Islamabad's Government in Azad Jammu & Kashmir
In Rawalakot the wheat is priced in rupees that keep losing weight, the electricity bill arrives carrying a tariff bureaucrats in Muzaffarabad cannot explain and bureaucrats in Islamabad will not, and the man reading that bill under a bulb that goes out twice a day has never once been asked, in fifty years, to choose the government that sets either number. He votes for his own member from his own constituency, and that member sits in a fifty-three-seat assembly where twelve other members were chosen by people who have never stood in his queue, never opened his bill, never lost power to his load-shedding schedule, because they do not live in Azad Jammu and Kashmir at all. They live in Lahore, in Karachi, in Gujranwala, in Rawalpindi, registered as refugees from the Indian-administered side of Kashmir, voting in polling stations on Pakistani soil, electing members who then travel to Muzaffarabad to help decide his electricity tariff, his wheat subsidy, and the fate of his prime minister.
This is the architecture. Twelve seats out of fifty-three, carved out of Pakistan, not Kashmir, and weighted in a way that turns the arithmetic itself into the scandal: six seats reserved for refugees from the Kashmir Valley, of whom roughly 30,000 are registered, and six for refugees from the Jammu region, of whom roughly 434,000 are registered. A Valley refugee vote in a Lahore polling station carries something close to fifteen times the weight of a Jammu refugee vote in the same city, and yet both blocs return six members each, and neither bloc answers to a single voter inside AJK’s own borders. Add the ten reserved seats for women and technocrats, themselves elected indirectly by the same assembly, and you arrive at the number that matters: a government in Muzaffarabad can be formed, sustained, and protected by thirty-four seats out of fifty-three without a single one of them representing a resident of the territory it governs.
Let’s sit with that for a moment, because the framing Islamabad prefers, that this is a generous gesture toward a displaced people, toward the unhealed wound of Partition, collapses the moment you ask the only question that matters: who actually wins these seats, and who do they answer to once they’ve won. The answer, documented across five decades of AJK elections, is whichever party currently controls the federal government in Islamabad. Not because Kashmiri refugees in Lahore have unusually strong party loyalties. Because the seats are won through federal party machinery, federal patronage networks, and federal money, deployed in Pakistani cities where the apparatus of the ruling party is strongest and where AJK’s own electoral institutions have no jurisdiction to scrutinise anything.
The 1974 architecture and what the Thirteenth Amendment didn’t change
To understand why this works as cleanly as it does, you have to go back to the document that built the cage: the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Interim Constitution Act of 1974. It did two things simultaneously. It created the fifty-three-seat Legislative Assembly with its forty-one territorial seats, its twelve refugee seats, and its ten indirect seats, and it created the Kashmir Council, an Islamabad-based body chaired by the Prime Minister of Pakistan, with the President of AJK as its only senior local figure among a federal majority. The Council held the power to legislate on the subjects that actually determine whether a government survives: hydroelectric power, currency, banking, the higher judiciary’s structure, and a long list of fiscal matters that meant any AJK assembly, however it was elected, was managing the residue.
In 2018 the Thirteenth Amendment was sold, in Muzaffarabad and in the Pakistani press that covers Muzaffarabad, as devolution. It abolished the Kashmir Council and transferred its functions to the AJK Assembly and a newly empowered AJK Council. What it actually did was redistribute fifty-four legislative subjects: thirty-two remained under the exclusive control of the federal government in Islamabad, and twenty-two more required Islamabad’s concurrence before AJK could act on them. The numbers changed. The hierarchy did not. And into an assembly still structurally subordinate to Islamabad on the questions that matter, the same twelve refugee seats continued to deliver, cycle after cycle, the government Islamabad’s ruling party wanted in Muzaffarabad.
This is the part that should make you angry, and it should make you angry in a single breath, not as two separate complaints: Pakistan stands at the United Nations and insists that the people of Jammu and Kashmir have an inalienable right to determine their own political future, and in the one fragment of that disputed territory it actually administers, it has spent fifty years constructing an electoral mechanism specifically engineered so that the people living under that government are not the people who decide who governs them.
