The present confrontation started on June 5 and represents the third major phase of an Intifada-like uprising that has unfolded since 2023. Two previous uprisings won huge victories against the implementation of neoliberal measures: for instance, subsidies were revived while unbearably inflated utility bills were slashed.

The recent killings are not an exceptional breakdown of state authority but express the logic of a political order whose survival depends upon denying the people in PaJK any meaningful control over the conditions of their own existence. The PaJK, unlike Indian-administered Jammu Kashmir (IaJK), is not integrated into the Pakistani state and enjoys formal (though highly symbolic) autonomy. Its population of 4.3 million people is approximately one-third that of the Indian-ruled territories, and it covers less than one-quarter of their land area.

In practice, the ongoing dispute involves election manipulation, especially through so-called reserve seats. Islamabad rigs and manipulates elections to install a puppet government in PaJK.

The present uprising cannot be understood through the language of economic crisis alone. Rising electricity tariffs, soaring fuel prices, inflation, and declining living standards supplied the immediate grievances around which the movement crystallized. But these conditions were themselves products of a deeper political relationship. They reflected the organization of power in PaJK where the population bears the consequences of economic decisions over which it exercises no effective control.

The territory’s constitutional framework has long separated political responsibility from political power. While elections produce governments and assemblies, decisive authority over fiscal policy, energy, natural resources, and major administrative questions remains concentrated in Islamabad. The institutions that appear to constitute self-government therefore perform a contradictory function. They are expected to absorb public anger while lacking the capacity to resolve the conditions that generate it.

The result is a colonial-style political economy in which democratic forms coexist with the systematic denial of popular sovereignty. The state appears local but governs through institutions whose ultimate authority lies elsewhere. Economic exploitation and political subordination, therefore, reinforce one another. The extraction of resources, the imposition of austerity, and the transfer of decision-making power to Islamabad are not separate processes but different expressions of the same structure of domination.

Economic hardship alone, however, does not produce mass mobilization. Similar conditions have existed elsewhere without generating a movement of comparable scale. The decisive question is how social grievances acquire organization. That process had been unfolding for years before the present uprising.

The revocation of Article 370, which granted IaJK limited autonomy, by the Indian state in August 2019 transformed political debate across the divided state of Jammu Kashmir. Although the constitutional changes were implemented in IaJK, their significance extended far beyond the Line of Control (the de facto line dividing PaJK from IaJK). They exposed the extent to which competing states claimed the authority to determine the future of Jammu Kashmir while excluding its people from that process. Questions of sovereignty, democratic power, and political representation acquired a renewed urgency throughout the territory.

The developments of 2019 also exposed the exhaustion of the dominant political parties in PaJK. For decades, they had alternated between the roles of government and opposition while operating within institutions whose purpose was not to transfer sovereignty to the people but to administer a subordinate territory.

The contradiction became increasingly difficult to sustain. The left-wing organizations, nationalist currents, student movements, and democratic activists sought to construct broader political alliances capable of challenging the existing order. Consequently, the People’s National Alliance (PNA) was founded in 2019 and generated considerable enthusiasm and revealed the existence of a substantial constituency seeking political change. Yet they struggled to establish durable organizational roots because they were unable to fuse the constitutional question with the increasingly urgent material concerns of workers, students, and the urban poor.

By the early 2020s, those contradictions had begun to converge. An economic discontent merged with a growing recognition that these conditions could not be separated from the political structure through which the territory was governed. It was from this convergence of class grievances and democratic aspirations that the present movement emerged.

The earliest campaigns focused on electricity tariffs, wheat prices, and the increasing cost of living. Demonstrations against inflation, symbolic burning of electricity bills, nonpayment campaigns, sit-ins, and shutter-down strikes spread through towns and villages during 2022 and 2023. What initially appeared as scattered local disputes gradually revealed a common political reality. Regardless of locality, protesters confronted the same institutions, the same administrative indifference, and ultimately the same state power standing behind every decision that shaped their lives.

This convergence was not simply geographical but reflected the gradual formation of a common political consciousness among social groups that had previously entered struggle through different experiences. Workers faced declining wages, there were shrinking opportunities for students along with phenomenal fee hikes, and small traders were struggling with falling purchasing power as well as rising operating costs. These experiences did not erase the differences between classes and social layers, but they increasingly pointed toward a common source of authority lying beyond the institutions of local government.

