The current agitation by the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) in Azad Jammu and Kashmir comes at a particularly sensitive moment for the Kashmir cause. What began as a movement centred on inflation, electricity tariffs and governance concerns has increasingly shifted towards constitutional questions and political confrontation as AJK approaches elections. Whatever the motivations of its organisers, the movement raises a larger question: who benefits when attention is diverted from the unresolved international dispute over Kashmir to internal political disputes within Pakistan-administered territory?

For nearly eight decades, the core issue in Kashmir has remained unchanged. The dispute persists because the UN Security Council resolutions calling for the exercise of self-determination have never been implemented. Kashmir is not merely a question of local administration, constitutional arrangements or electoral politics. At its heart lies the unresolved question of whether the majority Muslim people of Jammu and Kashmir should be allowed to determine their own political future.

This distinction is crucial because, while political energies are increasingly consumed by unrest in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, India continues to consolidate the consequences of the constitutional changes it imposed in August 2019. The revocation of Articles 370 and 35A fundamentally altered the legal and political status of the territory under Indian control. Since then, New Delhi has introduced new domicile provisions, amended land laws, restructured political representation and deepened direct administrative control. Whether described as demographic engineering, political restructuring or settler colonialism, these measures have moved Kashmir further away from the conditions under which a........

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