Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan-administered Kashmir, formally known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), has spent the summer under an unofficial state of emergency.
Since early June, nearly 40 people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces, with sit-ins and road blockades regular features in the region over this period.
Banks remained shut for two weeks. Mobile and internet services remain suspended across most of the territory. Poonch division, which borders India and has been the epicentre of the unrest, was effectively sealed off for weeks, disrupting the supply of flour and other essentials to a region that depends heavily on them.
The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), the movement behind the protests, was banned by the local government on June 5, days before a planned demonstration.
Its leadership has since been arrested, has gone underground or has continued organising from sit-in camps in Rawalakot, the administrative headquarters of Poonch division.
Its demands, once centred on subsidised flour and cheaper electricity, have expanded to 38 points, chief among them the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees.
All of this is unfolding as the region prepares to vote. Elections for the 45-seat Legislative Assembly, originally scheduled for July 27, have been split across three dates.
Mirpur division votes as planned, Muzaffarabad division and the 12 seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees follow on August 2, while Poonch division, where tensions remain highest, goes to the polls on August 10.
JAAC’s leadership is not on the ballot and has urged supporters to boycott the vote.
Of all the movement’s demands, one issue has proved impossible to resolve: the 12 refugee seats. The government says they cannot be touched without a constitutional amendment. JAAC wants them abolished outright.
Between those two positions lies a legal argument stretching back nearly a century, and a more fundamental question: who gets to decide who governs Muzaffarabad?
Of the AJK Legislative Assembly’s 45 elected seats, 33 are filled from constituencies within the territory. The remaining 12 are reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who now live in different parts of Pakistan.
The arrangement traces its roots to electoral arrangements introduced in 1960, reinforced through laws in 1964 and 1970, before being formalised in AJK’s 1974 Interim Constitution and reaffirmed by the constitution’s 13th Amendment in 2018.
Chaudhry Muhammad Ibrahim Zia, a former chief justice of the AJK Supreme Court, said the basis for the seats goes back further still, to the AJK government’s founding declaration of October 24, 1947. He rejects any suggestion that the seats are unconstitutional.
Pakistan-administered Kashmir’s electorate has grown from 3.2 million voters in 2021 to more than 3.8 million this year. Within that, the 12 refugee constituencies account for roughly 439,000 registered voters, scattered across cities including Lahore, Rawalpindi and Sialkot.
Kashif Abbasi, a JAAC committee member, argues that the election is meant for people who actually live in AJK, and the 12 seats sit outside AJK’s jurisdiction.
JAAC’s demands were not always centred on the refugee seats. Its original charter was almost entirely economic. The refugee seats first appeared in the group’s expanded charter submitted in October 2025. Even then, JAAC did not initially seek their outright abolition. In written proposals submitted on May 30, the group offered two alternatives: retaining symbolic refugee representation or replacing the 12 assembly seats with four seats in the AJK Council. Both proposals were rejected at an All-Parties Conference on June 3.
In June, the AJK Supreme Court held that the seats are protected under AJK’s constitution and can only be abolished through a formal constitutional amendment.
Abdul Majid Khan, AJK’s former finance minister, rejects the idea that the seat holders form an unaccountable political bloc, pointing to AJK’s roughly 310 billion rupees (about $1.1bn) budget.
At the June 3 conference, AJK Prime Minister Faisal Mumtaz Rathore said any decision on the seats can only be taken by elected representatives. Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif urged JAAC to contest the issue in the election rather than demand its resolution beforehand.
A senior government official in Poonch took a hard line, stating that the movement is no longer a rights movement but is challenging the authority of the state.
In mid-July, JAAC leader Umar Nazir Kashmiri told supporters that the group had written directly to army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir. JAAC member Shaheen was more direct: “We believe real authority currently sits with Rawalpindi.”
Ershad Mahmud, a Canada-based researcher, said that Islamabad’s bureaucracy, military and intelligence establishment have reduced AJK’s elected leadership to a largely symbolic role.
The dispute over the refugee seats is unfolding within a framework that predates Pakistan-administered Kashmir itself. Under a UN resolution adopted on January 5, 1949, Kashmir’s final status was to be determined through a free and impartial plebiscite. Nearly 80 years later, that has yet to happen.
Historian Anam Zakaria argues that there is a deeper contradiction within AJK’s constitutional framework: candidates seeking public office must first swear allegiance to AJK’s accession to Pakistan, which contradicts the right to self-determination.
Source: www.aljazeera.com