We Stand with the Protests in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir
The people of Kashmir are occupied by three powers. To the South, India holds the territories of Jammu, the Srinagar Valley, and much of Ladakh. To the East, China holds Aksai Chin. To the West and North, Pakistan holds a sliver of Kashmir, Jammu and the entirety of Gilgit-Baltistan. For decades the Kashmiri people have been deprived of life, freedom and the riches of their own country by all three occupying powers.
The degenerate and decadent capitalists of Pakistan, who amass wealth and military power by selling their country’s resources to some power or the other, have exploited their share of Kashmir for its hydroelectric power and agricultural resources. Now, the people of Kashmir have had enough. After the first protests broke out in October 2025, the government first caved to the demands of the people and agreed to thirty eight demands of the Joint Action Awami Committee (JAAC). Since then, the government has hardly moved on their promises.
Now, the people of Kashmir are once more on the path of struggle. The people have been coming out in the hundreds of thousands demanding autonomy, better governance, and the rightful share of Kashmiris to their own natural wealth, the wealth which is currently being exploited by rich bureaucrats and politicians sitting in Islamabad.
The long march
After eight months of failed promises, the people of Kashmir had enough. If the Pakistani government was not going to keep its word, the people would make them do it. Thus started the long march from Bhimber district to Muzaffarabad (~160 miles) in June. The response by the Pakistani state to the long march of people demanding their democratic rights to representation and resources came in the form of the June 7th massacre. Official accounts of the event state that 27 people were killed, unofficially the number may be as high as 100.
The state has clamped down on protests, sweeping arrests have been made and are still being made. Hundreds across Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK) are arrested, with many still unaccounted for. Mobile services and communications are blocked or suspended in many parts, amidst heavy policing. The JAAC has been deemed as engaging in ‘terrorism’, at least a hundred and fifty of their leaders are being held in preventive detention. The scenes are not unlike Indian-occupied Kashmir in the aftermath of Article 370’s repeal.
The massacre of Kashmiris demanding their rights recalls to memory the martyrdom of the seven students during the language movement in 1956, when the Pakistani state and its elite, showed their true face when confronted with the earnest struggle of people on the streets. The Pakistani elite, surrounded by the institutions of the army, bureaucracy and deep state rely on the exploitation of every oppressed nationality they occupy. It was the Bengalis before, it is the Kashmiris today. For all their talk of solidarity with Kashmiris oppressed by Indians, the Pakistani bourgeoisie have exposed that they are no better.
The so-called “Azad” (“free” in Urdu-Hindi, as well as other Indo-Iranian languages) Kashmir, is trapped in a vicious cycle of exploitation and undemocratic isolation. This reality has now been exposed by the protestors of Kashmir, who have braved bullets and repression to stand their ground against the Pakistani state. The repression has failed to cow down the people, protests still continue and grow.
We stand in solidarity with Kashmiri self-determination
The working class of India and Pakistan are fed a constant diet of lies, taught to hate their working class brethren and allies among the poor peasantry and youth, all in the name of religion and a British-made border. The drug of nationalism is administered to hide the bitter reality of material exploitation. Nowhere more is this visible than in Kashmir, where the rhetoric on either side is to pretend their occupation is just, while the other is the devil.
India and Pakistan both exploit Kashmir for its resources, both use Kashmir’s geo-strategic position as leverage against the other, both need to suppress the democratic aspirations of the Kashmiri people in order to meet these very base material goals. No amount of nationalist phrase mongering and pretence can change this reality.
As revolutionary Marxists, we can see this reality beneath the layers of lies peddled by either state. It is our duty to expose the lies of the bourgeoisie before the workers and youth of our countries, and before the world.
The struggling people of Kashmir need solidarity, as much as the Bengalis did during their liberation war in 1971. International solidarity puts the bourgeoisie of Pakistan in a corner, forcing it to both drop the pretence of being the protectors of Kashmir and lose all legitimacy to rule over the region, or to finally concede to the people of Kashmir and listen to their just demand
As committed internationalists, we at Mazdoor Inquilab, give our whole hearted support to the movement of self-determination of Kashmiris in POK, as much as we did for the Kashmiris who have fought for self-determination in IOK (India-Occupied Kashmir).
LONG LIVE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY !
LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF KASHMIRIS !
FOR KASHMIRI SELF-DETERMINATION FROM INDIA AND PAKISTAN !
