By Staff Reporter
MUZAFFARABAD: Pakistan Peoples Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari intensified his confrontation with the ruling PML-N on Wednesday, demanding fresh polling in Mirpur and accusing his party’s own coalition partner of stealing the mandate of Azad Jammu and Kashmir’s voters in the first phase of assembly elections.
The war of words, now in its third day, has exposed deep strain in a federal alliance that has governed together in Islamabad since the 2024 general election, with senior figures from both parties clashing publicly in Muzaffarabad, Lahore and Islamabad over a contest that PML-N convincingly won but which the PPP insists was engineered.
Addressing a party workers’ convention in the AJK capital, Bhutto-Zardari challenged the Election Commission to prove its independence. “If you are not involved in this rigging,” he told commission officials, it should order re-polling in Mirpur without delay.
He turned his fire directly on Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz, telling the crowd that whoever occupies those offices does so not through public support but through what he called Form-47 — the provisional result sheet compiled by returning officers that has become opposition shorthand for alleged manipulation since the last general election.
The dispute follows the AJK Election Commission’s formal notification of results from the first of three voting phases, held on Monday across the Mirpur division. PML-N took nine of the 13 seats on offer; the PPP secured the remaining four. Two further phases are scheduled, in Poonch and Rawalakot on August 2 and in the Muzaffarabad, Bagh and Sudhnoti divisions on August 9, with polling staggered because of security concerns in the region.
Maryam Nawaz hits back
The confrontation began on Tuesday, when Nawaz used a televised address to insist that “it is not the state that decides election results, but the people,” and called on the PPP to accept the outcome with grace. She sharpened the attack on Wednesday, writing on X that the PPP — “the master of the fine art of rigging” — was now crying foul, and asking sardonically when doomsday might arrive.
PPP’s Sharjeel Inam Memon replied within the hour, telling her on the same platform that it was Form-47, not Nawaz, doing the talking, and that “doomsday came in 2024, when mandates were being distributed in charity.”
“A product of rigging”
In Muzaffarabad, Bhutto-Zardari went further than he had the previous day, describing PML-N as a “product of rigging” and contrasting it with his own party’s lineage, which he said stretched back three generations. He claimed the party opposite had never won an election on the strength of genuine votes.
“Do they think we will allow them to rig the elections in Kashmir?” he asked the crowd. “The Kashmiri people will not bow down and let anyone steal their mandate. This is Muzaffarabad, not Srinagar.”
He singled out the defeat of PPP candidate Chaudhry Yasin, arguing it made no sense given his standing in previous contests. He recalled that Yasin had won both seats he contested in an earlier election even while his sons were imprisoned and shots were fired at him, and said he could not accept a result that reversed that record now. He alleged PML-N had taken control of 30 polling stations in Mirpur to engineer the outcome, claiming to possess video evidence, and said turnout at those stations had reached 90 percent against 40 to 50 percent elsewhere.
“I am ready to accept defeat,” he told the convention, “but if you are going to steal our mandate by rigging the election, then I cannot accept these results,” adding that he would “take back every single stolen vote.”
Truth commission renewed
Bhutto-Zardari used the address to repeat his party’s call for a truth and reconciliation commission to address months of unrest in the region, framing it as a proposal made not for the government or the protest movement but “on behalf of every Kashmiri who does not belong to either.” He urged both the administration and the now-banned Joint Awami Action Committee to accept it, asking why either side would resist if it believed itself to be acting in good faith.
He told supporters he wanted employment and self-governance for Kashmiris delivered through the ballot box rather than through shutting down the city, and pledged to press for AJK’s representation in bodies such as the National Finance Commission and the Council of Common Interests. Taking aim again at PML-N’s economic record, he said the party’s guiding principle was that the wealthy should grow wealthier, and rejected any suggestion that his party wanted to turn Kashmir into Sindh. “I want Kashmir to stay Kashmir and let the people decide its fate,” he said, adding that no province, nor Islamabad, held the right to determine the region’s future.
Punjab claims rigging “exposed”
In Lahore, PPP’s Central Punjab general secretary, Hassan Murtaza, told a press conference that the results had exposed both the commission’s conduct and what he called broad-daylight theft of his party’s mandate, alleging rigging on a scale unseen in Pakistan’s history.
He said 30 polling stations in the Charhoi constituency, where Chaudhry Yasin stood, had been “held hostage” and that polling agents were barred from convening once voting closed, with similar tactics deployed in the constituency of Javed Badhanvi. He said a party worker, Mukhtar Younis, had died on polling day, and alleged that stations in the constituencies of Chaudhry Ikhlaq and Chaudhry Pervaiz Ashraf — where he said the PPP had been running close — were also seized.
