Gilgit-Baltistan, a region of roughly 73,000 square kilometres wedged between China, Afghanistan and Indian-administered Kashmir, has spent over seven decades in a constitutional no-man's land, its people denied parliamentary representation.
New Delhi: Gilgit-Baltistan, a region of roughly 73,000 square kilometres wedged between China, Afghanistan and Indian-administered Kashmir, has spent over seven decades in a constitutional no-man's land, its people denied parliamentary representation, enforceable citizenship rights and a legally defined political identity by the Pakistani state.
When Pakistan gained independence in 1947, Gilgit-Baltistan was neither formally acceded nor constitutionally absorbed. The region's scouts staged a revolt against the Maharaja of Kashmir and declared accession to Pakistan, but what followed was not integration. It was administrative limbo. Islamabad took control, retained authority, and offered, in return, governance orders rather than constitutional standing.
The Gilgit-Baltistan Empowerment and Self-Governance Order of 2009, later replaced by the Gilgit-Baltistan Order of 2018, expanded administrative autonomy on paper. A 33-seat legislative assembly exists, with 24 directly elected members alongside reserved seats for women and technocrats. A chief minister takes the oath.
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But the region still sends no elected representatives to Pakistan's National Assembly or Senate. Its people cannot approach Pakistan's Supreme Court as constitutional citizens in the ordinary sense. Land disputes, resource contracts and political arrests fall into a legal grey zone where rights exist largely as far as Islamabad permits.
Every governance order has followed a similar template: administrative expansion alongside constitutional exclusion. The label changes, the architecture shifts, but the core arrangement stays largely intact. Islamabad administers, Islamabad's judiciary increasingly adjudicates, and the federal government still decides how much or how little additional ground to give.
Pro-merger political parties in Gilgit-Baltistan have largely operated within this arrangement rather than against it. The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Pakistan Peoples Party have each governed the region at various points, and local leadership aligned with these parties has often prioritised closeness to federal power over pushing for enforceable constitutional guarantees. Integration with Pakistan has been framed by these parties as aspiration, as identity, as destiny, while the legal tools that would more fully protect people from arbitrary governance have gone largely undemanded by the parties holding office.
The argument Islamabad has historically deployed is the Kashmir dispute. Formally incorporating Gilgit-Baltistan into Pakistan's constitutional framework, officials have argued, could complicate the country's position on the broader Kashmir issue, where Pakistan has maintained that the entire former princely state, including Gilgit-Baltistan, should ultimately be subject to a plebiscite under UN resolutions. That plebiscite has not happened in over seven decades. The people of Gilgit-Baltistan continue to live with the practical consequences of a geopolitical position that has remained unresolved for generations.
The Supreme Court of Pakistan took up the question in a major ruling delivered on 17 January 2019, with a seven-judge bench finding that the court's own jurisdiction extended to Gilgit-Baltistan and that the region's residents were entitled to the same fundamental rights as other Pakistani citizens, even as the bench reaffirmed that Gilgit-Baltistan's final constitutional status remained tied to the unresolved Kashmir dispute and ordered the government to legislate further rights within a fortnight.
A facts-finding committee led by former foreign minister Sartaj Aziz had earlier recommended a path toward provisional provincial status. Years on, the constitutional amendment that would substantively change the region's status has still not materialised.
What the region's residents experience day to day is governance with limited accountability. Federal appointments dominate key administrative positions. Budgets are substantially shaped by Islamabad's discretion rather than by enforceable revenue rights over the region's own land and water. Disputes over development projects, land acquisition and resource contracts have no fully constitutional court of last resort to which residents can appeal as citizens. The Gilgit-Baltistan Chief Court functions, but its jurisdiction is circumscribed by the same governance orders that created the administrative system in the first place.
Civil society in Gilgit-Baltistan has documented this pattern with increasing precision. The Awami Action Committee, a broad-based local alliance of political, religious and civic groups, has repeatedly organised shutdowns and protests demanding constitutional rights, a share of CPEC-related revenue, and an end to what activists describe as a colonial-style governance model. Federal and provincial responses have ranged from negotiations that produce written commitments to the arrest of movement leaders and activists when pressure intensifies.
The constitutional question is not abstract. Without full constitutional status, a resident of Gilgit-Baltistan cannot straightforwardly seek a remedy from some federal bodies in the way citizens of Pakistan's provinces can. Federal laws do not automatically apply to the region unless extended by executive order. The National Finance Commission, which distributes federal revenues across the provinces, excludes Gilgit-Baltistan from its formula entirely.
