By Staff Reporter
MUZAFFARABAD: Voting for eight reserved seats in the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly will take place on 24 August, the region’s Election Commission announced on Sunday, setting in motion the final stage of a general election that has already been marred by allegations of rigging and disrupted by law and order concerns in two districts.
The seats up for grabs include five reserved for women, one for Ulema-e-Deen or Mushaikh — scholars versed in Islamic teaching — one for Jammu and Kashmir state subjects living abroad, and one for technocrats and other professionals. Unlike the general seats, these are not decided by public ballot but by the assembly’s directly elected members, who will cast their votes inside the chamber itself.
According to the notification, issued under Rule 76(2) of the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Elections Rules 2020, polling will run from 10am to 1pm on the day. The process leading up to it is tightly scheduled: candidates must file nomination papers with the returning officer on 20 August, between 9am and 2pm, after which officials will scrutinise the submissions and publish a list of validly nominated candidates.
Anyone unhappy with a returning officer’s decision to accept or reject a nomination has a narrow window to object. Appeals must be lodged with the Election Commission on 21 August, between 9am and noon. The chief election commissioner will then hear those appeals the following day, also between 9am and noon, before delivering verdicts on 23 August. Candidates wishing to withdraw an appeal must do so by 2pm that same day, just hours before the final list is locked in.
The timetable underscores how compressed the final phase of this election cycle has become, with barely four days separating nominations from the vote itself.
An assembly still short of its full strength
Under Article 22(1) of the AJK Constitution, the assembly is designed to hold 53 members: 45 elected directly through adult franchise, and eight chosen afterwards by those directly elected members — the five women’s seats plus the three specialist seats now being contested.
But the assembly heading into this vote is incomplete. Elections in seven of the 45 directly elected constituencies — five in Poonch district and two in Sudhnoti district — could not go ahead because of the security situation on the ground. As a result, only 38 of the 45 directly elected members, or 84.4 per cent of that chamber, will have a say in choosing who fills the reserved seats.
The gap traces back to the third and final phase of the general election, held last week, which had originally been intended to cover the entire Poonch Division — eleven constituencies in all, spanning Bagh, Haveli, Poonch and Sudhnoti. The Election Commission ultimately allowed polling to proceed only in Bagh and Haveli, citing law and order concerns severe enough to force a postponement in the remaining two districts. No new date has yet been set for those seven outstanding seats.
Nawaz Sharif convenes meeting on women’s representation
Ahead of the reserved-seat vote, PML-N supremo and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif chaired a meeting focused specifically on the women’s seats in the AJK Assembly, the party said in a statement. Participants used the session to discuss the matter in detail and to praise what they described as the active and significant role women had played throughout the wider election campaign, calling it an encouraging sign for the strengthening of the democratic process in the region.
A contested result feeding into a tense final stage
The reserved-seat vote arrives at the tail end of a general election process that has left the PML-N with a commanding lead. Across the first two phases and partial results from the third, the party’s tally stands at 25 seats, against 11 for the Pakistan Peoples Party.
The first phase, held on 27 July across 13 constituencies in Mirpur Division, saw the PML-N take nine seats to the PPP’s four. The second phase, on 2 August, covered eight constituencies in Muzaffarabad Division along with all twelve seats reserved for refugees; the PML-N won 15 of those, with the PPP taking six.
The PPP has not accepted the outcome quietly. Party chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari accused the government of rigging the vote, telling supporters in a video message released after the second phase that the coalition administration in Islamabad was on borrowed time. “To my friends in the PML-N, can you hear that sound? The countdown for the federal government has begun,” he said.
Nawaz Sharif, for his part, sought to strike a more conciliatory tone in separate remarks, acknowledging that political rivalry was a normal feature of democratic life but warning against letting disagreements curdle into outright hostility. “This is the first time that this environment has been created in Azad Kashmir, which is a cause of concern for all of us,” he said, attributing the deterioration in part to what he called the failures of previous governments to fulfil their responsibilities.
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