For decades, Pakistan built its international case on Kashmir around a simple moral script. Kashmiris were the victims, India was the occupying power, and Pakistan was the benevolent guardian of a people denied freedom. Islamabad funded conferences, cultivated separatist organisations and transformed “self-determination” into one of the permanent instruments of its foreign policy. The territory under its own control was called “Azad Kashmir”: liberated Kashmir, the supposedly free half of an unfinished national project.

The people living there are now demonstrating what that freedom actually means.

It means a regional government whose ultimate authority rests not in Muzaffarabad but in Islamabad. It means an assembly whose composition can be influenced through constituencies located outside the territory. It means economic exploitation, elite privileges, internet shutdowns, political arrests and anti-terrorism laws deployed against civilian protest movements.

Increasingly, it also means bodies in the streets. The latest unrest has produced demonstrations, strikes, road blockades and violent confrontations between protesters and Pakistani security forces. In July, nine people were killed during clashes in Tararkhal and Rawalakot. Six protesters and one police officer died in Tararkhal, while another protester and a security official were killed in Rawalakot. The latest deaths brought the number of people killed since the beginning of the current turmoil to roughly thirty, according to local estimates. The immediate dispute concerns twelve seats in the regional legislative assembly reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir who now live elsewhere in Pakistan. Protesters argue that the arrangement dilutes the representation of residents and allows Pakistani political parties to manipulate the formation of governments in Muzaffarabad through legislators who neither live in the territory nor answer to its population. It is an extraordinarily revealing controversy. Pakistan insists before the international community that Kashmiris must be allowed to determine their own political future. Yet, inside the portion of Kashmir it controls, local people are fighting for the elementary right not to have their legislature shaped by constituencies located in Pakistan. When the regional Supreme Court ruled that the seats were constitutionally protected, the decision triggered another cycle of protests and repression. Clashes in Rawalakot left at least eleven people dead and scores injured. The authorities accused armed demonstrators of attacking the security forces. Protest leaders accused the state of carrying out a massacre.

Pakistan’s response was characteristically elegant: it transformed a political movement into a terrorist organisation. The Joint Awami Action Committee, an umbrella group bringing together traders, lawyers, transporters and civil-society activists, was prohibited under anti-terrorism legislation. Its activists were arrested, communications were restricted and the security forces were deployed as if they were confronting an insurgency rather than citizens demanding political representation and economic justice. This is the Pakistani establishment’s most reliable administrative miracle. Citizens become terrorists, demands become conspiracies, demonstrations become foreign-sponsored destabilisation, and military violence becomes law enforcement. The method has already been tested in Balochistan, where families searching for disappeared relatives are accused of serving foreign intelligence agencies. It has been refined in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where opposition to military operations is treated as sympathy for terrorism. It has been deployed against journalists, lawyers, students, ethnic movements and supporters of Imran Khan. Now it has reached Kashmir. The present unrest did not begin only with the refugee-seat controversy. The protests initially grew around apparently ordinary demands: cheaper flour, lower electricity tariffs, an end to privileges enjoyed by politicians and bureaucrats, and a fairer distribution of local resources. But ordinary economic demands are often the most politically dangerous. They expose the distance between nationalist mythology and material reality. The territory produces hydroelectric power, yet its inhabitants have repeatedly mobilised against high electricity prices. Pakistan presents itself as the defender of Kashmiri rights, while Kashmiris under Pakistani control must organise strikes to obtain basic subsidies. The political class enjoys vehicles, allowances and administrative privileges, while ordinary families face inflation, unemployment and an economy treated as peripheral and dependent. “Azad Kashmir” is free in much the same way Pakistan’s civilian governments are civilian. The institutions exist, the titles are distributed and elections are periodically held, but sovereignty remains elsewhere. The territory has a president, a prime minister and a legislative assembly. These institutions are useful for ceremonial purposes and international presentation. They create the appearance of autonomy while ensuring that political activity remains within boundaries determined by Pakistan. The fiction worked as long as the Kashmir conflict remained focused almost exclusively across the Line of Control. Islamabad could point towards Srinagar, condemn Indian repression and avoid serious scrutiny of the system it had constructed on its own side. The population under Pakistani administration was expected to remain part of the diplomatic scenery: loyal, silent and permanently available for use in Pakistan’s international narrative. That arrangement is collapsing. The Joint Awami Action Committee is particularly threatening to Islamabad because it is not one of the traditional separatist organisations created, sponsored or armed by the Pakistani establishment. It emerged from local social and economic grievances. Its strength comes from shopkeepers, workers, lawyers, students and ordinary residents who no longer accept that patriotism requires silence. They do not need instructions from New Delhi to understand that their political system is manipulated. They do not require foreign agents to explain that electricity generated from their rivers should not become a luxury. Nor do they need an international conspiracy to notice when protesters are shot. Pakistan nevertheless continues to interpret every challenge through the language of foreign interference. Every Baloch activist is an Indian agent. Every Pashtun critic is a terrorist sympathiser. Every journalist is part of a conspiracy. Every Kashmiri protester who questions Islamabad’s authority becomes a threat to national security. The alternative explanation—that Pakistan’s citizens and subject populations are capable of recognising oppression without foreign assistance—is apparently too dangerous to contemplate. The reversal is strategically devastating for Islamabad because Pakistan’s Kashmir policy has always depended on a carefully maintained asymmetry. India was supposed to be the state facing demonstrations, accusations of occupation and international criticism. Pakistan was supposed to be the supporter of Kashmiri resistance. Today, it is Pakistani forces confronting Kashmiri crowds. It is Pakistan shutting down communications, arresting organisers and banning an indigenous movement. It is Pakistan defending an electoral system rejected by the inhabitants of the territory. And it is Pakistan killing Kashmiris while continuing to claim that Kashmir’s central tragedy is Indian oppression. The Kashmir issue is therefore shifting. It can no longer be presented simply as a conflict between Indian control and Pakistani support for self-determination. The people living under Pakistani administration are exposing another system of domination—one disguised by the word “Azad”. Pakistan may suppress the demonstrations, arrest the organisers and manufacture another temporary agreement. But it has already lost exclusive control of the Kashmir narrative. The question is no longer only what India is doing in its own territory. It is what Pakistan has done with the territory it called free. The answer now coming from Kashmiris themselves is increasingly clear: Pakistan did not liberate them. It merely demanded that its own domination be called freedom.