The Poor Pay for JAAC’s Politics
Rawalakot: Six days. That’s how long Rawalakot and large parts of Azad Jammu and Kashmir have now gone without normal economic life. No traffic on the highways, no tourists checking into guest houses, no shopkeepers opening their shutters with any confidence that the day will be worth it. For the Joint Awami Action Committee, six days might register as a tally of pressure successfully applied. For the people actually living through it, it has meant something much simpler: six days without pay. Behind JAAC’s stated grievances lies a set of demands whose economic, political and strategic costs fall entirely on the people they claim to represent.
The numbers tell their own story. Estimates put the daily economic loss from the disruption at around Rs 130 million, money that in ordinary times would move through the hands of transporters, hotel staff, tea-stall owners, vendors, and labourers. Roughly a hundred thousand families believed to have been directly affected each day the shutdown has continued. These are not abstract figures on a balance sheet. They represent fare collections that didn’t happen, rooms that went unbooked, vegetables that rotted unsold, and daily wages that simply vanished.
The Economic Cost: Who Really Foots the Bill
Tourism has been hit hardest, and in AJK, tourism is not a side industry, it is a lifeline. Guest houses, restaurants, local guides, photographers, jeep and taxi operators, small handicraft sellers, all of them depend on a steady flow of visitors to make ends meet. When that flow drops to zero, as it effectively has during this shutdown, the loss does not stay contained to one week. Cancelled bookings translate into cancelled plans for months ahead, as travellers who associate a destination with disruption simply choose to go elsewhere next time. The reputational damage to AJK as a stable, welcoming place to visit or invest will likely outlast the protest itself by a wide margin.
What makes this particularly hard to justify is the mismatch between who is organising the disruption and who is absorbing its cost. Whatever grievances sit behind JAAC’s call for shutdown, the people footing the bill are not bureaucrats or political opponents sitting in air-conditioned offices. They are the daily wage labourer who has no way to recover a lost workday, the taxi driver whose vehicle has sat idle for nearly a week, the hotel employee whose shift simply did not happen, the street vendor whose entire daily income depends on footfall that has not existed since the shutdown began.
For a salaried person, a week without income is an inconvenience. For someone living on daily wages, in a region where inflation has already squeezed household budgets thin, it can mean the difference between managing and falling behind on rent, on a child’s school fees, on medicine. Six days of lost income for a daily wage earner is not six days, it is often a setback that takes weeks to recover from, if it is recovered at all. There is also a longer-term economic cost that does not show up in any daily loss estimate. Repeated shutdowns, however well-intentioned their stated cause, build a pattern. Investors, tour operators, and even ordinary travellers begin to factor disruption risk into their decisions about AJK. Once that perception sets in, it tends to outlast the specific dispute that caused it. A region that depends as heavily on tourism and trade as AJK does cannot afford to keep sending the signal that normal life here is negotiable.
The Political Cost: Dismantling Constitutional Protections
Among JAAC’s demands is the abolition of the twelve Kashmiri refugee seats in the AJK Legislative Assembly. Presented as electoral reform, the demand deserves far closer scrutiny than it has received. These seats are not a political favour to any stakeholder. They are embedded in the constitutional structure of AJK itself. Article 22 of the AJK Interim Constitution provides dedicated representation for State Subjects displaced from occupied Jammu and Kashmir, and Article 15 guarantees equality before law to all State Subjects. Refugees from across the Line of Control are not outsiders to the AJK polity. They are part of the same people, displaced by occupation and conflict, whose political link to the whole of Jammu and Kashmir has been deliberately preserved because the dispute remains unresolved.
The comparison sometimes drawn between Kashmiri refugees and internally displaced persons from KP or North Waziristan does not survive examination. TDPs from those areas are Pakistani citizens displaced within an existing constitutional unit of Pakistan. Their rights must be protected through return, rehabilitation and facilitation, but they do not carry the status of State Subjects of a disputed former princely state whose final political status remains pending. Kashmiri refugee seats are not ethnic seats; they are continuity seats. They keep displaced Kashmiris politically connected to their homeland until the Kashmir question is finally settled.
Abolishing them would not democratise AJK. It would narrow the Kashmir cause, politically orphan those uprooted by occupation, and quietly concede that the Kashmiri people are now divisible by administrative boundary. Where genuine concerns exist about fake certificates or weak voter lists, the answer is strict verification and transparent electoral rolls, not the removal of the right itself. A political movement that frames displaced State Subjects as an electoral inconvenience rather than a constitutional reality is not pursuing reform. It is pursuing a narrower, more exclusionary version of the Kashmir cause.
The Strategic Cost: Handing a Narrative to the Enemy
There is a strategic cost to all of this that AJK can scarcely afford. The region sits at a sensitive frontier, and its economic stability is part of the broader picture of how Pakistan presents Azad Kashmir to the world, as a settled, functioning, forward-looking part of the country, in contrast to the lockdowns, curfews and economic strangulation that define life across the Line of Control in Indian-occupied Kashmir. Every viral image of a shuttered Rawalakot bazaar hands a ready-made narrative to those who would rather talk about unrest in AJK than about the situation in IIOJK. Repeated shutdowns do not just cost shopkeepers their daily earnings, they cost Pakistan a part of the contrast it has worked carefully to build.
AJK’s stability is not a domestic matter alone. It is part of Pakistan’s case on Kashmir at every international forum. When that stability is voluntarily disrupted from within, through shutdowns that close bazaars, block highways and project an image of a region in political crisis, the damage does not stay within AJK’s borders. It travels. And it is picked up by precisely those who have an interest in depicting Azad Kashmir not as a free, self-governing community awaiting the resolution of a legal dispute, but as another zone of disorder.
The Real Agenda and Its Real Victims
None of this is to dismiss the idea that genuine grievances can exist in AJK. But there is a basic tension worth sitting with: a movement that paralyses the local economy in the name of protecting ordinary people ends up extracting the heaviest price from those very people. The shopkeeper does not choose whether the road is blocked. The daily wage earner has no seat at the negotiating table where the shutdown’s terms are decided. Yet it is their income, their savings, and their sense of economic security that gets spent first.
JAAC’s real agenda, once the rhetoric of public welfare is set aside, produces three compounding costs. The economic cost falls on labourers and traders who have no mechanism to recover what six days of shutdown have taken from them. The political cost falls on displaced Kashmiris whose constitutional representation is being targeted under the cover of electoral populism. And the strategic cost falls on Pakistan’s broader Kashmir narrative, which depends on AJK appearing to the world as exactly what JAAC’s shutdowns make it look like it is not: stable, united and forward-looking.
If there is a lesson in these six days, it is that the cost of disruption is rarely borne by those who call for it. It is borne by the people who can least afford to pay it, quietly, every single day the shutters stay down, and by a region whose stability matters far beyond its own borders.
