Pakistan’s brutal crackdown on its own people in Pakistan-Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (PoJK) exposes the hollow hypocrisy of Islamabad’s endless lectures on “Kashmiri rights.”Since the protests began around 5 June 2026, led by the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) demanding basic economic relief, an end to reserved legislative seats for non-resident “refugees,” lower electricity tariffs, and genuine political voice, Pakistani security forces have responded with live fire, blackouts, hospital sieges, and mass repression. Activist and local reports put the death toll above 80 civilians, with a sharp spike of 17+ killed in the last 24 hours alone in Rawalakot and Mirpur amid major violence. Global media has largely looked away while people protest for elementary human rights and dignity. This is not “law and order.” It is occupation logic turned inward. Pakistani Defence Minister Khawaja Asif made the mindset explicit: “I put the protesters of PojK in the same category as India and consider them as enemies.” Pakistan’s repression in PoJK is not an aberration. It is the logical outcome of a political project that treats Kashmiris as instruments rather than citizens.

The protests that erupted in early June 2026, and the lethal force used against them, expose a structural contradiction at the heart of Pakistan’s Kashmir policy. Islamabad has spent decades presenting itself as the defender of Kashmiri self-determination. Yet when residents of the territory it actually controls demand basic economic relief, an end to non-resident legislative quotas, affordable electricity from the hydropower their land generates, and a genuine political voice, the response is live ammunition, sealed hospitals, power cuts, and the official designation of those protesters as “enemies” on par with India. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif’s statement is not a gaffe; it is a clarifying moment. It reveals that loyalty to the Pakistani state, not Kashmiri rights, is the non-negotiable condition of existence in PoJK.

This is occupation logic applied inward. Pakistan’s control over Azad Jammu and Kashmir has always rested on a carefully managed fiction of autonomy. Real power—security, foreign policy, major economic decisions—remains with Islamabad and the military. Local institutions function largely as administrative extensions. When a civil-society coalition such as the JAAC organises around concrete, non-secessionist grievances and begins to mobilise tens of thousands, that fiction becomes unsustainable. The ban under anti-terror laws, the communications blackouts, the denial of medical access, and the readiness to fire on crowds are not overreactions; they are the standard toolkit of a system that cannot tolerate independent political capacity among the people it claims to liberate.

The human cost—dozens dead since June, sharp recent spikes in Rawalakot and Mirpur, hospitals rendered inaccessible—is the predictable price of maintaining that control. What makes the episode analytically significant is the asymmetry of narrative. Pakistan has long invested heavily in internationalising the Kashmir dispute, amplifying every incident on the Indian side while treating equivalent or greater repression on its own side as an internal security matter. The relative silence of much global media is not accidental; it is enabled by the very information controls Pakistan imposes and by the success of its long-standing framing that “Kashmir” is a problem that exists primarily elsewhere. When protesters are framed as enemies of the state, the moral claim to speak for Kashmiris collapses into pure power politics.

The deeper pattern is one of resource extraction paired with political containment. PoJK’s rivers generate power that benefits the broader Pakistani grid while local tariffs remain punitive. Reserved seats for refugees settled outside the territory dilute local representation. Economic distress becomes a security threat the moment it organises. This is not unique to Kashmir; versions of the same dynamic appear in other peripheries of the Pakistani state. What distinguishes the Kashmir case is the scale of the external propaganda that has to be maintained alongside the internal repression. The two are incompatible over the long term. Every time the military and civilian authorities treat Kashmiris in PoJK as potential fifth columnists, they erode the very legitimacy they claim in international forums.

Asif’s equation of protesters with India is therefore more than rhetoric. It signals that the Pakistani establishment’s primary loyalty is to territorial control and institutional self-preservation, not to any coherent principle of Kashmiri rights. Once that is acknowledged, the violence in Rawalakot and Mirpur ceases to look like an unfortunate excess and begins to look like system maintenance. The demand for independent investigation raised by Pakistan’s own Human Rights Commission is necessary, but it addresses symptoms. The underlying problem is a political order that can only govern the territory it holds by periodically reminding its residents that dissent places them outside the circle of protection—and into the category of enemies.