide protesters with a degree of natural protection and make it more difficult for security personnel deployed from Rawalpindi to exercise effective control. But geography alone does not explain the repeated emergence of central PAJK as the protest site; the area’s strong local networks, martial tradition and history of resisting any real or perceived repression, have also played an important role.

In 1947, geographical contiguity with Islamabad and the relative ease with which Pakistani forces could access the area were only two of several factors that shaped the emergence of PoK. The extensive wartime recruitment of men from north-western British India, including what is today the central part of PoK and northern Pakistani Punjab, particularly the area culturally known as the Pothohar belt, into the British Indian Army created a substantial pool of trained military manpower.

Many served in the European and other theatres during the Second World War on behalf of the Brits, leaving behind considerable military experience that would later shape the region’s political and armed mobilisation. This manpower had also got demobilised after the war. This was one of the key reasons that local forces were able to mobilise quickly and stage an armed rebellion against the Princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in October 1947.

An eyewitness to the tumultuous era of 1947 and an authority on J&K, late Balraj Puri, a Padma Bhushan awardee, records on page seven of his best-selling book Kashmir: Towards Insurgency that the initial discontent in Poonch centred on “some local demands like the rehabilitation of 60,000 demobilised soldiers of the British army belonging to the area.”

According to Puri, as these issues became intertwined with wider political and communal tensions, “the agitation turned communal.” He writes that the state army was deployed to suppress the unrest, but soldiers refused to fire on demonstrators with whom they shared religious and ethnic ties. Some subsequently deserted the army, and, in Puri’s account, the agitation developed into an armed revolt. He further attributes the revolt’s growing strength to “ammunition and other types of assistance from across the border.”

Puri also identifies a longer historical dimension to the 1947 unrest. He argues that the revolt drew on local sentiments of patriotism in Poonch, which, in his view, had been offended when the territory was brought under the direct control of the Jammu Durbar in 1936, following what he describes as a decision of the British courts. Until then, Poonch had retained a distinct status under the descendants of ruler Gulab Singh’s brother for about a century. Gulab Singh was the founder and first ruler of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which he established in 1846 under the Treaty of Amritsar.

Thus, in Puri’s interpretation, the 1947 upheaval in Poonch was shaped not only by the immediate grievances of demobilised soldiers and the subsequent communalisation of the agitation, but also by longer-standing local political and historical sentiments. Like other princely states or estates of British India, Poonch maintained properties outside the jagir, including the Poonch House in Rawalpindi, which was built by Raja Moti Singh in the late nineteenth century as a rest house for the rulers of Poonch. A historic building known as Poonch House also exists in Lahore, although its institutional history appears to be distinct from that of the Rawalpindi residence.

Following the lapse of British paramountcy in August, the princely ruler initially sought to maintain the State’s independence and entered into a standstill arrangement with Pakistan, while also proposing similar arrangements with India. The State had therefore not acceded to either dominion when the rebellion and subsequent tribal invasion began in October. The Maharaja subsequently sought military assistance from India and signed the Instrument of Accession on 26 October 1947, after which India accepted the accession and deployed troops to defend the State. By then, however, large parts of J&K, what is today PoK, had already slipped from the control of the princely government.

Many of those who had served in the British Indian Army possessed both the organisational capacity and political networks necessary to mobilise men, organise resistance and subsequently shape the institutional structures of the territory. Some of the caste and community groups in this area, particularly the Sudhans, have a deeply internalised sense of community pride, honour and justice, reinforced over generations by the martial identity associated with communities that the British classified as “martial races” in British India after the 1857 uprising.

The historical significance of these areas helps explain why their representatives were subsequently given a prominent role in PoK’s political architecture. This area also provided much of the political and military leadership of the region during the early phase of the conflict and became the principal interlocutor in establishing the emerging relationship between the territory and Pakistan. Leaders such as Sardar Ibrahim Khan and Sardar Abdul Qayum Khan emerged from this area and played a central role in the mobilisation and political consolidation of the territory. Initially, however, the region’s political executive was more urban and politically cosmopolitan, represented by figures such as Dogri or Punjabi-speaking Ghulam Abbas, who had migrated from the plains of J&K and had emerged as an important Muslim political leader in the wider Jammu and Kashmir region. His background and political standing also enabled him to enjoy the patronage of the Pakistani state. His followers, who were the migrants from the plains of J&K, were mostly concentrated in Pakistani Punjab and not PoK. Over time, leadership shifted increasingly towards those rooted in the areas where the armed mobilisation had taken place, reflecting the military and political weight that these areas had acquired during the events of 1947. This was further cemented by the Sudhan uprising of 1955–56. Centred in the Sudhan heartland, it reflected grievances over the Pakistani state’s interference in local affairs, the sidelining of Sardar Ibrahim Khan, the absence of representative institutions and demands for greater autonomy. In short, the present dispute over the refugees’ seats has historical roots in the region’s politics apart from other factors.

The part of Poonch that later became central PoK, as noted earlier, had already been one of the principal recruiting grounds for the British Indian Army, a military tradition that continued after Partition with recruitment into Pakistan’s armed forces. Even today, in parts of central PoK, it is common to find families with three successive generations having served in the Pakistani armed forces, including in senior positions. These deep military and social linkages gave Pakistan an advantage that few other parts of PAJK enjoyed. Shared service, institutional ties, and sustained interaction with the Pakistani state might have been expected to strengthen political integration. The Pakistani state’s continuing difficulty in accommodating the overall region’s political and economic aspirations is, in that sense, particularly revealing and points towards a failure of a hard state approach.

A predominantly coercive approach has not resolved underlying political questions; instead, it has contributed to alienation and, in many cases, intergenerational resentment towards Islamabad. Allegations that protests are orchestrated by foreign powers are frequently deployed in official discourse, yet such explanations often obscure the structural grievances that have accumulated over decades. The recent protests have brought these unresolved tensions to the surface. The current phase of protest may eventually be contained through coercive measures, but the scars are likely to endure. Political memories often outlive the events themselves, passing from one generation to the next.

Magrey had told me that none of those responsible for attacking him had ever been arrested or prosecuted because, in his view, members of extremist militant organisations enjoyed official patronage in PAJK and Pakistan at the time. Whether or not one accepts every aspect of his account, it reflects a strand of local memory that has endured across generations and illustrates how lived experiences can diverge sharply from official narratives. It is these accumulated memories, as much as contemporary grievances, that continue to shape political attitudes in the region.

The saga around PoK, which has drawn international attention now, offers a broader lesson for post-colonial entities: coercion cannot substitute for political accommodation. The anger had been building for years before erupting. Apart from being a victim of Pakistan’s enduring obsession with internationalising J&K, which has led it to instrumentalise the region for its foreign policy and portray it as “Azad” (independent), when it clearly is not, the experience of PAJK illustrates these broader dynamics.

A hard state response may suppress unrest temporarily, but its effectiveness diminishes when underlying grievances remain unaddressed. Bureaucratic paternalism and elite perspectives formed in distant capitals must give way to a genuine willingness to learn from those who have experienced these realities firsthand. For post-colonial states facing similar tensions between central authority and peripheral regions, the lesson is clear, though each case has its own historical, legal and political specificities: unless deeper political questions are addressed through meaningful political accommodation, unrest may be contained temporarily, but the grievances sustaining it are unlikely to disappear.

(Luv Puri has authored two books on Jammu and Kashmir namely Uncovered Face of Militancy and Across the Line of Control, the latter published by Columbia University Press based on field-work in the region.)