For 30 days, Pakistan administered Jammu Kashmir (PAJK) has lived under siege, yet the resolve of the people has not been broken. In Rawalakot and beyond, people are still sitting, still holding their ground, and still refusing to bow despite the crackdown, arrests, raids, rain, hunger, blackouts, and the blocking of food and medical supplies. The state has used the full weight of its rule: firing on people, raids, warrants, curfews, blackouts, abductions, media lies, social media slander, and a wide campaign meant to break the will of the people.
In response to this siege and repression, the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) has called for protests across PAJK and across the world on July 5th. JKNSF supports this call and our comrades in Jammu Kashmir are already part of the struggle on the ground, while our comrades in Britain, the United States, and other parts of the world will take part in the protests and carry this voice wherever they are organized.
The present movement in PAJK did not begin as a movement around the 12 seats alone. The movement first rose around the cost-of-living crisis. In 2024, people came onto the streets because they could no longer bear a setup in which homes were crushed by bills while rulers kept their cars, guards, offices, funds, and patronage. Later, as the movement grew and the roots of the crisis became clearer, the demand to end the 12 so-called refugee seats became part of the wider struggle. That demand has weight because it lays bare the link between bread and rule. These seats allow people living outside PAJK, in Pakistani provinces, to shape the legislature of a territory where they do not live and whose people must bear the outcome. In practice, they have served as a tool for political engineering, a way for Islamabad and its parties to bend the mandate of PAJK and keep its politics tied to outside control.
The state answered these demands with force. It proscribed JAAC, issued warrants, raided homes, deployed police and paramilitary forces, fired on protesters, cut communications, and stopped food and medical supplies from entering the region. Public reports have placed the death toll at at least 28 and hundreds have been injured, and around 500 people have been “picked up”.
To call many of these cases arrests in the proper sense of the term gives the state too much credit, because families are being kept in the dark, due process is being cast aside, and people are being swallowed by the machinery of repression without the basic safeguards that even a formal arrest should carry.
A core committee member of the JAAC, Shaukat Nawaz Mir, was arrested around 1st of July. We condemn his arrest, just as we condemn the arrest of our comrade Abdul Wahab, a member of the Central Committee, who has been under arrest since 4th June. We demand the release of Shaukat Nawaz Mir, Advocate Muhammad Nasir Masood, Abdul Wahab, and the other political workers targeted in this crackdown. Their arrests belong to the wider attack on the movement and the state is targeting a whole field of struggle: organizers, students, lawyers, workers, traders, journalist, speakers, and those who stand with the oppressed. It wants to teach the region that anyone who raises a voice can be dragged into its grip.
This sequence matters because it shows how false the later excuses are. The crackdown was already under way before the state, its apologists, and so-called “well wishers” began looking for a speech, slogan, or political demand to blame. Here we feel it is important to clarify a dangerous confusion that has spread in some circles which claim that the movement would have been spared this violence had it stayed within the bounds of economic demands and avoided political questions. This claim must be rejected, state violence began before many of the later political speeches were made, arrests began before the state could use those speeches as an excuse, and our comrades were picked up before this whole line of blame was even available. To say that the people brought repression upon themselves by raising political questions repeats the state’s story in leftist phraseology.
This is the old economism Lenin fought. In his 1899 polemic against Rabochaya Mysl, Lenin mocked the idea that struggle should be limited to the struggle that already exists at a given moment. He quoted their line, “Desirable is the struggle that is possible, and possible is the struggle which the workers are waging at the given moment,” and called it “senseless and unprincipled opportunism.” That is the same outlook now being repeated by those who say that since the movement began around electricity bills, wheat prices, and elite perks, it should have stayed there. Since the people first rose over bread and bills, they are told to leave aside power, representation, repression, and sovereignty.
Lenin wrote that if the workers’ only struggle is to improve their condition, then “the workers have no need for socialists.” He also attacked the liberal cowardice that treats repression as proof that people are unready for political struggle. He wrote that from police repression, the liberal concludes that workers are “ill-prepared for the struggle,” while the socialist concludes that the party must build a “well-ordered organisation” and train “competent and resourceful revolutionaries.” The lesson of the siege is that the people of Jammu Kashmir need deeper organization, sharper politics, stronger defence of democratic rights, and a clearer programme against the whole ruling setup.
