India, June 25 -- The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor enters Pakistan through Gilgit-Baltistan. The Karakoram Highway, the primary artery of one of the most strategically significant infrastructure projects in Asia, runs directly through the region. Gilgit-Baltistan provides the land, the mountains and the routes. The economic architecture built on top of all of this has been designed almost entirely without the region's people directly shaping its terms.

CPEC, the flagship project of China's Belt and Road Initiative, was announced in April 2015 with a headline figure of $46 billion, a sum roughly equivalent to a fifth of Pakistan's annual GDP at the time. By 2017 the publicly cited value of CPEC projects had grown to around $62 billion...