In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, a coalition of local politicians, activists and small-business leaders called the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) has been leading mass protests over the soaring cost of living and the limits placed on political autonomy. In response, the Pakistani government banned the group under counterterrorism laws and ordered a communications blackout. Security forces have been accused of indiscriminately firing on nonviolent demonstrators, killing at least 40 people. For more, we speak to Kashmiri writer Mirza Waheed, who grew up in India-administered Kashmir, on the other side of the “Line of Control.”
In the Pakistani-controlled region known locally as Azad Kashmir, the center of the JAAC protests, “the discontent is not recent,” explains Waheed. “It’s been simmering under the surface for a while, and now it’s kind of burst out [in] the open.” He traces the turmoil in the disputed territory to the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent by the departing British colonialists. “All these grievances about increasing prices, unemployment, healthcare, infrastructure, they have coalesced into a larger, broader critique of the political arrangement.”
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