A Ban, Then a Blackout
On the evening of June 5, 2026, the Azad Jammu and Kashmir government proscribed the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) under anti-terrorism law, hours before the group's planned long march. Mobile data and broadband across the territory went dark the same night. It stayed dark for 48 days. Partial restoration reached Mirpur, Kotli and Bhimber divisions only on July 24; Muzaffarabad and adjoining districts remained cut off as of that date, according to Dawn. The timing was not incidental — AJK's phased legislative assembly elections began July 27, with the Poonch division vote pushed to August 10 partly because of the disruption, per Al Jazeera.
This is worth separating from the VPN-registration regime Pakistan has built on the mainland — the CNIC-linked whitelisting scheme for freelancers and firms, the periodic app throttling. AJK got something categorically blunter: not a filtered internet, but no internet, mobile or fixed, for a population of roughly four million.
The Steelman: Why Governments Reach for the Off Switch
The AJK government's argument deserves a fair hearing before it's dismissed. JAAC's long march followed a period of unrest in which, per Amnesty International, eight protesters and four police officers were killed in clashes in Rawalakot. A government facing crowd violence and a planned mass mobilization can reasonably argue that real-time coordination over encrypted apps makes policing harder and that a short, targeted network pause buys time to de-escalate. Cellular shutdowns during acute unrest are not a uniquely Pakistani tool — India, Iran and Myanmar have all reached for the same lever. The argument for some version of emergency network control during active violence is not frivolous.
Why the Off Switch Fails Its Own Legal Test
But 48 days is not a pause, and Pakistan's own courts have already drawn this line — against the government. In CM Pak Limited v. PTA (2018), the Islamabad High Court held that Section 54 of the Pakistan Telecommunication (Re-organization) Act 1996 authorizes network suspension only for war, hostilities with a foreign power, internal aggression, or defense and security emergencies — not ordinary public-order concerns. Justice Athar Minallah wrote that "apprehensions relating to public safety, law and order cannot by any stretch attract section 54(2)," and that shutting down networks without notice was "without lawful authority," per Digital Rights Foundation's account of the ruling. No presidential emergency proclamation under AJK's Article 53 was issued in June 2026 either — which is precisely what a petition now before the AJK High Court, filed by Barrister Syed Abdul Basit Gillani under Article 44 of the AJK Interim Constitution, argues. The petition also alleges the shutdown was applied unevenly, with some government offices staying connected while ordinary residents were cut off entirely; the court ordered PTA, the AJK government, the AJK Council and the Special Communications Organisation to respond by July 15, per Dawn. Nearly two months into the shutdown at that point, the case had not produced restoration.
No Network, No VPN, No Workaround
This is the part that should worry anyone who thinks of VPNs as a release valve for internet restriction. Pakistan's mainland playbook — block a platform, push users toward registered VPNs, throttle the rest — at least leaves a technical path through. AJK's shutdown left none: no mobile data, no broadband, no VPN tunnel, because there was no carrier signal to tunnel through. A printing-business owner told Al Jazeera his enterprise had "completely collapsed," with losses of $54,000–$72,000 during peak election season; staff drove two hours outside the city just to reach a signal. Flour prices tripled against the subsidized rate, ATMs stopped working, and a college principal reported medical-entrance exams postponed indefinitely for an entire student cohort. Nationally, NetBlocks' Cost of Shutdown Tool estimates a complete internet blackout costs Pakistan roughly $53.2 million a day, and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation puts Pakistan's total 2024 shutdown losses at $892 million to $1.6 billion — the highest of any country that year. AJK's economy is far smaller than Pakistan's as a whole, but the same arithmetic — no signal, no commerce, no remote work, no exam — applied at local scale for 48 straight days.
The Proportionality Pakistan Owes AJK
People of Internet's position is not that governments must never touch networks during unrest. It is that a tool a domestic court has already ruled illegal for anything short of war cannot be treated as routine election-season crowd control, and that the harder a shutdown becomes to justify, the harder it should be to renew without judicial sign-off, district by district, on a fixed clock. Muzaffarabad's continued blackout, weeks after the immediate unrest passed and mid-election, is the clearest sign the AJK government is optimizing for control rather than proportionality. The AJK High Court case is the mechanism that should settle this — not another 48-day fait accompli followed by a quiet partial restoration.