DESPITE hurdles, doubts, speculation, a protest movement and delayed polls on seven out of 45 directly contested Legislative Assembly seats, the task of installing a new government in Azad Jammu and Kashmir has finally been accomplished. There had been serious questions about the fairness of the elections. The bitterest criticism was from the PPP, the PML-N’s ally in the national parliament.

Even the AJK prime minister’s election was not without controversy. Barrister Iftikhar Gillani was not selected or even recommended as a candidate for the office by the PML-N parliamentary party of the AJK assembly; rather, he was picked by the president of PML-N Pakistan. The choice was resented by some senior party leaders, including Shah Ghulam Qadir, the party president in AJK, who boycotted the assembly session that elected the PM.

The key objection to Mr Gillani’s election as PM was not his relative inexperience compared to veterans such as former PM Raja Farooq Haider or former speaker Shah Ghulam Qadir but the mode of his election as an assembly member. He had lost his seat — the Muzaffarabad constituency, LA-29 — to his PPP rival in the election by over 3,000 votes. Still, he returned to the assembly on a seat reserved for technocrats. There is no legal bar to the eligibility of a member who is defeated in the general election and subsequently elected on a reserved seat to seek the PM’s office. But many politicians believe that a PM should win the confidence of his constituency before seeking the coveted........

© Dawn