Pakistan’s escalating use of firepower against protestors in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) has made a bad situation worse for the country’s de facto military regime. A resolution to the ongoing agitation, which will require at least one side to step back, is not apparent in the short to medium term. The use of extraordinary force appears only to have made the protestors even more determined.

On November 5, at least three people were killed in what locals have alleged was a drone attack in Rawalakot, close to where at least a couple of thousand, if not more, protestors have been in a peaceful sit-in since June. Unofficial estimates put the casualties at five killed and 18 injured. 

The drone is no stranger to Pakistan, where it has been in use since the US began deploying it to take out suspected Al Qaeda terrorists during its war on terror in the north-west border areas, also killing civilians in frequent cases of mistaken identity. The Pakistan security forces have since expanded their use to fight the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the insurgency in Balochistan. 

If the allegations are true, this is the first time a drone has been used in a territory once held sacred to the war cry of “Kashmir Banega Pakistan”, and it has added further strain to the compact between Pakistan and PoK. Over the last six months, that compact, which gave PoK and its people a special status in the Pakistani narrative on Kashmir, has frayed to the point where it now looks as, if not more tattered than, Delhi’s relationship with Kashmir. 

Protests spread across PoK

The region has been restive since 2022. But since June this year, every act of violence by the Rangers and the local police, and every killing, has fuelled the protests, widening them from Rawalakot across all 10 districts of PoK. The exact toll remains unclear because of a strict media ban, but a September communication from six UN special rapporteurs to the Pakistan government mentions 96 deaths.  

Photographs and videos show a massive gathering for the funeral prayers of those slain in the November 5 killing. The Jammu & Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JKJAAC) called for a bandh, which was observed on November 8 in Rawalakot, the centre of the protests, and other parts of PoK, including Muzaffarabad, Mirpur and Kotli. The protests continued on November 9, with more incidents of firing being reported. 

On November 8, the JKJAAC called for an end to the firing on protestors and for negotiations “within 24 hours” with representatives from both sides “authorised to make commitments” but the government has ignored that appeal. Earlier negotiations to discuss the demands of the protestors – three rounds in October 2025, and then again in May 2026 – stumbled on the main demand of the protestors. 

The refugee-seat demand and a fraught election

The demand for abolition of 12 “refugee constituencies” of PoK, which are located not in the region, but across the four provinces of Pakistan, is the proverbial bone stuck in the throat of both the civilian government and the Army. The demography of these constituencies comprises people who left the princely state of J&K due to massive anti-Muslim rioting in Jammu in 1947, triggering an exodus into the newly formed Pakistan. 

These constituencies, of about 40,000 voters each, became contentious because those elected from them increasingly had no link to PoK, did not live there even after winning elections, but had a disproportionate say in deciding the lives of the 4.5 million people of the region. The winning candidates had dubious credentials, and appeared to local people more as proxies of the federal government or the Army or ISI. Their concerns were not the people’s concerns. 

The 2026 election was held in fraught conditions, in the midst of protests in which dozens of people had been killed by security forces. For the first time, election authorities had to stagger the voting in three phases. Reminiscent of how elections are held in J&K, security forces were poured into the region in large numbers to ensure there would be no disruptions. Nominations from independent candidates were not accepted. As a proscribed organisation, JKJAAC could not put up any candidates. The turnout was subdued, and much lower than the 2021 election. In seven constituencies in the Poonch and Sudhnoti districts, elections had to be postponed indefinitely and have not yet been held.

Just when PoK thought it had seen everything, the election produced an even more egregious outcome. Ifthikar Gilani, a candidate who was decisively rejected by voters in Muzaffarabad, his second successive defeat from the constituency, was given a place in the Assembly through the nominated quota. Soon after, he was elected by the PML(N), the largest party in the Assembly, as the Prime Minister, the official designation of the head of the PoK government. This chain of events came as a slap in the face of the demand for electoral reforms.

Merger fears and lost subsidies

To many observers in PoK, it is no coincidence that their land turned into a festering hotspot soon after the August 2019 constitutional changes to Jammu & Kashmir on the other side. People – on both sides – had expected the Pakistan Army to mount a fierce response to those changes. Instead, what PoK leaders and other prominent people heard at soundings by senior ISI officials was ideas about merging what is at the moment constitutionally only a Pakistan-administered territory with the rest of Pakistan, as another province. At a widely reported and much discussed briefing in Islamabad, the then Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa spoke of “freezing” the Kashmir issue for some years.

