Easier to say “it’s not appropriate” than to admit “I don’t know how to feel secure next to someone more successful than me.”
Everyone talking about Azad Kashmir right now is asking who is right. JAAC or the government. Twelve seats or constitutional process. Almost nobody is asking the question that should come before all of that. Why does an entire student population have to pay for a fight that has nothing to do with them?
Think about that for a second. A protest over political representation somehow turned into board exams frozen since June. Internet shutdowns that block a student from registering for MDCAT. A generation stuck in limbo because two sides can’t agree on how many seats belong to who. That is not a side effect anyone had to accept. That was a choice, made by people busy fighting over power, who never stopped to ask what it would cost the people not even part of the fight.
Here is the part that should actually bother people
This didn’t have to be all or nothing. A protest movement and a government response can both be organised enough to protect the people who chose not to take a side. Students who wanted to sit their exams could have. Families who wanted to keep their kids in school could have. Businesses that wanted to stay open for people who needed medicine or food could have. None of that requires either side to give up their actual demands.
Instead what happened was a blanket shutdown. Blackouts covering entire districts. Banks closed for weeks. Education boards with no timeline for anything. A protest that could have stayed targeted and disciplined instead became something closer to chaos, and a government response that could have carved out protections for daily life instead treated the whole region the same way.
That is not principle. That is disorganisation dressed up as necessity.
Why does this keep happening?
Look back at 2024 and 2025. Same pattern. A real grievance, a protest that spreads wider than it needs to, a government response that shuts down more than it has to, and ordinary people, especially students, absorbing the cost neither side planned for. If this cycle has repeated three times now, at what point does it stop being an accident and start being a failure both sides should be held accountable for?
What should have happened instead
A serious protest movement negotiates exemptions. Education continues. Emergency services continue. People not involved get to opt out and live their lives while the actual dispute plays out through legal and political channels. A serious government response protects those same basic functions even while managing security, instead of treating an entire population as suspects because of a fight involving a smaller group of people.
Neither side did that here. And a full academic year is currently the price being paid for that failure.
The question worth asking
If you were designing a way to protest something you believed in, would you build it around disrupting the lives of people who have nothing to do with your fight? And if you were the one responsible for responding to that protest, would you shut down an entire region’s daily function, or would you find a way to keep ordinary life running while addressing the actual unrest?
Genuinely curious what people think here. Is this level of disruption ever actually necessary, or is it always possible to protest and to govern in a way that protects the people caught in the middle?