Context:

Pakistan has decided to elevate Gilgit-Baltistan’s status to that of a full-fledged province.

About:

• The region was part of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and is claimed by India.
• Gilgit-Baltistan is located between the Karakoram and the Himalayas world’s highest mountains. It’s home to K-2, the second tallest mountain in the world.
• During the first Indo-Pak war of October 1947, Pakistan occupied 78,114 sq km of the land of Jammu and Kashmir, including the ‘Northern Areas’.
  • The Northern Areas is the other name of Gilgit-Baltistan that Pakistan has used for administrative reasons because it was a disputed territory.

Governance of the Region

• The political nature of Gilgit-Baltistan has been directionless from the beginning.
• Pakistan initially governed the region directly from the central authority after it was separated from ‘Azad Jammu and Kashmir’ on April 28, 1949.
• In 1963, Pakistan gave away 5,180 sq km of the region to China, despite local protests.
• Pakistan passed the Gilgit-Baltistan Empowerment and Self Governance Order in 2009, which granted “self-rule” to the ‘Northern Areas’.
• Pakistan signed an agreement with China for mega infrastructure and hydel power projects in September 2009.
• In 2019, a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan took up the constitutional status of Gilgit-Baltistan.
• Over the years, the region has acquired a government and a council, which gave it a de facto status of a province of Pakistan, but the constitutional status of the region remained vague without explicit statehood.