Murtaza argued that staging the election in three phases had been designed to make such manipulation easier, and likened the AJK Election Commission’s conduct to that of a Punjab police unit deciding “who is to be half-fried and full-fried” — which polling agents to remove and which stations to take over. He alleged that polling hours had been extended by an hour specifically to allow additional stamping of ballots for PML-N, and said his party had raised concerns with the commission throughout voting only to be ignored until public pressure mounted on social media.
Responding to Nawaz’s earlier remarks dismissing the PPP’s record, Mr Murtaza said history showed it was his party that had secured AJK’s right to parliamentary politics in the first place. He said that during a brief period in regional government, then-premier Faisal Mumtaz Rathore had accepted 35 of the JAAC’s demands by executive order, with only two outstanding because they required federal involvement or constitutional change. He said PPP figures Raja Pervaiz Ashraf and Qamar Zaman Kaira had spent two weeks trying to bring the protest committee into talks, without success, but argued that the group’s refusal did not mean negotiations should be abandoned altogether or the truth and reconciliation proposal shelved. “If the state had shown some flexibility, the issue could have been resolved,” he said.
The PPP has raised the proposal repeatedly since protests began building in AJK over the past month, centred chiefly on the JAAC’s demand to scrap the 12 assembly seats reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who settled in Pakistan after 1947 — a dispute that has fuelled unrest across the region and led to the group’s proscription.
“Video evidence”
In Islamabad, Ashraf held a separate press conference at which he said he was presenting evidence of rigging and renewed his call for the chief election commissioner to rule swiftly on constituencies where the PPP had lodged objections. He asked whether his party was not entitled to seek redress through the proper channel, arguing that only the people of Pakistan and Kashmir were fit to judge the matter, and objected to PML-N figures telling the PPP to move on while, in his view, legitimate grievances went unaddressed.
He described video footage appearing to show a man setting fire to ballot papers in constituency LA-12, alongside a crowd of 100 to 150 people he said were led by the PML-N candidate. He said he had raised the matter with AJK Chief Justice Raja Saeed Akram Khan more than 48 hours earlier and asked why no action had followed, and questioned how the party could be expected to stay calm and continue campaigning with two phases of voting still to come.
Turning to the count itself, Ashraf said polling station 15 in LA-12 had 785 registered voters, of whom PML-N’s candidate secured 639 and his own candidate 12 — yet the results indicated a full turnout. He noted the station was located in Charhoi, where he said roughly a quarter of residents lived abroad, and asked how every registered voter could plausibly have cast a ballot. Turnout at some stations, he said, had reached 99 per cent, which he suggested was only possible “when you are sitting down and stamping the ballot papers yourself.”
He appealed directly to the AJK chief justice to examine the figures and called on the region’s chief election commissioner, retired Justice Ghulam Mustafa Mughal, to act, saying complaints had been lodged from the outset and should not have been left three days without a decision. “You have ensured the PPP was defeated, and you have done a lot of planning,” he said, “but when you pull such a move, there is always a trace.”
“Be ashamed,” Punjab tells PPP
The dispute also played out between the two parties’ provincial governments. Punjab information minister Azma Bokhari told reporters that Bhutto-Zardari appeared to be imitating an unnamed figure in his rhetoric, and contrasted his tone with what she described as a PML-N leadership that never resorted to personal attacks and instead pointed to its record — including chief minister Nawaz’s 18 months in office. She asked why Karachi remained reliant on the “tanker mafia” for water, why Sindh’s capital had no functioning transport network despite Punjab running 1,100 buses, and why rubbish continued to pile up on Karachi’s streets, arguing no PPP figure could answer for it. She said Punjab’s development record over the period compared favourably with 18 years of PPP government in Sindh, which she suggested gave the party little grounds for its current complaints.
Sindh senior minister Sharjeel Memon rejected the comparison, accusing PML-N of having taken power nationally in 2024 through a “fake mandate” and of now attempting the same in AJK. He said the PPP had entered coalition with PML-N afterwards only to keep the parliamentary process functioning, not because it accepted the legitimacy of the result. Referring to Mirpur’s large diaspora population — enough, he said, for the city to be nicknamed the second United Kingdom — he claimed PML-N had recorded up to 99.4 per cent of the vote across just 20 polling stations in Yasin’s constituency, and cited a separate constituency where he alleged 110 per cent of registered votes had been cast. He called on the Election Commission to act on both immediately and repeated the PPP’s demand for re-polling wherever it held reservations.
Memon also accused the Punjab government of governing with “a dictator’s mindset,” citing the case of Hum News journalist Khurram Iqbal, whom he said had been arrested and mistreated over a tweet about Nawaz, and alleged that broadcasters were avoiding coverage of monsoon flooding in the province for fear of losing government advertising.
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