“100 per cent illegal”: the verdict from the bench that retired
When Muhammad Azam Khan, a former Chief Justice of the AJK Supreme Court, gave an interview after his retirement and called the refugee seats “100 per cent illegal,” it travelled through AJK’s political circles the way a confirmation travels rather than a revelation. He alleged the seats were engineered from Islamabad specifically to dilute the political weight of the roughly 4.5 million people who actually live in AJK, and he argued they sat in direct tension with the spirit of the UN resolutions Pakistan invokes on Kashmir at every multilateral forum it can reach. What made the remarks land wasn’t novelty. It was the source: a man who had sat on the bench that adjudicates these questions, saying on the record what JAAC organisers had been saying on the street for years, and saying it the moment he no longer had to weigh his words against the institution he’d served.
A 2024 opinion poll cited in regional reporting found that only 11 per cent of AJK residents believed the refugee seats served the cause of Kashmiri unity, while 64 per cent described them, flatly, as instruments of electoral manipulation. Senior lawyers in Muzaffarabad have filed petitions arguing that extending assembly representation to Pakistan-resident immigrants from Indian-administered Kashmir is not just inconsistent with AJK’s own constitutional scheme, but actively prejudicial to the security interests of both AJK and Pakistan, an argument that inverts the entire premise on which the seats were originally justified.
June 2026: the Supreme Court speaks, and so does the street
The matter came to a head when the AJK president sent a reference to the AJK Supreme Court asking, formally, what could be done about the twelve seats. The court’s answer was a masterclass in giving an institution exactly enough rope to hang itself slowly. It confirmed that the seats enjoyed full protection under Article 22 of the AJK Constitution, traced their legal lineage back through instruments dating to 1960, 1964, and 1970, and ruled that no executive order or administrative measure could touch them: only a formal constitutional amendment could. Then it added the line that did the actual political work, warning that any demand to abolish the seats through “coercion, brute force, or threats of mass public obstruction” was incompatible with constitutional supremacy and the rule of law.
Read that warning next to what was happening on the ground at the same time, and the court’s intervention stops looking like jurisprudence and starts looking like cover. Adviser to the Prime Minister Rana Sanaullah told the Senate in Islamabad that the demand to scrap the seats was “unacceptable” and that the matter was “unequivocally closed.” The AJK Legislative Assembly passed a unanimous resolution praising the “sacrifices” of refugees and describing their representation as a historic and constitutional reality, leaving any reform, it said, solely in the hands of elected representatives, the same elected representatives a third of whom owe their seats to the arrangement under review. An all-parties conference convened by the federal government rejected the abolition demand outright, framing it as a dangerous deviation from the broader Kashmir cause, as though defending the cause required defending the mechanism that has spent fifty years undermining the political agency of the people the cause claims to represent.
On the street, the Joint Awami Action Committee, the coalition that has become the primary rights platform across AJK, was not speaking the language of constitutional procedure. JAAC describes the refugee constituencies as “a hub of corruption” and “political opportunism,” and its leaders argue, with documentation circulating in Muzaffarabad’s press, that the seats function as conduits for inflated development schemes and large-scale embezzlement rather than as instruments connecting genuine refugee communities to political representation. Rights campaigners describe a specific mechanism: development funds nominally allocated for refugee welfare get appropriated by members whose actual constituencies, and actual residences, are in Pakistani cities, and the money never crosses back into AJK at all. Meanwhile refugees still living in camps remain in conditions campaigners describe as squalid, and territorial constituencies inside AJK, the ones that actually elect the forty-one members tied to the soil, continue living with prolonged load-shedding, climbing tariffs, and infrastructure that has not kept pace with fifty years of population growth.
Rawalakot, the 38-point charter, and the one demand that didn’t move
By June 2026 this had stopped being an argument conducted in op-eds. JAAC’s protests escalated into violent clashes that left people dead and dozens wounded across the Poonch sector, and negotiators sat down to produce an agreement out of a 38-point charter of demands. The government claimed, and to a significant extent delivered, movement on the bulk of that charter: tariff relief on electricity, cuts to the size of the AJK cabinet, concessions that mattered to the man in Rawalakot reading his bill under the failing bulb. But one item on the charter was treated as untouchable in a way none of the others were: the constitutional abolition of the twelve refugee seats. Everything else was negotiable. That wasn’t.
