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There is a pattern now, and anyone following events in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir will recognise it almost on sight. People gather over an economic grievance, wheat subsidies, electricity bills, reserved assembly seats, the government refuses to budge, protests grow, and then the internet goes dark. It happened in 2023. It happened again in 2024. And in June 2026, it happened once more, this time with a scale and severity that even seasoned observers of the region found startling.
The trigger, on paper, looked almost bureaucratic. Talks between the Jammu and Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, known locally as JKJAAC, and the regional government broke down in late May over a demand to abolish twelve legislative assembly seats reserved for refugees who settled in the region after 1947. JKJAAC has long argued the provision is an outdated tool that political parties use to tilt the formation of the regional government in their favour. When negotiations collapsed, the group announced a region-wide strike for June 9.
Islamabad did not wait for the strike to happen. On June 5, authorities designated JKJAAC a “proscribed organization” under the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Anti-Terrorism Act of 2014 the same legal machinery typically reserved for armed militant outfits, now aimed at a grassroots movement that had spent years campaigning on bread-and-butter issues. Within a day, more than a hundred people connected to the group had been arrested. Its central office in Muzaffarabad was raided and sealed.
Then came the blackout. Internet and mobile networks across the region were suspended, initially expected to last until June 12, though the practical effect stretched well beyond any announced timeline. Journalists were not spared either. Sohrab Barkat, a reporter from the region who had been covering the unfolding crackdown on his YouTube channel, was arrested under Pakistan’s electronic crimes law on charges of defamation and spreading false information, for reporting on a protest movement, in other words, not for inciting one.
What followed was worse than a communications blackout. On the night of June 5, an activist named Shahzeb Habib was shot during what police described as an encounter. The circumstances, as rights groups later noted, did not suggest any imminent threat to the officers involved. He died of his injuries. Two days later, when his body was being transferred for autopsy, clashes broke out between protesters and law enforcement in Rawalakot. By the end of that day, at least eight protesters and four police officers were dead, with dozens more wounded on both sides. The violence did not stop there, over June 8 and 9, more than twenty-five additional people were reportedly killed. By the time the International Human Rights Foundation issued its assessment, the death toll for that single week had climbed past thirty.
It is worth pausing on what makes this crackdown different from ordinary policing of unrest. Cutting off internet access is not simply an inconvenience for people trying to post on social media. It is, in effect, a blindfold placed over an entire region at the precise moment its residents most need outside eyes on them. Activists working with JKJAAC from outside the territory have said plainly that these measures sealed the region, making it extremely difficult to verify what was happening on the ground. Authorities also told outsiders and tourists to leave, and paramilitary forces answering to the federal government, not the regional administration, were deployed. Whatever one calls that combination of steps, it amounts to a region cut off from scrutiny while force was being used inside it.
Amnesty International, in a statement that did not mince words, called the crackdown “violent and sweeping” and said branding a grassroots organization as terrorist while simultaneously severing the region’s connection to the outside world raised serious questions about the government’s disregard for basic rights. The organization also pointed out that this was not an isolated incident. During the May 2024 Kashmir Long March, organized by the same group, three protesters and a police officer were killed. In October 2025, at least nine people died, six protesters, three police officers, with hundreds injured. Each time, the sequence has been strikingly similar: economic grievance, mobilization, a heavy-handed security response, deaths, mass arrests, and then a deeper sense of alienation among people who already felt unheard.
Pakistan’s Reuters-reported response to the June unrest included a ten-million-rupee bounty for the arrest of four senior JKJAAC leaders, an extraordinary measure against people whose stated grievances were about seats in a legislature and the price of subsidized wheat, not against any armed insurgency. Sedition cases were ordered against prominent figures associated with the movement. Whatever the legal justification offered, the optics were difficult to escape: a government that has long presented itself internationally as the voice of Kashmiri Muslims was, in this instance, deploying federal paramilitary troops and anti-terrorism laws against Kashmiri Muslims protesting inside territory it controls.
The international response has been comparatively muted, though not silent. British members of parliament raised concerns about the crackdown, and Kashmiri diaspora communities organized demonstrations in the United Kingdom. The International Human Rights Foundation has called for an independent international investigation into the killings and into the treatment of those detained. With regional elections announced for July 27, 2026, the question of whether peaceful assembly will be permitted in the run-up to that vote remains open, and given the pattern of the last three years, there is little reason for confidence that it will be.
None of this settles the broader and far older disputes over pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir’s status. each time the response is measured in internet blackouts, mass arrests, and bodies.
Mdbhat@gmail.com
