Field Marshal Asim Munir spent the past year auditioning for the role of regional statesman, brokering conversations between Washington, Tehran and Riyadh; meanwhile, he ignored the fire boiling in Muzaffarabad, which has now turned into a full-blown protest across Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir(PoJK).
Grievances over the 12 “refugee seats” reserved for Kashmiri and Jammu-origin voters scattered across Pakistan’s mainland have often given Islamabad an easy way to grab power in a region that it has no genuine electoral constituency in. However, this time, it was the Joint Awami Action Committee’s ban that has exposed the faultlines, says Captain Alok Bansal on the Gist.
“Pakistan likes to project PoJK to the world as ‘Azad Kashmir’, which is actually the biggest facade. It is evident now that the military has declared the JAAC grouping as a terrorist organisation and it is the Pak army which is curbing the dissent of people in PoJK.
If Islamabad gives in to the demands of the JAAC, Capt. Bansal says “The local leaders in PoJK will try and move it away from Pakistan because people are not very happy with the way the civil-military government has been treating them.”
Munir considers himself a global leader, Capt. Bansal says that this has inflated his sense of self. “Munir is least bothered about what happens in this small piece of land (PoJK). He feels he can ignore that. And that is actually further aggravating the anger amongst people who are protesting.”
As for India, Bansal says that the people there are citizens of India and their well-being is the responsibility of the government of India. So if they are suffering, we have a right to protest. However, any intervention to send aid risks being read by Islamabad as an act of war rather than solidarity.
However, Bansal ends by saying that autocracies rarely collapse gradually. While Asim Munir likes to think he is General Yahya Khan’s incarnate, the pattern for an overconfident Pakistani general has often been one of miscalculation.
