PoK’s newly-appointed Prime Minister and the Islamabad factor

In 2006, while I was staying in Muzaffarabad, a serving young Deputy Commissioner of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir came to visit me one evening. What took me by surprise was the candour with which he described the extent of Islamabad’s institutional domination over the everyday governance of PoK. Here, “Islamabad” is often used in the broader political sense to denote the power establishment comprising the Pakistani civilian political executive and the military establishment, whose interests and influence often converge on matters concerning PoK. The officer spoke at length about how deeply “the federal government” was embedded in the region’s administrative and political structures, leaving little doubt, in his view, that the autonomy suggested by PoK’s constitutional arrangements was far narrower in practice. I was taken aback not merely by the substance of what he was saying, but by the fact that a serving senior administrator was willing to articulate it so openly.