Column

By Khalid Rasool

For decades, Pakistan has stood before the world as the loudest champion of the Kashmiri cause. But in the past two months, the people of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK) have watched that very same State answer their own demand for representation with tear gas, live fire, and silence.

The bloodshed in Rawalakot on the night of July 27, 2026 is not an isolated incident. It is the latest chapter in a story we have been living for years: a State that speaks of self-determination abroad, but meets it with bullets at home.

The Long March that began in Mirpur and converged on Rawalakot was not the work of
foreign-backed agitators, as officials would have the world believe.

It was our march. It was organised by the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), a coalition of ordinary residents who have spent more than a year raising simple, bread-and-butter demands: fair electricity tariffs, wheat subsidies, and an end to a political system that gives twelve seats in the legislature to non-resident refugees while diluting the votes of those who actually live here, pay taxes here, and send their children to schools and hospitals here.

These are not separatist demands. They are the demands of any people who want their voices to count in their own home. A grievance rooted in arithmetic, not ideology.

What JAAC is asking for is far less dramatic than the response it has faced.

Pakistan-occupied Kashmir’s legislative assembly reserves twelve of its seats for refugees who fled Jammu and Kashmir in 1947 and their descendants — many of whom no longer live here at all, having settled permanently elsewhere in Pakistan.

Those of us who live in POK argue that these seats dilute our representation and hand disproportionate influence to a non-resident constituency.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court upheld the constitutional status of these reserved seats earlier this year, a ruling that hardened rather than settled the dispute.

What began as a narrow constitutional argument about apportionment has, over months of stonewalling, grown into a broader movement encompassing electricity tariffs, wheat subsidies, and the release of detained activists — the natural trajectory of any grievance that finds no institutional channel willing to hear it.

A pattern of escalation

The crackdown did not begin in July. Clashes in and around Rawalakot in early June left between eleven and fifteen dead by regional accounts, with further deaths reported the same week in Kotli and Mirpur.

Officials claimed some demonstrators had attacked security personnel and property;
we countered that the security response was disproportionate to anything the protesters had done.

In mid-July, at least nine more people were killed in renewed clashes, including a police officer killed during a raid on a house near Rawalakot. Each round of violence has been followed by the same cycle: talks between JAAC representatives and the government, a breakdown of those talks, and a return to the streets.

That cycle reached its most lethal point yet on July 27, as the long march advanced toward
Muzaffarabad on the same day the first phase of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir’s general election was underway in Mirpur division.

The march had camped on the outskirts of Rawalakot after a midday deadline for the government to meet JAAC’s core demands — release of detained activists, withdrawal of criminal cases, and implementation of commitments made in earlier rounds of talks — passed without agreement.

Thousands then attempted to enter the city on their way toward the regional capital.

Eyewitnesses and JAAC leaders say security forces opened fire on the marchers as they reached Rawalakot that evening.

Organiser figures initially ranged from fourteen to twenty-one killed, but reporting since the crackdown — including Al Jazeera — has said the death toll has risen to 30, with dozens more wounded and hospitals in the city reportedly appealing for blood donors.

Among the dead named by organisers was Usman Nazir, the younger brother of JAAC leader Umar Nazir Kashmiri, whose death became a rallying point for further protest.

Regional police have not confirmed a toll of that scale, and reporting from the broader weeks of unrest has also noted casualties among security personnel — a reminder that the basic facts of the night remain genuinely contested, not merely disputed for political convenience.

A near-total mobile and internet blackout across the region in the days since has made independent verification of the Rawalakot death toll extremely difficult, leaving the world dependent on organiser accounts, official silence, and whatever footage escapes the shutdown.

Timing cannot be ignored

The coincidence of election day and the deadliest night of the crackdown will not be lost on
observers.

JAAC itself was formally proscribed under Pakistan-occupied Kashmir’s Anti-Terrorism
Act in the weeks before the vote, a designation its members reject as a pretext to criminalise dissent rather than a genuine security measure.

A government that bans the territory’s most prominent civil-rights coalition, then holds elections while that coalition’s supporters are being fired upon in the streets, forfeits much of its claim to be conducting a free and fair vote.

Holding elections in the shadow of a banned movement, a communications shutdown, and an unresolved body count raises a question that goes beyond Rawalakot: what democratic legitimacy can any resulting assembly claim, when the loudest political voice in the territory was outlawed and its marchers met with bullets rather than ballots of their own devising — a boycott, in effect, engineered by force rather than choice?

A credibility problem, not just a law-and-order one

Islamabad has built much of its foreign policy around the issue of so-called “self-determination” in Jammu and Kashmir, raising the issue at the United Nations and in bilateral forums with a consistency few other Pakistani foreign-policy positions can match.

That advocacy loses force when the same government cannot tolerate a peaceful march for electoral reform in parts of Jammu and Kashmir on its own side of the Line of Control.

A state’s standing to speak for the rights of Kashmiris elsewhere depends, at minimum, on how it treats the Kashmiris under its own administration.

A double standard does not become defensible merely because it runs in a politically convenient direction.

It is worth stating plainly what fairness requires here: the toll from Rawalakot is disputed, not confirmed by independent inquiry, and Pakistani officials have pointed to casualties among their own security personnel across the months of unrest.

None of that changes the underlying pattern — a civilian political movement met, repeatedly, with lethal force rather than sustained negotiation — but it is a pattern that deserves independent verification, not activist claims alone, before the world renders final judgment on numbers.

What independent verification would actually require

Calling for an impartial inquiry is easy; specifying what it would need to accomplish is harder, and more useful.

It would need access to Rawalakot’s hospitals and their admission logs from the night
of July 27, unmediated by either JAAC or the local administration.

It would need to interview security personnel who were present, not merely read official statements issued after the fact.

It would need the communications blackout lifted long enough for residents to submit testimony without fear that doing so would be traced.

And it would need a mandate broad enough to cover the full arc of the unrest since early June, rather than treating Rawalakot’s worst night as an isolated incident divorced from the pattern that preceded it.

Anything short of that will produce another round of competing press releases rather than an accounting either side can be held to.

An appeal to the United Nations and the world community 

This is not a plea for a new position on the final status of Kashmir. It is a plea for the most basic norms of human rights and democratic governance to be applied without double standards.

The United Nations Human Rights Council and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have the mandate and the precedent to request an independent, impartial accounting of the Rawalakot deaths — one that does not depend on either JAAC’s figures or the government’s silence.

Election observers who monitored the July 27 vote should be asked, publicly and on the
record, what they saw and did not see that day in the districts nearest the violence.

The people of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir are not asking the world to redraw maps. We are asking it to see us: to ensure that a government cannot fire on unarmed civilians and then black out the phones so the world cannot count the bodies.

That principle applies in Rawalakot exactly as it would apply anywhere else, regardless of which government’s flag flies over the district headquarters.

The argument Pakistan cannot win by force

Political legitimacy is not manufactured through communications blackouts and proscription
orders. It is built through dialogue, a transparent accounting of the dead, and a willingness to let a banned committee argue its case in an assembly hall instead of a street under fire.

The people who marched from Mirpur to Rawalakot were not asking for the map to be redrawn.

They were asking to be represented on it — a narrower, more modest demand than the one Pakistan makes on their behalf at the United Nations every year.

A government that answers that request with gunfire, and then shuts down the phones so the world cannot verify the body count, has already conceded the argument it claims to be winning.

To the United Nations and the world community: if the language of human rights means anything, it must mean something here too.

Help the voiceless people of POK be heard, before more nights like July 27 become the only history we are allowed to remember.

Ends