And once the immediate crisis passed, the state did not simply move on. The regional government banned JAAC under anti-terrorism legislation, reframing a coalition that had spent years organising around electricity bills and constitutional reform as an entity attempting to sabotage elections. Courts that had spent paragraphs warning against “mass public obstruction” now had a legal framework that treated road blockades not as the blunt democratic tool of a population with no other lever, but as something approaching insurgency. Internet was cut across the Poonch sector. This is not the first time AJK has watched its own casualty count become a second dispute layered on top of the first: the September-October 2025 unrest produced a government toll of nine dead against a movement count of twelve dead and over two hundred injured, and the two figures were never reconciled, because the institutions capable of reconciling them were the ones with an interest in the lower number.
The Twelve Names: Lahore, Karachi, Multan, Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Anywhere But Kashmir
Abstraction is the refugee seats’ best friend, because as long as the conversation stays at the level of “12 out of 53” and “fifteen-to-one weighting,” it remains a debate about formulas. So let’s make it a debate about addresses, because that is what the AJK Assembly’s own member directory, party records, court filings, and government notifications allow us to do for the twelve members elected to these seats in the 10th Legislative Assembly following the July 2021 election.
Start with the six Jammu seats, LA-34 through LA-39. Chaudhry Riaz Ahmed Gujjar, the PTI member for LA-34 and the assembly’s deputy speaker, lists his permanent address in the assembly’s own records as House No. 350, Block J-03, Mohallah Johar Town, Lahore, a Lahore neighbourhood with no refugee camp in it. LA-35 was won by Chaudhry Maqbool Gujjar of PTI, a result an election tribunal nullified in October 2023 over “illegal and corrupt practice,” handing the seat to PML-N’s Chaudhry Mohammad Ismail after a January 2024 recount, only for the AJK Supreme Court to reverse that reversal in April 2026 and restore Maqbool Gujjar, two months before this piece was filed, in proceedings that tell you something about how seriously these contests are litigated when the stakes are a Muzaffarabad majority. LA-36 belongs to Hafiz Hamid Raza, a PTI cleric based in Sialkot, Punjab, whose profile in Pakistani politics rests largely on a 2018 incident involving an anti-Ahmadi mosque demolition campaign rather than on any documented advocacy for Jammu refugee welfare. LA-37, explicitly designated “Jammu-IV (Narowal District)” in the constituency code itself, is held by Chaudhry Muhammad Akmal Sargala of PTI, who went on to serve as AJK’s forests minister, a portfolio whose jurisdiction is, by definition, AJK’s forests, not Narowal’s. LA-38 went to Chaudhry Mohammad Akbar Ibrahim of PTI, born and based in Tanda, District Gujrat, in a constituency that on paper covers the refugee population spread across Wazirabad, Gujrat, and Mandi Bahauddin. And LA-39, the seat covering the refugee population across Rawalpindi Division, the Islamabad Capital Territory, and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, was won by Raja Muhammad Siddique of PML-N, the party that controlled the federal government when the 2021 AJK election was held.
Now the six Kashmir Valley seats, LA-40 through LA-45, the ones representing roughly 30,000 registered refugees with the same six-seat weight as the 434,000 Jammu refugees above. LA-40 is held by Amir Abdul Ghaffar Lone of the PPP, whose party directory lists his address as C-17, Mohalla Shadman Town, Sector 14-A, North Nazimabad, Karachi, a city that is, depending on how you drive it, somewhere between sixteen and eighteen hours from Muzaffarabad by road. LA-41, designated “Kashmir Valley-II (Lahore Division),” went to Ghulam Mohi-ud-din Dewan of PTI, a Lahore-based party figure whose residence has appeared in Pakistani crime reporting as the site of police raids, which is one way for a Kashmir Valley refugee constituency’s representative to make the news without it involving Kashmir. LA-42 belongs to Muhammad Asim Sharif Butt of PTI, and we know precisely where he lives because the AJK cabinet’s own notification cancelling his State Subject certificate, the document that determines whether someone legally qualifies as a Kashmiri at all, describes him as “resident of Mohalla Androon Haram Gate, Mohalla Tillanwali, Multan.” Sit with that for a second: a member elected to represent Kashmir Valley refugees had his own claim to Kashmiri State Subject status formally challenged by the government he sits in, and he is from Multan.
