Pakistan’s Kashmir votes: Why the election hinges on 12 disputed seats The fight over refugee representation has revived longstanding questions about democracy, autonomy and political power. Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan-administered Kashmir, formally known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), has spent the summer under an unofficial state of emergency. Since early June, nearly 40 people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces, with sit-ins and road blockades regular features in the region over this period.

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Mobile and internet services remain suspended across most of the territory. Poonch division, which borders India and has been the epicentre of the unrest, was effectively sealed off for weeks, disrupting the supply of flour and other essentials to a region that depends heavily on them. The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), the movement behind the protests, was banned by the local government on June 5, days before a planned demonstration.

Its leadership has since been arrested, has gone underground or has continued organising from sit-in camps in Rawalakot, the administrative headquarters of Poonch division. Its demands, once centred on subsidised flour and cheaper electricity, have expanded to 38 points, chief among them the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees. All of this is unfolding as the region prepares to vote.

Elections for the 45-seat Legislative Assembly, originally scheduled for July 27, have been split across three dates. Mirpur division votes as planned, Muzaffarabad division and the 12 seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees follow on August 2, while Poonch division, where tensions remain highest, goes to the polls on August 10. JAAC’s leadership is not on the ballot and has urged supporters to boycott the vote.

Of all the movement’s demands, one issue has proved impossible to resolve: the 12 refugee seats. The government says they cannot be touched without a constitutional amendment. JAAC wants them abolished outright.

Between those two positions lies a legal argument stretching back nearly a century, and a more fundamental question: who gets to decide who governs Muzaffarabad? A dozen seats, one dispute Of the AJK Legislative Assembly’s 45 elected seats, 33 are filled from constituencies within the territory. The remaining 12 are reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who now live in different parts of Pakistan.

The arrangement traces its roots to electoral arrangements introduced in 1960, reinforced through laws in 1964 and 1970, before being formalised in AJK’s 1974 Interim Constitution and reaffirmed by the constitution’s 13th Amendment in 2018. Chaudhry Muhammad Ibrahim Zia, a former chief justice of the AJK Supreme Court, said the basis for the seats goes back further still, to the AJK government’s founding declaration of October 24, 1947, which he said reflected “the collective will of the people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir”.