News
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
PML-N announces to form its chapter in AJKAttique elected new AJK PM
* Current legislative assembly makes history by ousting three prime ministers in last one and a half years
By Irfan Ghauri
ISLAMABAD: Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan was on Tuesday elected the new prime minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. He is the fourth AJK PM since the 2006 general elections.
Attique was elected unopposed as no other candidate filed nomination papers against his candidature for the post of prime minister that was vacated by Raja Farooq Haider after his resignation on Monday.
Haider, on the other hand, spent the day in Lahore where he met the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz top leadership.
Barrister Sultan Mehmood, former AJK prime minister and head of People’s Muslim League, also held a meeting with Raja Zafarul Haq and expressed his willingness to join the PML-N.
Other smaller groups and individual politicians are likely to join the PML-N’s AJK chapter in the coming days.
AJK has a 49-member legislative assembly. The politics in the area have been a relatively stable affair since 1985. Ever since the introduction of the parliamentary democratic system in AJK in 1970, not a single AJK prime minister was sacked through in-house changes. However, things have been different since the 2006 elections that most believe were rigged.
The current legislative assembly has made history by ousting three prime ministers in the last one and a half years and many believe the fourth one is unlikely to complete the remaining one-year as well. Political pundits trace back the present political instability to, what they call, the ‘engineered polls’ held in 2006. They claim the elections were directly supervised by the Pakistani intelligence agencies in a bid to install a favourable government in the AJK. At that time, back-door diplomacy between India and Pakistan was in full swing and the Musharraf government wanted to avoid any opposition from AJK in case it reached a settlement over the issue of Jammu and Kashmir. Sardar Khalid Ibrahim, chief of the Jammu Kashmir People’s Party who resigned from the present assembly in 2009, claimed that some people were put in the AJK Assembly for a specific purpose by the Musharraf government. “These 12 to 15 cultivated politicians serve as a catalyst for in-house changes when they switch their loyalties overnight for every newcomer,” he said. Ibrahim said the in-house changes were part of the democratic process, but “the way things are going on in AJK is not a good omen for political institutions”. All the three prime ministers – Attique, Sardar Yaqoob and Raja Farooq – were removed on charges of mismanagement, corruption and nepotism by the same people who had earlier voted in their favour. All three accused the federal government of interfering in the politics of AJK.
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk