By Staff Reporter
GILGIT: The swearing-in of the newly elected Gilgit-Baltistan chief minister has been postponed after the head of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party left for Iran to attend funeral proceedings for the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the party said on Sunday.
Advocate Amjad Hussain, elected unopposed as leader of the Gilgit-Baltistan assembly on June 22, had been due to take his oath of office on July 1. The PPP’s regional chapter said the ceremony would be rescheduled once party chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari returned from his engagements abroad, without specifying a new date.
“A new date and time for the oath-taking ceremony will be announced later,” the party said in a statement.
Hussain, who also serves as the PPP’s Gilgit-Baltistan chapter president, outlined an ambitious agenda for his incoming government in an interview with Pakistani newspaper Dawn, describing a region battered by climate change and squeezed by fiscal pressure.
He said his administration would immediately seek additional federal funds to address the accelerating impacts of climate change in the mountainous territory, which sits at the confluence of the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Himalayan ranges and has been among Pakistan’s most climate-vulnerable regions.
Hussain sought to dismiss concerns over the delayed passage of the regional budget for the current fiscal year, saying the timing would not hamper his government’s ability to function. He said his administration would identify priorities and begin work as soon as the oath was administered.
On the broader political front, the chief minister-elect struck a nationalist tone, framing his party’s electoral campaign around three central pledges — the right to self-governance, land ownership rights, and employment guarantees for residents of the territory. He argued those pledges had successfully undercut the appeal of religious and nationalist parties in the polls.
Hussain also renewed the PPP’s push for Gilgit-Baltistan to be accorded provisional provincial status under Pakistan’s constitution, a proposal the party has long championed as a strategic riposte to India’s 2019 revocation of the special autonomous status of Indian-administered Kashmir.
He argued that granting GB provisional provincial status — along with seats in Pakistan’s Senate and National Assembly — would serve as a concrete counter to New Delhi’s move, while preserving Islamabad’s formal position that Kashmir’s final status must be determined through a United Nations-mandated plebiscite.
“Declaring Gilgit-Baltistan a provisional province is the appropriate response,” Hussain said, adding that Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari had made precisely that argument in a recent address to Pakistan’s National Assembly.
He blamed the previous government of former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party for blocking a proposed 26th Constitutional Amendment in 2022 that would have conferred provisional provincial status on the territory.
Gilgit-Baltistan, which borders China, Afghanistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir, occupies a strategically sensitive position and is the gateway to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The territory has no formal representation in Pakistan’s federal legislature and its constitutional status has long been a source of political contention.
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