NEW DELHI – Starting in late December 2023, the Awami Action Committee led a sustained wave of protests and shutdowns across Gilgit-Baltistan that held for weeks into the new year, building on earlier rounds of unrest over the same issues earlier in 2023. The demands included a greater share of CPEC-related revenue, stronger constitutional rights, cheaper, more reliable electricity, and a reversal of steep increases in the price of subsidized wheat flour, which had made it unaffordable for many local households. The protests were organized in significant part by young people, students, and first-time activists who had grown up in a region where political consciousness runs high and formal political power runs close to zero.
That combination, acute awareness without a matching institutional outlet, has produced something that researchers studying the region are beginning to take seriously: a generation of politically mobilized young people in Gilgit-Baltistan who are refusing to accept the terms that previous generations were handed.
Core Demands of Gilgit-Baltistan’s Youth Movement
- Revenue Sharing: A localized, legally defined share of CPEC and resource extraction profits.
- Constitutional Footing: Full constitutional status to challenge federal decisions in court on equal ground with Pakistani provinces.
- Legislative Power: The right to elect representatives to Pakistan’s parliament with active voting power on local budgets.
- Cultural Preservation: Legislative protection for indigenous languages and cultural heritage in school curricula.
The Demographic Shift: 60 Percent Under 30
Gilgit-Baltistan’s population is young. Approximately 60 percent of the region’s residents are under 30, according to Pakistan Bureau of Statistics data drawn from the 2017 census, the most recent completed nationwide count. That cohort has grown up with internet access, smartphone cameras, and social media platforms that have created information environments their parents and grandparents did not have. A university student in Skardu can follow proceedings from Pakistan’s National Assembly, read human rights organization reports on land acquisition disputes, and follow journalists documenting CPEC employment patterns, all within the same afternoon.
Classroom vs. Reality: The Rise of Self-Education Networks
The political education happening outside classrooms in Gilgit-Baltistan has, in many respects, outpaced what happens inside them. Public schools are underfunded and understaffed; the Gilgit-Baltistan government’s per-student education expenditure is among the lowest in Pakistan. Civic education, of the kind that teaches constitutional rights, governance accountability, and democratic participation, is not a substantial formal part of the curriculum. What young people in Gilgit-Baltistan know about their region’s political situation, they have largely assembled themselves, through civil society organizations, informal networks and independent media.
The Gilgit-Baltistan Civil Society Forum and associated youth organizations have worked to systematize that self-education. They run awareness workshops on constitutional rights, document cases of land acquisition and resource extraction, and create platforms for young people to connect across the region’s sectarian and linguistic divides.
Breaking the Sectarian Paradigm
The sectarian manipulation that older activists describe as a historical tool of political control is something this generation has, in some cases, watched operate in real time, including in periodic targeted violence in the region; a notable feature of youth civil society in Gilgit-Baltistan is its explicitly multi-sectarian character, with Shia, Sunni, and Ismaili participants working within shared organizational frameworks.
The demands articulated by this generation are specific. They want a defined share of revenues from projects running through their land. They want a constitutional status that would allow them to challenge federal decisions in court on the same footing as citizens of Pakistan’s provinces. They want their languages more fully reflected in school curricula and their cultural heritage protected by law rather than left largely to the discretion of administrators in Islamabad. They want the right to elect representatives who sit in Pakistan’s parliament and can vote on the budgets and legislation that affect their daily lives.
Beyond the Kashmir Footnote: International Recognition
What they are pushing back against is similarly specific: both centralized federal control over the region’s political and economic life, and the influence of extremist networks that have at times exploited sectarian division for their own ends. The young civil society movement in Gilgit-Baltistan is not simply caught between these forces; it is, in the assessment of activists and some outside researchers, organizing against both at once, a stance that requires a degree of political sophistication that outside observers have at times been slow to credit.
International researchers are increasingly engaging with this dynamic. The journal Central Asian Survey and independent analysts writing for platforms including the Wilson Center and the Stimson Center have, in recent years, published work that treats Gilgit-Baltistan’s civil society as a serious political actor in its own right rather than simply a footnote to the Kashmir dispute or the CPEC story. That recognition matters because one of the arguments Islamabad has used to manage political demands from the region is that there is no coherent or representative local voice to engage with.
Ashu Mann
Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He was awarded the Vice Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card on Army Day 2025. He is pursuing a PhD in Defense and Strategic Studies at Amity University, Noida. His research focuses include the India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy.
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