Opinion | Osama Jameel: A Scholar Killed for Raising His Voice in PoJK

As a common Kashmiri living in a peaceful Jammu and Kashmir, I appeal to the world’s human-rights organisations to ask Pakistan for accountability. Osama’s death should become a question the world keeps asking Islamabad: how many more Kashmiri voices must fall before Pakistan answers for what it is doing in PoJK?

Long ago, when I was merely 5–8 years of age, I had one habit, maybe good or bad: I used to sit in the gatherings of older people, many of whom were then in their 60s and 70s. Whenever they discussed politics, I often heard them speak about how Kashmiri Pandits had been the best teachers for everyone and how strong the bond among people used to be before the 1990s. Alongside this, another phrase was very common in those gatherings: “SEEENI AKH BARADARI CHI APARI TI” (one of our brethren is across the border). For a six-year-old child, it was impossible to understand what those words truly meant. With the passage of time, however, I came to understand that they were referring to our brethren living across the Line of Control, in the territory illegally occupied by Pakistan and we call it as Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK). In those days, avenues for information dissemination were limited. There was no social media, no smartphones and no instant access to events taking place in distant parts of the world. Information travelled slowly, and hardly anything happening in one corner would reach another corner with the speed and scale that we witness today. We therefore had little understanding of what was happening to the people on the other side of the Line of Control. Social media has changed that reality. In the past few years, the videos and photographs emerging from PoJK have shown the world the inhuman treatment, brutal injustice and suppression faced by our Kashmiri brethren at the hands of the power corridors of Islamabad and the ISI. The recent protests of 2026 once again exposed the deep anger and desperation of the people of this occupied land. Pakistani security forces opened fire during the protests, killing numerous civilians who had come out to raise their voices against the injustices they faced. Among those killed was Osama Jameel, a PhD scholar, student activist and one of the voices that had emerged from the streets of Rawalakot.

The protests were not born out of a single day’s anger. They were the accumulated result of years of political manipulation, economic deprivation and Islamabad’s continued interference in the affairs of the land it claims to have granted “Azadi”. The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), a grassroots coalition of traders, lawyers, civil society groups and activists formed in 2023, had already been challenging soaring electricity bills, shortages of subsidised wheat and flour, corruption and the failure to give the people of PoJK a fair share of the benefits generated from their own natural resources. By 2025, its charter had expanded to 38 demands, bringing questions of governance, representation, development and political rights to the centre of the movement. But the issue that exposed the deeper architecture of Islamabad’s control was the 12 reserved seats in the Legislative Assembly for Kashmiri refugees living across Pakistan. These are people who do not live in PoJK but whose votes can influence who governs the people who actually live there. JAAC demanded their abolition, arguing that the arrangement allows Pakistan’s mainstream political parties to engineer governments in PoJK from outside the territory. When the movement refused to accept this political arrangement, Islamabad’s response was not to listen to the people whose rights it claims to represent, but to ban JAAC under anti-terrorism laws, restrict communications and unleash the machinery of the state against a movement demanding its own political and economic rights. The very same Pakistan that lectures the world about Kashmir suddenly found itself unable to tolerate Kashmiris on its side of the Line of Control asking a basic question: if this land is truly “Azad”, why does Islamabad need to decide who gets to govern it? The confrontation that followed was therefore much larger than a dispute over 12 seats. It was a direct challenge to a system in which Islamabad holds the strings, political parties seek power through those strings and the security establishment, including the powerful shadow of the ISI, has for decades remained central to Pakistan’s Kashmir policy. The streets of PoJK were now asking questions that Islamabad had spent decades avoiding, and Pakistan’s answer, as the protests intensified, came through arrests, restrictions and force rather than political accommodation.

By the last week of July, Islamabad had pushed the situation to the edge. The people of PoJK had already made their demands clear, but Pakistan had apparently run out of answers and found the familiar language of force far more convenient. JAAC had been banned, communications had been choked, arrests had followed, and the streets were increasingly being placed under the shadow of the security establishment. Then came the long march towards Muzaffarabad. What Pakistan could not defeat politically, it attempted to silence through the barrel of the gun.

