India does not need to send agents into Azad Jammu and Kashmir to destabilise. It needs only to wait for administrative failures to produce a grievance, position its information apparatus to capture that grievance before the state can respond to it and reframe a dispute about flour subsidies as evidence of oppression. That is precisely what has happened in AJK over the past four years, and the result is an effective subversion operation running against the Pakistani state.
This is not an argument that AJK’s residents have nothing to complain about. They have legitimate administrative demands, and the government has acknowledged as much by accepting 37 of JAAC’s 38 demands. It is an argument that a foreign adversary has systematically converted those demands into a weapon, that elements within the JAAC have allowed that conversion to proceed and that Pakistan must now respond with clarity that the situation demands.
The Joint Awami Action Committee’s (JAAC) origins in 2022 were internal and specific. People demanded electricity tariff rates that account for hydroelectric power generated by AJK’s rivers for the national grid. The wheat flour subsidy was being intercepted by distributors and middlemen before reaching households. These are solvable governance problems, and the government has demonstrated that it can solve them; by October 2025, the government addressed 37 of 38 demands, with 24 already fulfilled and 13 in active implementation. That is a record of genuine administrative responsiveness reached after sustained negotiation.
The one outstanding demand tells a different story. The JAAC’s insistence on abolishing 12 seats reserved in the AJK Legislative Assembly for refugees from Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) residing in Pakistan is not an administrative demand. It is a demand with a specific strategic utility.
The AJK Supreme Court ruled on June 7, 2026 that seats are constitutionally protected and can only be altered through a constitutional amendment. Every political party in AJK at an all-party conference rejected the JAAC’s demand on the same grounds. The Jammu and Kashmir Refugees Council Pakistan went further, demanding that seats be increased from 12 to 24 to strengthen the constitutional rights of displaced Kashmiris.
However, the point that is being overlooked is that even the AJK Legislative Assembly does not have the power to abolish refugee seats. To understand the legal status of AJK, it is necessary to look beyond the 1974 Interim Constitution and return to the Proclamation of the Provisional Government of October 24, 1947. Through the proclamation, the Azad Government of J&K claimed to represent the people of the entire state of J&K, not merely inhabitants of the liberated territory now known as AJK. It also claimed the mandate to secure liberation of the remaining areas.
It was recognised as a de facto parallel authority in J&K, thereby bringing into dispute the alleged accession of the Dogra Raja to India, resulting in subsequent UN resolutions for self-determination. Meaning that since no authority could claim to rule the whole J&K state, none could exercise authority to decide the question of accession to Pakistan or India. Hence, recourse to a plebiscite to determine the choice of the people.
The AJK government and Legislative Assembly established under the 1974 interim constitution function as a de facto political arrangement rather than a de jure sovereign state. The political and constitutional structure of Azad Government is not a creation of the 1974 interim constitution. It originates in the political order established in 1947, while the 1974 constitution serves as an administrative and constitutional framework for that pre-existing structure.
The AJK Legislative Assembly, therefore, lacks constitutional authority to alter the foundational structure itself. Refugee representation derives from that foundational structure and cannot be abolished through subsequent constitutional arrangements.
India’s interest in the issue of refugee seats is not subtle. Jammu and Kashmir is a dispute between two countries on whether the whole of it will finally become part of Pakistan or India. Pakistan’s international position on Kashmir rests on AJK’s status as territory administered by it on behalf of a Kashmiri people awaiting self-determination. The refugee seats are part of that architecture; they represent the political identity of Kashmiris who have lived under Pakistani protection since Partition. A movement demanding their abolition framed as a democratic reform strips one layer of that architecture.
The amplification of the JAAC’s refugee seats demand through Indian information channels has been systematic and selective. Indian media operating under the ‘Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir’ framing it applies to all AJK coverage did not amplify the JAAC’s demands for a better Net Hydel Profit (NHP) formula or transparent subsidy distribution. It amplified the constitutional challenge to Pakistan’s legislative arrangement, street violence and the proscription. Accounts and channels with no prior record of interest in AJK’s electricity tariffs surged into coverage of June 2026 protests with a consistency of framing that does not occur organically.
The government’s decision to proscribe JAAC on June 5, 2026 under the Anti-Terrorism Act was a necessary security response to an organisation pursuing a foreign agenda against the Pakistani state. When clashes erupted in Rawalakot on June 8, violence followed a pattern of deliberate escalation by elements within the protest movement seeking to generate images, casualties and international condemnation that India’s information apparatus required.
International criticism that followed from Amnesty International and aligned organisations is a predictable feature of any security response to externally manipulated unrest. These organisations apply a consistent standard; state force is disproportionate, civil society is legitimate and context is irrelevant. Pakistan should engage that criticism calmly, present its evidence of external interference through diplomatic channels and continue governing.
Treating international human rights criticism as a veto on security decisions is itself a form of subversion, one that rewards the tactic of embedding operational actors within civilian protest movements precisely because it forces the state to absorb violence without responding to it.
What Pakistan owes AJK’s residents is not a softer response to subversion. It is a faster response to legitimate governance failures so that those failures cannot be converted into weapons before they are corrected. The NHP computation for hydroelectric generation should be placed on a transparent statutory basis. Resource transfers should move toward formula-based entitlements. These are commitments government has made in principle; honouring them in practice removes raw material that external actors require.
Pakistan’s political leadership must also make the affirmative argument directly and publicly. Refugee seats are not a democratic anomaly. These are a foundational expression of Pakistan’s unbroken commitment to the Kashmir cause, a recognition that the people displaced by India’s illegal occupation retain a political identity and a stake in the territory’s future.
That argument must be made by elected politicians in Muzaffarabad and Mirpur, not by press statements from information ministries. Citizens follow political leaders. The narrative war in AJK will be won by the side that makes its argument most persistently, most specifically and in most credible voice. Pakistan’s political class has that voice. It has not yet chosen to use it.
The writer is a public policy expert and leads the Country Partner Institute of the World Economic Forum in Pakistan. He tweets/posts @amirjahangir and can be reached at: [email protected]
