‘It is not over till it’s over,’ goes a popular aphorism. In Pakistan, this applies not just to the insurgency in Balochistan — intermittent since 1948 — or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) since 2001, but also to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The last episode in PoK, which gathered momentum in early June, somewhat quietened after security forces killed nine people on July 14. However, the chief minister’s car was greeted by a hostile crowd very recently. This makes PoK the third unstable border province in Pakistan.

International relations theory holds that a State’s borders frame its sovereignty and legal existence. Against this backdrop, as each disenchanted party supports the other, Pakistan’s peripheries are facing erosion.

The protests in “Azad Kashmir” were centred in and around Rawlakot, the same area where rebellion broke out between 1950 and 1956, when Sardar Ibrahim’s government was dismissed. Belonging to an elite Sudhan family, Ibrahim took on the Pakistani State by forming a separate government from Rawlakot and Pallandri. Local forces were helpless against the fierce Sudhanis, who took some 150 policemen hostage. Eventually, the Pakistani forces launched a brutal crackdown and ended Ibrahim’s revolt. Protests, however, went on and off over the years till 2024, before they broke out this June.

The recent protests were also led by a Sudhan, Sardar Aman Khan, from Pallandri. Meanwhile, the intervals between such protests are getting shorter.

For now, calm has been restored, with local officials reaching out and Islamabad bringing in British-Pakistani Qamar Raza, head........

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