And then there was Osama Jameel. Before he became a name in the casualty lists of Pakistan’s crackdown, Osama was a young man from Mang in Sudhanoti who had fought his way through limited means to become a scholar of geology. He belonged to a large family and came from a place where the politics of Kashmir was not an abstract subject discussed in drawing rooms but something woven into the lives of ordinary families. His father had died years earlier, one of his brothers had served in the Pakistan Army and returned home with a serious disability. Osama himself took a different route. He became one of the first students to graduate in geology from the University of Poonch, subsequently moved to Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad for an MPhil and went on to pursue his doctorate in geology. But Osama was not the kind of scholar who believed that education meant keeping one’s head buried in books while the society around him burned. He became associated with the Jammu Kashmir National Students Federation (JKNSF) and participated actively in the public rights movement. He stood among the young Kashmiris who had decided that degrees, laboratories and university corridors could not become excuses for remaining silent when the political system governing their homeland was being imposed from Islamabad. During the protests, his voice became particularly recognizable after a video showed him reciting Bismil Azimabadi’s “Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna”, a poem whose very words speak of the desire to sacrifice and of testing the strength of the executioner’s arms.

There was something deeply ironic about the story that was unfolding. A young Kashmiri who had risen from an underfunded university to the corridors of one of Pakistan’s premier institutions, who had chosen geology as his field and scholarship as his profession, had now become a voice on the streets of Rawalakot. The same state that likes to present PoJK to the outside world as a land of “Azadi” was confronted with a generation of Kashmiris who were asking what that freedom actually meant. And when those questions became too uncomfortable for Islamabad, Pakistan did what it has so often done when confronted with dissent: it reached for its security machinery. Osama had come to the streets demanding rights. He did not know that the streets of Rawalakot would become the place where he would lose his life. On July 28, as the march moved towards Muzaffarabad, Osama was at Chinar Chowk. There, according to reporting by Drop Site News and accounts from people associated with the movement, he was shot dead. A PhD scholar who had spent years studying the earth was brought down by a bullet on the very streets of his homeland. Osama wasn’t killed for anything but for speaking against the injustice , brutality, extrajudicial killings, kidnaps, crackdowns, resource exploitation and other heinous crimes that Pakistan and its deep state has been doing in POJK since decades.

This is not the first time that the silencing of a Kashmiri voice has been written into the story of this conflict. In Jammu and Kashmir, or I may call ‘peacful J&K’ Pakistan-backed violence and intimidation have claimed the lives of people who refused to remain silent. Veteran journalist Syed Shujaat Bukhari, who spoke openly about Kashmir and worked for dialogue, was assassinated in Srinagar in 2018. Babar Qadri, a young lawyer and outspoken commentator, was shot dead in Srinagar in 2020. Different circumstances surrounded their killings, but their deaths remain part of a Kashmir where those who challenge violence, extremism or the dominant political narrative have repeatedly faced deadly consequences. Now, on the other side of the Line of Control, the same question is staring Islamabad in the face: what does Pakistan do when a Kashmiri begins exposing the reality of its rule from within PoJK itself? Osama Jameel could have been a leader of tomorrow. A PhD scholar, a young academic and an activist who had already found his voice, he had years ahead of him to contribute to the political and intellectual life of his people. He could have become a torchbearer for the rights that the people of PoJK have been demanding on the streets. Instead, his life ended amid the crackdown on the very movement in which he had chosen to participate. The young man who had spent years studying the earth was suddenly reduced to a name in a list of the dead. And the irony could not be more brutal: a state that has spent decades telling the world that PoJK is “Azad” found itself confronted by a generation of Kashmiris demanding to know what that freedom actually means. Osama had gone to the streets with a voice. He never knew that the state machinery standing against him would turn that protest into the final chapter of his life.

As a Kashmiri from Jammu and Kashmir, I cannot look at Osama Jameel’s killing as just another statistic from across the Line of Control. I grew up hearing that our brethren live there, and today, when their voices are finally reaching us through social media, I cannot remain silent. I appeal to the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and every credible human-rights organisation to look towards PoJK. Look beyond Islamabad’s propaganda and examine what happened to the protesters, who fired the bullets, who ordered the crackdown, and why the Internet was shut down when the world needed to know what was happening. The people of PoJK deserve independent investigations, free access for journalists and human-rights observers, and accountability for every civilian killed. Pakistan and its deep state may block the Internet, suppress information and attempt to bury the truth beneath the familiar rhetoric of “national security” and “foreign conspiracy”, but they cannot permanently silence an entire people. Osama Jameel deserved to complete his PhD and live the future he had worked for. Instead, he became a martyr to the voice of his people. His death should not become another forgotten name. It should become a question the world keeps asking Islamabad: how many more Kashmiri voices must fall before Pakistan answers for what it is doing in PoJK?

Email: soulofkashmir1@gmail.com