MUZAFFARABAD: Terming the recent change in Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) through a no-trust motion a “stopgap arrangement”, a senior leader of the opposition Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) on Saturday claimed that the Legislative Assembly could witness more such “adventures” in the days to come.

“It’s not going to end here…. This house may repeat the history of a previous legislature from 2006 to 2011 which had seen four prime ministers in five years,” said Chaudhry Tariq Farooq, AJK’s former senior minister and a member of the PML-N organising committee, while talking to journalists.

According to him, the nomination of Abdul Qayyum Niazi for AJK premiership in 2021 was a replication of the nomination of Usman Buzdar for Punjab chief ministership in 2018 and it was bound to fall flat at an appropriate time which came too early in Azad Kashmir.

He recalled that in 2021 Barrister Sultan Mahmood and Sardar Tanveer Ilyas were at loggerheads with each other but even though apparently both appeared to have reconciled at the moment, “there is more than what meets the eye”.

The PML-N leader alleged that there had been “grouping and division” within the ruling PTI parliamentary party “on the basis of natives, refugees and clans” and the same had messed up the very basis of the government and the institution of bureaucracy.

“Failure of the PTI to deliver in the past eight months in AJK proves that the government cannot be run through the ‘lent officers’,” he said, referring to the officers posted from the central services in AJK, mainly the chief secretary and the IGP.

Of the parliamentary opposition, comprising 12 members from PPP and seven from PML-N, Mr Farooq maintained that though it did consist of many senior and seasoned politicians in its folds “it was however bereft of an effective strategy to take on the disoriented treasury benches”.

He admitted that there were groups within the opposition as well, which were subsequentlygoing to the benefit of the government.

“The day the opposition devised a comprehensive strategy to take the government to task in the assembly, it will work wonders for them,” he said without elaborating.

Mr Farooq said the PTI was mistaken in believing that it could ‘manage the support’ of some opposition lawmakers to undo some provisions of the 13th amendment in AJK Constitution.

Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2022