To understand why the streets of Rawalakot and Muzaffarabad have burned in 2026, one has to walk back to the autumn of 1947 — to the moment the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir fractured and never quite came together again.
When Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession to India on October 26, 1947, war was already underway in the western districts. A parallel provisional government had been declared on October 24 at Palandri under Sardar Muhammad Ibrahim Khan, an early lawyer-turned-revolutionary who would become AJK's first president.
That declaration is the constitutional footprint that AJK's political class still invokes today: it framed the territory not as a Pakistani province, but as a liberated portion of a still-disputed state awaiting a UN-mandated plebiscite. The plebiscite never came.
What came instead was the Karachi Agreement of 28 April 1949 — a document kept secret until the 1990s and signed by only three men: Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani for Pakistan, Sardar Ibrahim Khan for Azad Kashmir, and Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas for the Muslim Conference. In one stroke, the agreement transferred defence, foreign affairs, communications, and — most consequentially — the entire administration of Gilgit-Baltistan to Pakistan, without ever consulting the people of either region.
Contemporary AJK protest movements, including the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), routinely cite this document as the original sin of the region's governance. Between 1950 and 1970, AJK cycled through provisional rules, the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs in Islamabad, and a series of overlapping frameworks.
The 1960 electoral arrangements introduced the concept of reserved seats for Kashmiri refugees who had fled to Pakistan — an arrangement reinforced in 1964 and 1970, and eventually enshrined in Article 22 of the Interim Constitution of 1974. That constitution, still in force today, established a Legislative Assembly, a Council chaired by Pakistan's Prime Minister, and a President and Prime Minister for AJK. Critics have called it a hybrid architecture that gives Islamabad ultimate veto power over legislation, appointments, and financing — while denying AJK any of the constitutional protections a Pakistani province enjoys.
The 13th Amendment in 2018 attempted to strip the Kashmir Council of most of its legislative powers and transfer them to the AJK Assembly. On paper, it looked like devolution. In practice, federal ministries and the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs and Gilgit-Baltistan retained the levers that mattered — including the electricity tariff regime and the sanction of major hydropower projects such as Mangla, Neelum-Jhelum, Karot, Azad Pattan and Kohala. By the mid-2020s, three structural problems from this constitutional inheritance had converged.
First, a governance model where an unelected federal apparatus in Islamabad exercises decisive influence over an elected AJK assembly. Second, an electoral system where 12 of the assembly's 53 seats represent refugees settled in Pakistan proper — meaning residents in AJK do not elect the representatives whose votes shape their government.
Third, an economic settlement in which AJK's rivers power Pakistan's national grid at concessional water-use charges, while consumers in AJK pay tariffs benchmarked against the national average. None of these problems are new. What is new is that the population of AJK — median age below 25, digitally connected, exposed to grievance-politics elsewhere in Pakistan — is no longer willing to accept them as background conditions.
The 2024, 2025 and 2026 waves of protest are, in essence, a generational demand that the temporary arrangements of 1947–49 finally be reconciled with the political consciousness of 2026. The Karachi Agreement was signed in secret. Seventy-seven years later, the questions it left unanswered are being asked at full volume in the open — on the roads of Bagh, Bhimber, Kotli, Poonch and Muzaffarabad
Yasir Rai