Our position on the movement has been one of support, solidarity, and political honesty. We have stood with the people against state repression, against the siege, against arrests, against the ban on JAAC, and against the campaign to smear a mass struggle as a law-and-order threat. At the same time, we have had comradely disagreements with some currents inside the movement. We believed earlier, and still believe, that political questions needed to be raised more clearly, because the economic crisis in PAJK is tied to the structure of rule, representation, and control over resources.
We also held that electoral participation should not be abandoned as a field of struggle. Our view was never that elections alone could settle the matter, nor that electoral work should replace organizing in the streets, workplaces, campuses, neighborhoods, and villages. The point was that elections should not be left uncontested to the same ruling parties and patronage networks that have kept PAJK trapped within this order. Participation in elections, where useful and where rooted in a clear programme, should be tied to mass organizing outside elections, and should not be treated as a separate road, a shortcut, or a substitute for struggle.
We have also said that certain forces inside the movement tried to sideline progressive and leftist forces, while backward, conservative, and opportunist elements tried to keep the struggle within safe bounds but a living mass movement carries unevenness, pressure from below, pressure from above, bold steps, cautious retreats, and sharp turns. Once the movement came face to face with the state, political questions began to rise from the ground itself.
This is why two errors must be fought at the same time. We reject political adventurism, empty sloganeering, and reckless acts that cut a movement away from the people and other nationalities but we also reject the state’s story that speeches, slogans, and political demands caused the murder of innocent citizens and the firing on unarmed people. The blame lies with the forces that fired, who raided homes, shut the internet, and turned towns into a cage. Anyone who shifts blame from the gunman to the slogan helps the rulers wash blood from their hands!
Those circles that have repeated this line must readdress it openly and must ask why they were so ready to suspect the movement and so slow to indict the state. Also, they must also confront chauvinism inside their own nationalities. The state is trying to use chauvinism, especially Punjabi chauvinism, as a weapon against the people of Jammu Kashmir. It is using television, newspapers, fake accounts, social media drives, paid stories, and loyalist voices to paint the movement as foreign-backed, criminal, anti-Punjabi, or dangerous. This poison must be fought at its root and the left in Pakistan has a duty to stand with the people of Jammu Kashmir as an internationalist duty grounded in struggle.
The burden of internationalism cannot be placed on the oppressed nationality while the dominant nationality avoids a reckoning with its own chauvinism. Lenin raised this question in his fight against Great Russian chauvinism when Stalin used the charge of “national-socialism” against communists from oppressed nationalities, Lenin struck at that attitude and stressed the special duty of communists from the dominant nation to fight their own nation’s chauvinism. The same principle applies here, the first duty of the Pakistani left, especially those placed within the dominant national framework, is to fight the chauvinism, propaganda, and state violence being turned against Jammu Kashmir.
Again and again, from the stage of the people’s movement, it has been made clear that this struggle is not aimed against any particular nationality, and the movement has called for solidarity with the entire working class and progressive elements in Pakistan including the working class and left in Punjab. This has been said not only by cautious voices but also by some of the most aggressive elements within the leadership of the mass movement. The target is the ruling class and the order that sets one oppressed people against another while hiding behind chauvinist venom.
The siege has shown the truth of this order. State wants hunger without witness, grief without record, death without blame, and surrender without terms. Whereas, people of Jammu Kashmir demand that those who live under a law should have the right to shape it. They are demanding that their land, water, budget, resources, and political future should no longer be held hostage by an order built above their heads.
30 days of siege have stripped the mask from the rulers, but they have also shown the unwavering resolve of the people. In Rawalakot, despite firing, arrests, raids, blackouts, hunger, fear, and the full weight of state repression, people are still sitting, still holding their ground, and still refusing to bow! The task now is to stand with this resolve, deepen the movement, fight chauvinism, reject adventurism, contest every useful field of struggle, and stand firmly with the people against the whole machinery of repression. JKNSF calls on all progressives, leftists, trade unions, student groups, academics, and workers’ organizations within Pakistan, as well as the international working class, to raise their voice, build solidarity, and stand with the people of Jammu Kashmir!