LAHORE: Veteran politician Mian Muhammad Azhar breathed his last here on Tuesday after a prolonged illness as he was under treatment for a serious ailment over the past several months. He was 83.

He was the founding president of the PML-Q and father of PTI leader Hammad Azhar.

A representative of the influential Arain clan and a business family of Lahore having steel business, Mian Azhar held several key positions during his decades-long political career. A family friend of the Sharifs, he earlier served as the Mayor of Lahore before being appointed as the governor of Punjab during Nawaz Sharif’s first tenure as the prime minister in the early 1990s. He resigned after developing differences with the Sharifs.

Following the 1999 military coup by Gen Pervez Musharraf, he became the first politician to call on the military ruler. He then played a pivotal role in the formation of the then kings party, Pakistan Muslim League–Quaid (PML-Q), by making dents into the Nawaz-led Muslim League.

While he was a strong candidate for the slot of prime minister, he lost in a dramatic way in the 2002 general election. He resigned as the PML-Q president and also retired from active politics.

Later, he joined the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in October 2011.

In the 2024 vote, he re-entered the electoral arena after his son Hammad went underground, and successfully contested the National Assembly seat NA-129 (Lahore), previously held by his son.

Running as a PTI-backed independent candidate, he defeated PML-N candidate Hafiz Nauman by a significant margin. He also won the presidency of Pakistan Football Federation by a margin of one vote, beating Pakistan People’s Party leader Faisal Saleh Hayat in 1990. Azhar governed the federation till the 2003 elections, when he was beaten by Hayat. By that time, Azhar had fallen out of favour with the pro-Musharraf PML-Q, while Hayat’s own pro-Musharraf PPP-Patriot faction had been growing in power in the run-up to the 2002 general election.

Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2025