Pakistan has spent decades presenting itself as the champion of Kashmiris. It is an increasingly difficult performance to sustain when Kashmiris living under Pakistani control are being arrested, beaten and killed for demanding political rights. I know personally people in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. I employ one of them. I speak to them directly. Their anger towards Pakistan is viceral. They describe beatings, intimidation and families frightened to speak openly. Internet blackouts, so they move across a tightly controlled border to Karachi or Islamabad to stay with relatives and get internet to get the word out. They tell me of people killed during protests and of communications being cut precisely when the authorities do not want the outside world watching. Most strikingly, some tell me they want “the experiment of Pakistan” to end.
That surprised me. No 'Happy Independence Day' for them. They do not want Pakistan occupying their lands. Pakistan seeks to make same under the blanket of religion which it cannot because outside of religion ethnic divides matter to the people. India glues Gujaratis and Punjabis - different though we are in food, temperament, culture, more so than a Brit and an Italian, yet we are one, because it was not about religion. We celebrate and love the diversity. When you force religion as the only unifying force on a Baloch and a Kashmiri - they want no part of the elite Islamabad experiment. Jinnah didnt understand that, Gandhi did. India is liberal and secular because it has to be to glue, just like the UK has to be to glue. Force religion (Britain tried that - it usually ends up with the Monarch getting their head cut off) and you cause civil war (again look at Britain). And Pakistan in forcing one religion, the elitist experiement, is going the same way.
It does not come from an Indian television studio or government briefing. It comes from people who have lived with the consequences of Pakistani rule. Rule they did not vote for, neither now nor in 1947. It can't survive. Control is tempting. It unravells.
Their testimony is now supported by a growing body of independent reporting. In June 2026, Amnesty condemned what it called a violent and sweeping crackdown in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. It documented an internet shutdown, mass arbitrary arrests and deadly force against protesters. The authorities had also designated the Jammu and Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee, a grassroots movement demanding economic and political rights, as a terrorist organisation. Munir who runs Pakistan knows as a man with a hammer only one thing - use the Army.
That is the familiar authoritarian conjuring trick. If citizens demand accountable government, call them terrorists. If they record the response, turn off the internet. If they persist, send in the security forces.
On 8 June, Reuters, followed by BBC reported, that clashes involving police and paramilitary forces had left 11 people dead and more than 70 injured. Further violence followed. By July, Reuters that around 30 people had been killed since June, even using conservative estimates. My god, even Al Jazeera, editorially instructed to be anti-India, is getting the ire of Pakistan's Munir.
This unrest did not appear from nowhere. Protests in 2024 and 2025 were driven by complaints about electricity prices, food subsidies, inadequate public services, elite privileges and political representation. In October 2025, demonstrations ended only after at least ten deaths and another package of government concessions. Protest leaders said earlier promises had not been fulfilled. Pakistan offers Kashmiris solidarity in speeches and subsidies after funerals.
Of course, not every resident holds the same political view. Nor should human rights abuses elsewhere be ignored. India must always be prepared to answer scrutiny of its own conduct. But criticism of India cannot serve as Pakistan’s diplomatic immunity. Human rights are not a cricket match in which one side’s failures cancel the other’s score.
The more fundamental question is one of political legitimacy. Pakistan calls the territory “Azad Jammu and Kashmir”. Azad means free. Na-Azad would be more appropriate. The population cannot meaningfully be described as free when peaceful movements can be outlawed under anti-terrorism legislation, political expression is constrained and the internet disappears whenever public anger becomes inconvenient.
Pakistan has internationalised Kashmir for generations. Very well. International scrutiny must apply to the Kashmir Pakistan actually controls, not merely the Kashmir it covets. The people speaking to me are not abstractions on a map. They are not bargaining chips between two nuclear states. They are human beings asking why those who claim to champion their freedom appear so frightened of letting them exercise it. I hope this column is read by the Pakistani High Commission and sent to Islamabad and ISI - you're failing everyone except the elite. In India, farmers or students feel aggrieved, and the PM does a U-turn (rightly or wrongly) - he says he will do better.
The world is entitled to reach an uncomfortable conclusion: Pakistan’s Kashmir policy was never primarily about Kashmiri freedom. It was about territory, military strategy and a grievance useful enough to be preserved indefinitely. The experiment my friends describe is failing. And when a state must silence the people it claims to liberate, the propaganda has already lost - dangerously for Munir in Pakistan itself as those in Islamabad, Karachi, Rawalpindi in denial about the situation in Kashmir are getting the information - we're making sure of it.
