By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Peoples Party is poised to seize control of the government in Azad Kashmir on Monday, when the regional Legislative Assembly is expected to vote out Prime Minister Chaudhry Anwarul Haq and install the party’s regional secretary general, Raja Faisal Mumtaz Rathore, in his place.
The no-confidence motion, submitted to the Assembly secretariat on Friday afternoon, already commands the support of at least 29 of the 53-seat body’s 49 directly elected members, well above the simple majority required.
Speaker Chaudhry Latif Akbar promptly summoned the house to meet at 3 pm on Monday. Haq, who leads a fragile coalition that includes the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), now faces removal less than two and a half years after he was elected with the PPP’s backing in April 2023. If the motion passes, and party leaders say it will by a “wide margin”, Rathore would automatically become prime minister under the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Constitution, marking the fourth leadership change in the current Assembly since its election in 2021.
The PPP’s chairman, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, had pressed Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan to deliver not only the PML-N’s votes for a “thumping majority” but also its participation in the new regional government. The PML-N leadership rebuffed the second request. It agreed to support the no-confidence vote but said it would remain in opposition. Two senior PML-N figures in the region, Shah Ghulam Qadir and former prime minister Raja Farooq Haider, nevertheless signed the resolution alongside 23 PPP lawmakers.
The five-member Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) parliamentary party, which holds the formal position of Leader of the Opposition, and the two lone legislators from the Muslim Conference and the Jammu Kashmir Peoples Party, announced they would abstain. On Sunday, the PPP’s numbers grew further when two ministers belonging to a PTI “forward bloc”, Deewan Ali Khan Chughtai (elementary education) and Taqdees Kausar Gillani (small industries), formally switched sides after meeting Faryal Talpur, Bhutto-Zardari’s influential aunt and a senior PPP leader. “We will get the no-confidence motion through with a wide margin,” Chaudhry Qasim Majeed, a senior PPP legislator and cabinet member in the outgoing government, said in an interview with a private television channel. “The PML-N will also support us in this regard.”
The resolution accuses Haq of inflicting “serious damage to the constitutional, ideological and democratic framework of the state through his governance style, political narrative and confrontational conduct.” None of the PPP ministers who signed the document has resigned from the cabinet they now condemn, nor has Haq dismissed them despite their public rebellion, a paradox that has drawn mockery in local political circles.
Appearing on a private television channel, Haq dismissed the charges as “childish” and “frivolous.” “The charge sheet against me leaves one wondering whether the allegations were even understood before being made,” he said. “If my cabinet colleagues had difficulty writing in Urdu, they could have asked me; I would have drafted the accusations against myself in better words.” He insisted he had broken the “status quo” by involving the full cabinet in decision-making and rejected the accusation of confrontational conduct, noting that all his speeches and statements over the past two and a half years were on record. “The person who wrote this phrase should at least know what he was writing,” Haq said.
A senior PPP official said Rathore is expected to take the oath of office as early as Tuesday before the region’s president, Barrister Sultan Mahmood. Bhutto-Zardari is scheduled to attend the ceremony. The rapid collapse of Haq’s administration underscores the continuing volatility of politics in Azad Kashmir, where governments in Islamabad have long exerted decisive influence over the regional assembly. The region has seen three prime ministers since the current assembly was seated after the 2021 elections, each change engineered through shifting alliances rather than fresh public mandates.
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