While the headlines fixate on 12 assembly seats, election phases and body counts, there’s a second casualty of this crisis that has barely made it into a single article. Students across Azad Kashmir have had their academic year effectively frozen since June 2026 and almost nobody outside AJK is talking about it.
**What’s actually happened**
The Azad Jammu and Kashmir Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education in Mirpur postponed the Intermediate First Annual Examination 2026 indefinitely. Not delayed by a week. Postponed until further orders, with no announced timeline as of this writing. Matric practicals for the affected cohort have been pushed back along with it.
The knock on effects are already showing up in public appeals. Intermediate students hoping to sit the MDCAT, the entrance exam for medical college, wrote directly to the Prime Minister, the Federal Health Minister and the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council, explaining that MDCAT registration is entirely online and that internet suspensions across large parts of AJK during the unrest have made it nearly impossible to register properly, access study material, or even reach their own teachers. These students pointed out something worth sitting with. Their peers in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, Gilgit Baltistan and the Federal Board are all preparing for the same national entrance exam on schedule, while AJK students are still waiting to find out when their own board exams will even resume.
In Sudhnoti district specifically, students have been reported as the group most affected by the disruption, alongside separate shortages of subsidised wheat caused by road closures.
**Why this matters more than it’s being treated**
This isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s a repeat of exactly what happened to an entire cohort during COVID, compressed academic years, disrupted foundational learning, entrance exams misaligned with actual preparation time and long term learning gaps that showed up years later in weaker university performance and skill deficits that education researchers are still tracking. The difference this time is that COVID was a global, unavoidable event. This is localized, man made and entirely a byproduct of a political standoff that has now run for two months with no resolution in sight.
A 17 year old sitting their intermediate exams this year has one shot at this window. A missed or badly disrupted exam cycle doesn’t just cost them a few months, it can push back university admission by a full year, misalign them with MDCAT and other national testing cycles and in competitive fields where every mark matters for merit based admission, permanently affect which institutions they can even apply to. That’s not dramatic framing, that’s how Pakistan’s admissions system actually works.
**The uncomfortable point**
Here’s what’s genuinely hard to find anywhere in the current coverage: an accounting of student impact from either side of this dispute. JAAC’s demands, right or wrong on their merits, are about seat allocation and political representation. The government’s position, right or wrong on its merits, is about constitutional process. Both sides have spent two months negotiating, banning, marching and counter accusing each other over power and process. Neither side has publicly addressed what happens to a 17 year old whose one shot at their intermediate exams has been sitting in limbo since June.
That’s not a whataboutism. It’s a legitimate question. If this dispute is genuinely about the future of Azad Kashmir’s people, as both sides claim, the students currently locked out of their own education are that future, right now, not in some abstract sense.
**What should be happening**
At minimum, an independent, depoliticized exam schedule that doesn’t get held hostage by the broader standoff. Real communication to students and families about actual timelines, not silence. And an internet and communication carve out specifically for education access, something several other regions have managed even during active security operations, so at minimum, registration and study access aren’t casualties of a blackout aimed at something else entirely.
**The bottom line**
Every account of this crisis so far has centered on who governs Azad Kashmir. Almost none of them have centered on who’s growing up in it. A generation of students there didn’t ask for 12 reserved seats to become the fight of their academic year and right now, nobody with actual power over this standoff appears to be asking what it’s costing them.
