On June 5, 2026, the government of Pakistan-administered Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) issued notification Home/HS-NAP-1(75)/2026, adding the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JKJAAC) — a grassroots movement that began as a campaign for cheaper flour and electricity — to the schedule of proscribed organizations under the AJK Anti-Terrorism Act, 2014. Late the following night, authorities ordered a region-wide suspension of mobile and internet services that ran until June 12, timed to pre-empt a shutdown and wheel-jam strike the JKJAAC had called for June 9. The official rationale was the maintenance of "law and order."
The case the state would make
It is worth stating the government's strongest argument before dismantling it. AJK authorities were not reacting to a hypothetical. The week was genuinely violent: Amnesty International reports that at least 12 people — eight protesters and four police officers — were killed in clashes at a hospital in Rawalakot on June 7, with more than 70 injured and over 100 JKJAAC members arrested. The region votes on July 27. A government can reasonably argue that mobile networks are the logistical backbone of a wheel-jam strike, that viral video accelerates crowd mobilization, and that a temporary, geographically bounded suspension is a lesser evil than live fire on a larger crowd. Preventing imminent, coordinated violence is a legitimate state interest, and pretending otherwise is not honest analysis.
The problem is not the goal. It is that the chosen instrument is both unlawful under Pakistan's own jurisprudence and demonstrably counterproductive.
Pakistan's courts already drew this line
The legal architecture for telecom suspensions in Pakistan runs through Section 54 of the Pakistan Telecommunication (Re-organization) Act, 1996. That section is narrow by design: it permits the federal government to commandeer or suspend services only upon a presidential proclamation of emergency, and in the context of war, hostilities by a foreign power, or internal aggression against the state.
In February 2018, the Islamabad High Court confronted exactly the justification AJK now invokes. The court held that arbitrary network shutdowns were illegal and that "apprehensions relating to public safety, law and order or the happening of an untoward incident can by no stretch of the imagination attract section 54(2)." It found such suspensions violated fundamental rights to movement, assembly, association, trade, speech, and information under Articles 15 through 19-A of the Constitution. "Law and order" — the precise phrase AJK used — is the one ground the court singled out as insufficient.
AJK's constitutional status is distinct, and its own Anti-Terrorism Act gives local authorities proscription powers. But the proportionality principle the High Court articulated is not a jurisdictional technicality; it is the test any rights-respecting government should meet. Cutting an entire region's connectivity for a week is the bluntest tool available, and blunt tools fail proportionality almost by definition: they punish the diabetic seeking a pharmacy, the family checking on a relative, and the small trader locked out of digital payments alongside the strike organizer. VoicePK documented residents in Muzaffarabad unable to withdraw cash because ATMs and banks were down, and patients' families unable to arrange treatment. That is collective punishment, not targeted policing.
Blackouts make the documentation problem worse, not better
There is a second-order cost that regulators consistently underweight. When the state seals a region — Amnesty's Isabelle Lassée said the blackout "effectively sealed" AJK and made the flow of information "extremely difficult" — it does not only stop strike coordination. It stops the independent documentation that would let outside observers distinguish proportionate policing from abuse. In an episode where 12 people died, the absence of verifiable real-time information serves whichever party has the most to hide. A government confident in its own conduct has every incentive to keep the lights on.
The economics confirm the misjudgment
The cost side is no longer speculative. Pakistan was the single most expensive country in the world for internet shutdowns in 2024, losing an estimated $1.62 billion, according to Top10VPN's annual cost-of-shutdowns research — much of it driven by the prolonged restriction of X. Globally, shutdowns cost a record $19.7 billion in 2025. These are not abstract figures for a country whose IT and freelance export sector depends on uninterrupted connectivity, and whose telecom regulator has spent the past two years building a VPN-registration regime precisely to reassure that sector. A government cannot court digital investment with one hand while normalizing region-wide blackouts with the other; investors price in the second behavior regardless of the first.
A proportionate alternative exists
None of this requires the state to tolerate violence. Proportionality offers a sequence: name and arrest individuals credibly linked to violence under ordinary criminal law; seek narrowly targeted, time-limited and judicially reviewable orders rather than a regional kill switch; and keep voice and emergency services running even where specific platforms are throttled. The 2014-era reflex of designating a flour-and-electricity protest movement as a "proscribed organization" and pulling the plug on a million people is the opposite of that sequence. It is the maximal response to a problem that admits of minimal ones — and Pakistan's own High Court said so eight years ago.
The wheel-jam strike went ahead anyway. The blackout did not prevent the strike; it only guaranteed that the rest of the country, and the world, would learn what happened in AJK later, and from less reliable sources.