The story of Pakistan’s control over Gilgit-Baltistan begins not with the will of its people, but with a secret meeting held without them.
The Karachi Agreement of 1949 is where Gilgit-Baltistan’s political marginalisation was written into the institutional DNA of the region, and where it has remained, in one form or another, ever since.
Signed on 27–28 April 1949 between Pakistan, the leadership of so-called “Azad Jammu and Kashmir,” and the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, the agreement transferred sweeping administrative authority over Gilgit-Baltistan to Islamabad.
Not a single representative of the region sat at that table. The people whose homeland was being signed away were simply not consulted.
The absence was not an oversight. It was the shape of things to come.
Through the Karachi Agreement, Islamabad assumed complete control over all critical levers of power in the region, defence, foreign affairs, communications, and the conduct of negotiations with the UN Commission for India and Pakistan on Kashmir.
Most consequential of all was the formal transfer of the “Northern Areas,” as Gilgit-Baltistan was then designated, from even the nominal authority of the AJK government to direct federal control in Islamabad.
It is worth noting that the Karachi Agreement is a source of confusion because there are two agreements that carry that name: the April 1949 Pakistan-AJK deal discussed here, and a separate July 1949 military accord between India and Pakistan establishing the ceasefire line in Jammu and Kashmir.
The two are entirely distinct. The April agreement was an internal arrangement, negotiated in secret and kept hidden from the public until the AJK High Court exposed it in the early 1990s, at which point it caused considerable embarrassment to Pakistan, which was simultaneously championing Kashmiri self-determination at international forums.
Scholars and analysts are largely in agreement that Gilgit-Baltistan was never a party to the agreement that decided its fate, and the International Crisis Group has described the pact as deeply unpopular in the region for precisely this reason.
The democratic deficit it created was not merely procedural. It was structural, and it has persisted across seven decades.
Rule by Appointment
Even before the Karachi Agreement formalised things, Pakistan had moved quickly to establish direct control.
When its first political agent, Sardar Muhammad Alam Khan, arrived in Gilgit on 16 November 1947, one of his first acts was to impose the Frontier Crimes Regulations, a colonial-era legal instrument originally designed for the northwest tribal belt.
Under the FCR, a single appointed official served simultaneously as magistrate, revenue collector, police chief, and judge.
Residents had no right to legal representation, no right of appeal, and in some cases needed police permission simply to travel.
This was not the post-independence democratic promise. It was its negation.
The FCR regime remained in place until 1972, when Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto finally abolished it. For a full quarter century after the Karachi Agreement, across Pakistan’s constitutions of 1956, 1962, and 1973, Gilgit-Baltistan was present in none of them.
The region was governed, but it was not represented. It paid the cost of being part of Pakistan without enjoying any of the rights.
The Paradox at the Heart of Islamabad’s Policy
The Karachi Pact created a contradiction that Pakistan has never resolved. Islamabad exercises de facto control over Gilgit-Baltistan, but has consistently refused to grant the region full constitutional status.
The reason is strategic: formally integrating Gilgit-Baltistan as a fifth province of Pakistan would undermine Islamabad’s longstanding international position that the future of Jammu and Kashmir, of which Gilgit-Baltistan is legally a part, must be determined through a UN-supervised plebiscite. The result is a region trapped between two positions.
Pakistan claims it for strategic purposes but declines to own it constitutionally. Gilgit-Baltistan has no seats in Pakistan’s National Assembly. Its people cannot vote in federal elections.
They inhabit a space that Pakistani law has never quite decided how to name.
Reforms have arrived, but slowly and always on Islamabad’s terms.
Bhutto established a rudimentary Northern Areas Advisory Council in 1970 and abolished the FCR in 1972. Benazir Bhutto introduced a Legal Framework Order in 1994.
The landmark 2009 Empowerment and Self-Governance Order created an elected assembly for the first time in the region’s history, over six decades after the Karachi Agreement.
The 2018 Order that replaced it transferred some powers from the federal Gilgit-Baltistan Council to the elected assembly, but retained a prime ministerial veto over key legislative areas. Each reform has been a response to pressure from below, not a principled reckoning with the illegitimacy of the original arrangement.
The People Still Waiting
The legacy of 1949 is not abstract. It shows up in the recurring protests across Gilgit-Baltistan over wheat prices, electricity, mining rights, and land. It shows up in slogans demanding genuine autonomy and an end to rule by distant decree.
It shows up in the fact that major infrastructure projects, among them the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a corridor that runs through Gilgit-Baltistan and reshapes the region’s geography, were conceived and agreed without any meaningful local input.
Political movements across the region have, for decades, called for provincial status or at minimum a governance model that gives people a real voice in decisions that affect their land, water, and futures. The demands are not radical.
They are, at their core, a request to be treated as citizens rather than as subjects.
The Karachi Agreement of 1949 was not merely an administrative convenience. It was the moment that institutionalised Gilgit-Baltistan’s disenfranchisement. Seventy-five years on, the pact’s shadow has not lifted.
The region remains governed without full consent, its people still pressing for the voice that was denied to them before the ink was even dry.