The city of Rawalakot, which has long served as a center of radical left politics and secular democratic activism, became one of the earliest centers of sustained mobilization. Demonstrations over wheat prices evolved into prolonged occupations that repeatedly frustrated attempts by the authorities to disperse them. The city acquired political significance because it demonstrated that disciplined mass mobilization could withstand routine police repression and maintain control of public space for extended periods. Each successful mobilization encouraged similar initiatives elsewhere, enabling participants in local struggles to recognize themselves as forming part of a wider territorial movement rather than isolated episodes of protest.

As mobilization expanded, it became increasingly clear that fragmented campaigns could not exert sufficient pressure upon a state capable of containing localized dissent. Activists, therefore, sought an organizational form capable of coordinating action across the territory while preserving the broad social coalition emerging through struggle. This process culminated in the formation of the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), which united local action committees into a territory-wide coordinating body in September 2023.

One of the most important developments within the uprising has been the scale and visibility of women’s participation. PaJK remains deeply shaped by patriarchal social relations that have historically confined women to the private sphere while restricting their presence in political life. Public leadership has largely remained the preserve of men, and women’s political activity has frequently been treated as secondary to struggles defined and directed through male-dominated institutions.

The present movement has disrupted that order in significant ways. Women have organized demonstrations, addressed public meetings, participated in sit-ins, and marched alongside men despite the certainty of police violence and arrest. They have not appeared merely as supporters of a movement led by others but as political actors whose participation has altered the movement’s social composition and expanded its democratic horizons.

This transformation carries implications extending beyond questions of representation. Patriarchal authority and colonial rule are historically distinct forms of domination, yet they reinforce one another by restricting who may legitimately exercise political agency. A population is more easily governed when political participation is confined within established hierarchies, whether those hierarchies are maintained by the state or by conservative social relations.

Women’s emergence as organizers, therefore, challenges both simultaneously. Every woman who occupies political space denied to her weakens structures of authority that depend upon exclusion as a condition of their reproduction.

These developments have unfolded unevenly. Conservative tendencies within the movement have at times sought to marginalize women’s leadership or limit their role in decision-making. Such contradictions reflect the movement’s broad social composition rather than an external pressure imposed upon it. Yet these tensions cannot obscure the transformation already underway.

Women have stood on the front lines of demonstrations, endured arrests, faced live ammunition, and mourned those martyred in the struggle. Their participation has become part of the political memory of the uprising and whatever course the movement ultimately takes, it has already altered the social landscape from which future struggles will emerge.

For decades, the Pakistani state has sought to legitimize its authority through constitutional arrangements that preserve the appearance of self-government while concentrating decisive power elsewhere. This contradiction has become increasingly obvious and difficult to manage.

As living standards declined and democratic institutions repeatedly proved incapable of responding to popular demands, broader sections of society began to recognize that meaningful economic reform could not be secured without challenging the political framework that produced those conditions. The struggle has, therefore, moved beyond a contest over policy. It has become a confrontation over sovereignty itself.

This explains the ferocity of the state’s response. The Pakistani ruling class is not merely defending a particular government or protecting a single administrative institution. It is defending an entire structure of domination whose stability depends upon preventing the people of Jammu Kashmir from exercising effective control over their political and economic future.

Every successful mobilization threatens to weaken that structure by demonstrating that collective organization can impose limits upon state power. Every concession won through struggle encourages new demands, broader participation, and greater confidence among those who have long been excluded from political decision-making.

The significance of the uprising, therefore, extends beyond the boundaries of PaJK. Across South Asia, declining living standards, deepening inequality, and increasingly authoritarian forms of rule have generated recurring waves of popular resistance. Governments have responded with familiar methods: criminalizing dissent, militarizing civilian life, restricting democratic freedoms, and presenting repression as the defense of public order. The confrontation unfolding in Rawalakot belongs to this wider historical moment, in which ruling classes increasingly rely upon coercion to preserve political arrangements that command diminishing social legitimacy.

Whatever immediate outcome emerges from the present confrontation, the uprising has transformed the relationship between the people of Jammu Kashmir and the state. A generation that has experienced its own collective strength is unlikely to return quietly to the political passivity upon which colonial-style rule depends. The question now is not whether the old order has entered into crisis. It is whether the forces that have brought it to that crisis can develop the organization, political clarity, and solidarity necessary to carry the struggle beyond resistance and toward genuine popular sovereignty.