Condemning violence from a comfortable distance is the easiest job in global politics. When the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) issued its predictable, hand-wringing statement calling for immediate de-escalation in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK), the international community nodded along in lazy agreement.
The standard narrative loves this script. It treats civil unrest like a sudden, tragic weather event. It begs both sides to lower their voices, urges the state to show restraint, and asks regional authorities to address grievances.
It is an utterly useless approach.
By treating the regular eruptions of violence in PoJK as temporary breakdowns of law and order, human rights organizations miss the entire point. The instability is not a malfunction of the system. The instability is a structural feature of how the region is governed. Until observers stop treating a deep-seated constitutional crisis as a mere policing issue, every single solution offered will continue to fail.
The Lazy Consensus on Regional Unrest
The standard media analysis of PoJK focuses almost exclusively on the immediate triggers of protest: inflation, soaring electricity bills, cuts in wheat subsidies, and heavy-handed police crackdowns. When thousands of people hit the streets under the banner of the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), the consensus view was that this was a localized economic protest that spun out of control.
This analysis is superficial. It treats the symptoms while ignoring the terminal illness.
Local populations are not just angry because their utility bills are high. They are angry because they live in a constitutional twilight zone. PoJK exists in a permanent state of legal limbo. It is administered by Islamabad, yet it is not formally integrated into the Pakistani state structure. This creates a toxic dynamic: the central government exercises immense control over the region's resources but bears minimal constitutional accountability to its people.
When a human rights body asks for "immediate de-escalation," it is effectively asking for a return to the status quo. But the status quo is precisely what caused the explosion in the first place. Forcing a temporary calm without resolving the underlying governance vacuum is just resetting the timer on a bomb.
The Resource Exploitation Myth
To understand why simple de-escalation is a fantasy, look at the energy mathematics of the region. This is where the conventional narrative truly falls apart.
PoJK produces a significant surplus of hydroelectric power, primarily through massive infrastructure projects like the Mangla Dam and the Neelum-Jhelum project. The local population expects, quite logically, to benefit from this cheap, clean energy source. Instead, the electricity is fed directly into Pakistan’s national grid. The central government then sells that power back to the local population loaded with heavy taxes, transmission fees, and fuel adjustment charges.
Imagine a scenario where a region produces enough food to feed itself ten times over, but the central authority confiscates the entire harvest, processes it hundreds of miles away, and sells it back to the farmers at a premium they cannot afford.
That is not an administrative oversight. That is an extractive economic model.
When protests erupt over these electricity tariffs, they are not merely economic disputes. They are fundamental challenges to resource ownership. The state cannot simply lower the prices temporarily to quiet the crowd, because the entire financial framework relies on extracting value from the periphery to support the center.
The Fallacy of the Neutral State
The core flaw in standard human rights advocacy is the belief that the state can act as a neutral arbiter. The HRCP and similar bodies routinely call on law enforcement agencies to exercise restraint and avoid the use of force against peaceful protestors.
This assumes the security apparatus is designed for crowd control. It is not. In disputed, heavily militarized border regions, the state apparatus is designed for territorial control and regime survival.
When the Rangers—a federal paramilitary force—were deployed to crush the protests in Muzaffarabad and Mirpur, it was not an overreaction by local commanders. It was the predictable deployment of federal muscle to suppress a perceived threat to national security. The moment a protest challenges the economic or political terms dictated by Islamabad, the state ceases to view the demonstrators as citizens with grievances. It views them as subversives.
Calling for restraint in this environment is like asking a hammer not to act like a hammer. The security forces use violence because violence is the primary tool available to maintain control over an unrepresented population.
Dismantling the People Also Ask Premise
When people look into the recurring instability in PoJK, they usually ask variations of the same flawed question: How can Pakistan improve human rights in the region?
The question itself is broken. It assumes that the existing political framework is capable of hosting a healthy human rights ecosystem. It cannot.
You cannot have a robust human rights framework in a territory where the local legislative assembly is systematically subordinated to a federal body like the Kashmir Council, which is chaired by the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Under the current constitutional setup, the real legislative and executive power does not reside with the elected representatives in Muzaffarabad; it resides in Islamabad.
If you want a brutally honest answer, Pakistan cannot improve human rights in PoJK without fundamentally rewriting its own constitutional relationship with the territory. And doing that would require dismantling the geopolitical stance Pakistan has maintained on the international stage for decades. The state will always choose territorial containment over structural reform.
The Cost of Conventional Activism
There is a distinct downside to challenging the human rights consensus. When you point out that statements of condemnation do nothing, you alienate the very organizations tasked with monitoring abuses. It sounds cynical. It sounds like an argument for inaction.
But real pragmatism requires acknowledging that symbolic victories are often worse than defeats. When the Pakistani government announced a hasty, multi-billion rupee subsidy package to quell the JAAC protests, the human rights community celebrated it as a win for peaceful demonstration.
It was not a win. It was a tactical retreat.
The subsidy package was a temporary band-aid designed to buy peace until the global media attention shifted. It did not alter the fact that the region lacks fiscal autonomy. It did not change the reality that local resources are managed by federal bureaucrats. By treating these temporary financial concessions as genuine progress, activists help the state paper over the cracks until the next inevitable explosion.
Stop Demanding Peace, Demand Power
The solution to the ongoing cycle of violence in PoJK is not de-escalation, better policing, or federal subsidies. The solution is the devolution of absolute political and economic authority.
If the international community actually wants to prevent the next round of violence, it must stop issuing boilerplate statements about human rights and start focusing on structural mechanics.
- Abolish the Federal Veto: The Kashmir Council must be stripped of its executive power, returning full legislative autonomy over local resources, taxation, and budgeting to the local assembly.
- Resource Hydro-Autonomy: The region must be granted the first right of refusal on the energy it produces, paying only the actual cost of generation rather than national grid premiums.
- Demilitarize Domestic Policing: Federal paramilitary forces must be permanently barred from managing civil, economic protests.
Until the conversation shifts from moral outrage to institutional architecture, human rights reports are just noise. The people of PoJK do not need the world to feel sorry for them when they are shot in the streets. They need the structural leverage to ensure the state cannot pull the trigger in the first place.
