Islamabad, June 20 (IANS) The massive agitation in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) has exposed a widening gap between Pakistan's Kashmir rhetoric and the realities on the ground, with a report highlighting that Islamabad's narrative abroad rests on the very principles it tramples at home.
It argued that calls for dignity and justice for Kashmiris at the United Nations ring hollow when similar demands in PoK are met with restrictions and crackdowns.
“There is a peculiar genius to Pakistan’s ruling order: it can take a people asking for flour, electricity, dignity, representation, and constitutional accountability and, with the dead-eyed solemnity of a clerk stamping a death warrant, declare the whole thing terrorism,” a report in ‘Kashmir Times’ stated.
“This is the miracle of the Pakistani security state. It manufactures poverty, strangles politics, humiliates citizens, imprisons the popular, bombs the peripheral, disappears the inconvenient, and then clutches its medals in theatrical astonishment when the governed begin to object,” it added.
The report stated the protests in PoK did not "descend from abstraction” but stemmed from long-standing grievances.
This was the result of rising electricity bills, wheat prices, unemployment, inflation, concerns over constitutional manipulation, and growing frustration that local voices remain marginalised.
The report noted that what makes the current situation volatile is not only repression in PoK but also the wider perception that the region has become “one chamber in a larger national anatomy of fear.”
Highlighting that repression of Pakistani authorities extends beyond PoK, it said, "Pashtuns displaced by wars they did not choose are treated as suspects in their own homeland. Baloch families, demanding the return of the disappeared, are lectured about national security by the very institutions that made disappearance a language of governance. Supporters of Imran Khan are not engaged as citizens with political preferences but diagnosed as a contagion to be quarantined."
According to the report, tens of thousands of Pakistanis have come to believe that public expression is tolerated only when it praises those in power, mourns selectively, or criticises external actors in line with official narratives.
"The state’s moral universe is now magnificently simple. A Kashmiri resisting India is heroic. A Kashmiri resisting Islamabad is manipulated. A Pashtun mourning a drone strike is suspect. A Baloch mother holding a photograph is a threat. A voter supporting the wrong party is diseased. A student asking why Generals own the future is an agent. By this logic, Pakistan is not a country. It is a courtroom. The accused are always ordinary citizens. The judge always arrives in uniform,” it stated, highlighting the shrinking space of dissent in Pakistan.
--IANS
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