In June 2026, the streets of Muzaffarabad and Rawalakot did something that seventy-seven years of diplomacy could not. They exposed Pakistan’s Kashmir narrative for what it has long been: a claim advanced in the name of the people of Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) without their meaningful consent.

The protests began not over geopolitics but over something far more basic: electricity bills. Residents of PoJK, many of them Pahari and Gojri speakers whose identities receive limited institutional recognition even within the region, have repeatedly complained that they pay electricity tariffs several times higher than consumers in mainland Pakistan, despite the region’s rivers powering significant portions of Pakistan’s hydropower network. Families asked a simple question: why should communities living amid resource-rich mountains pay exorbitant prices for electricity generated from their own land?The Joint Awami Action Committee transformed that economic grievance into a popular movement. Its 38-point charter of demands, covering subsidised flour and electricity, accountable governance, and the abolition of twelve legislative seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees settled in mainland Pakistan, reflected the breadth of accumulated discontent. Those reserved seats have long allowed Islamabad’s favoured parties to engineer governments in Muzaffarabad, bypassing local voters. When the Supreme Court of Pakistan-administered Kashmir ruled in June 2026 that the seats could not be abolished without a constitutional amendment, it became the immediate flashpoint that brought people onto the streets. The Pakistani state’s response was revealing: the JAAC was banned under anti-terrorism legislation, and protesters were met not with dialogue but with batons, arrests, live........

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