As the whispers grew louder – that Muzaffarabad district would be merged with Abbottabad, Mirpur with Jhelum and Poonch with Rawalpindi – the people of PoK got truly rattled. “We weren’t anti-Pakistan, even now we are not. But we had been told for seven decades that we had a special place in Pakistan’s heart and in the fight for Kashmir. We had already understood over the years that the borders were never going to change, but at least we had a chhoti-moti identity of our own. Now even that was at risk,” a civil society figure from PoK told this columnist.. 

When the subsidies went – on wheat flour in 2022, and electricity in 2023 – people saw it as a move towards “pakistanising” PoK. 

“That is when we realised for sure that we are no longer special, because these subsidies had been given to us for who we were and what we represented. Now those had been taken away,” a second person from PoK told this columnist.

It was then that the people of PoK began demanding the subsidies back as their right – the flour subsidy because the wheat fields of Punjab are irrigated by rivers that flow through their land, the lower electricity tariffs because the hydropower is produced from the same rivers. “We also wisened up then, and as they say in Punjabi, we said sadda haq ithhe raq”.  

JKJAAC, its unmet demand and a new fear

To articulate these rights, the JKJAAC was formed in 2024 as a non-partisan body of civil society activists, lawyers, traders, students and others. Some of the demands were hyperlocal, such as better-equipped hospitals, 4G connectivity, the repair of a bridge in Mirpur and so on. In September 2025, the world saw viral videos of pitched battles between the Rangers and protestors in Rawalakot and other areas. At least nine people were killed, including security personnel. The government agreed to all the demands set out by JKJAAC, putting off for consideration at a later date the one demand that people believed would make the PoK government more representative and responsive to local concerns, and that was the abolition of the refugee seats. JKJAAC was told the government had to study the legal implications.

The protests this year began when JKJAAC was told by the government in May to drop the demand and raise it after the elections, as it could be considered only by the next PoK Assembly. Even those that were agreed to have not been implemented. Subsidised atta (wheat flour) at public distribution outlets was being spirited away to be sold in Afghanistan, forcing people to buy from the open market. The FIRs against protestors had not been withdrawn. Instead, JKJAAC has been declared a terrorist outfit. From May to November, people have been protesting continuously. Since the first incidents of killings of protestors in firing by security forces, Dreik in Rawalakot has emerged as the main site of a sit-in by women, men, and children, participating by relay. 

Members of the PoK-based Hurriyat who condemned the protests and took a pro-Pakistan view of the agitation faced a fierce backlash, forcing some of them to retreat into silence, and others to concede missteps in the governance of the region.  

“It seems they [the Army and government] underestimated our resolve,” the civil society figure said. 

The new threat that confronts PoK is speculation that “Prime Minister” Gilani is going to set in motion a plan to introduce an amendment to the PoK constitution rolling back the limited financial and political devolution that the region won through the 13th amendment of 2018. Gilani has tried to play down the fears, saying there will be no change to PoK’s status, and that amendments have to be seen as part of a process of “constitutional evolution”. 

Across the Line of Control, a muted response

Across the Line of Control, Kashmiris are watching the situation unfold. In an August post on X, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq expressed concern over the loss of lives and asked the Pakistani forces to  “prioritise dialogue, restraint and engagement”. A few days prior to that, he expressed solidarity with the families of those who had been killed in firing by security forces against protestors, and called for an investigation into the deaths. A post by former CM Mehbooba Mufti around the same time described the deaths as “heartbreaking” and asked the government to engage with the protestors. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, in his Independence Day speech, said that had Article 370 not been revoked, the people of PoK would have been protesting to reunite with Jammu & Kashmir. 

Barring these stray comments, though, there is a public silence about the goings-on in PoK. Residents say that on political issues, especially those involving Pakistan, silence is the default option most people have chosen since August 2019. There is little coverage in what is left of Kashmiri media. Only Kashmir Times has been following the story consistently. But what has not gone unnoticed in J&K is Delhi’s subdued response. 

Beyond dismissing the Pakistani allegation that India was behind the unrest, and engaging in some shadow boxing at United Nations platforms over the last month, where both India and Pakistan asked the UN to investigate the other’s alleged human rights violations, India’s response has not been as robust as might have been expected. Even media that are known to play up some coverage at the behest of the government have been restrained. Whatever the reason, Pakistan and India are for once on the same side of the fence. In Ladakh, part of the erstwhile Jammu & Kashmir state, where civil society groups are demanding the postponement of elections, the government has banned protests in Leh and Kargil ahead of the elections scheduled between November 21 and December 4. Some might even dare imagine that the two governments are talking to each other through a secret channel.

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