LA-43, the constituency covering wards 15 to 50 of Rawalpindi’s municipal corporation, was won in 2021 by Javed Butt of PTI. By the time Javed Butt was murdered in 2024, an event that made national news, reporters described the rickshaw parked outside his residence in Huma Block, Iqbal Town, Lahore, meaning that over the course of one term the member for a Rawalpindi-coded refugee seat had relocated, in life and in death, to Lahore, and nobody in either city noticed any change in how the seat functioned. LA-44, covering Attock District, most of Rawalpindi District outside the city itself, and the Islamabad Capital Territory, went to Muhammad Ahmed Raza Qadri of PML-N, the federal ruling party again. And LA-45, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa-based Kashmir Valley seat, was won by Abdul Majid Khan of PTI, described in his own 2021 election petition as “resident of Peshawar.”
Lay all twelve out and a single fact becomes impossible to avoid: Lahore appears at least three times, Rawalpindi-Islamabad twice, and Karachi, Multan, Sialkot, Peshawar, Narowal, and Gujrat once each, and not one of the twelve members has a documented residence inside Azad Jammu and Kashmir, because the seats were never designed to require one. Nine of the twelve, by party affiliation in 2021, belonged to whichever party held federal power in Islamabad at the time of the election, PTI, with the remaining three going to PML-N, the party that held federal power immediately before and would again immediately after. Of the two parties that have governed Pakistan in the period these seats have existed, one or the other has held nine to twelve of the twelve refugee seats in essentially every assembly since 1975, which is the entire mechanism in one sentence: whoever wins Islamabad wins Muzaffarabad, because the twelve votes that decide it were never going to be cast by anyone Muzaffarabad could hold accountable.
This is what the AJK Legislative Assembly’s unanimous resolution actually defended when it praised the “sacrifices” of refugees and called their representation a constitutional reality. It was not defending the 30,000 registered Valley refugees or the 434,000 registered Jammu refugees, most of whom will never meet, let alone hold to account, the men whose addresses sit in Lahore’s Johar Town, Karachi’s North Nazimabad, and Multan’s Tillanwali Mohalla. It was defending a transmission line, twelve wires running from federal party headquarters in Islamabad straight into the AJK Assembly floor, that has worked exactly as designed since before most of the people protesting it in Rawalakot were born.
What a different Islamabad would look like, and what this one chose instead
None of this requires abandoning Kashmiri refugees, and it’s worth saying plainly because the government’s defenders will reach for the accusation immediately: nobody serious is arguing that the historical grievance of displaced Kashmiri families disappears if these twelve seats do. Their voices, their history, their claims on any future settlement of the broader dispute can be carried through advisory councils, through diaspora forums that inform policy without deciding who governs a territory their members do not live in. Reforming the seats does not weaken Pakistan’s position on Kashmir at the UN. If anything it does the opposite: it removes the single most concrete piece of evidence that Pakistan’s commitment to Kashmiri self-determination stops at the border of the territory it actually controls.
A government willing to test that argument would have started small and started visibly. Unban JAAC and withdraw the cases built to criminalise a protest movement whose central demands, by the government’s own account, were largely legitimate. Build a constitutional review process headquartered in Muzaffarabad, not Islamabad, with bar associations, refugee community representatives, rights groups, and every major party at the table, and give it a public deadline. Announce, at the level of the federal party leadership, that the next AJK election will not be engineered through Pakistan-based refugee constituencies, and then prove it by not doing what has been done in every cycle since 1975.
Instead the state reached for the instrument it always reaches for. It cited the constitution to protect a structure that 64 per cent of the people living under it call manipulation, and it reached for the Anti-Terrorism Act and an internet blackout when that structure was challenged in the street. Every speech Islamabad gives at the UN about the Kashmiri right to self-determination will continue to be heard in Muzaffarabad exactly the way it has been heard for fifty years: as a government asserting, on behalf of people across a border it cannot cross, a right it has spent half a century refusing to extend to the people on its own side of it.
What happens to the activists still in detention under that proscription order, once the cameras move on to the next crisis, is the question nobody in Islamabad is answering yet.