After six days of deliberations, Chaudhary Anwar Ul Haq was “elected” unopposed as the new prime minister by the lame legislative assembly of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) on April 19, 2023
Haq hails from Bhimber City in the Bhimber district in PoK. He was the Speaker of the legislative assembly and was elected to the house on the ticket of Jammu and Kashmir Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) from Bhimber constituency number 7 during the 2021 general elections Haq is the 15th prime minister of PoK and obtained 48 votes.
Pakistan People’s Party and Pakistan Muslim League (N) plus 7 members of the PTI Forward Block that oppose Imran Khan had all voted in unison to get Haq elected. Four members of the assembly remained absent during the session.
The office of the PoK prime minister became vacant after Tanveer Ilyas was disqualified in a contempt of court case on April 11, 2023.Haq was elected for the first time to the assembly in 2006 on the ticket of the People’s Muslim League. Since then he has served as senior minister, speaker and acting president of PoK.
Former Secretary of Defence Lt General (r) Chaudhary Ikram ul Haq is his brother.
Haq’s father claimed to have been part of the anti-Dogra ‘revolution’ and the formation of the government of PoK that was allegedly established on October 14, 1947, is said to be the precursor of Pakistan’s attack on the state of Jammu and Kashmir on October 22, 1947.
It is therefore not hard to come to the conclusion that he was and remains the blue-eyed boy of the Pakistan military establishment.
Information gathered from my inside sources say that he has ascended to power with the blessings of top military command as well as the ISI chief General Nadeem Anjum.
The fact that both PPP and PML (N) voted for him and no other candidate was planted to contest him means that like the coalition government in Pakistan now in PoK we will have a pro-PDM government as well.
The former prime minister of PoK Ilyas who was ousted on April 11 through judicial engineering has said that the majority of workers and leaders of PTI stand with Imran Khan.
Ilyas said that Haq was not nominated by Imran Khan as a candidate and soon a meeting will be held with Chairman Imran Khan to discuss future strategy.
Tanveer Ilyas is not the first prime minister or head of government of PoK who has disgracefully been thrown out of office.KH Khurshid was appointed as President of PoK in 1959 by the then-military dictator of Pakistan General Ayub Khan.
When Khurshid began demanding more power from the government in PoK, the general forced Khurshid to resign. He was later killed in a road accident.
Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan, who boosted about being the first holy warrior of the October 22, 1947 attack on the State of Jammu and Kashmir, was the president of PoK in 1974.
However, he refused to support the Pakistani government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and was disgracefully removed from office through a Pakistan-engineered vote of no-confidence.
Sardar Muhammed Ibrahim, who was the lackey of the Pakistan army and a key character of the October 22, 1947 invasion of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, was the President of PoK and he was sacked by the direct orders of Pakistan military ruler General Zia ul Haq on October 30, 1978.
Khan’s crime at the time was that he refused to support the military coup that ended Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government on July 5, 1977.The recent ousting of PoK prime minister Tanveer Ilyas is therefore not an isolated incident. He perhaps had become too much of a visionary for the Pakistan military establishment to swallow.
In November and December 2021, Tanveer Ilyas initiated the first-ever local body election in PoK in 30 years. Pakistan military establishment rules over PoK by depriving people of true representation. To have local body elections serves the opposite.
During the local body elections, people of PoK found themselves the opportunity to talk, debate and canvas about issues that are related to the betterment of the neighbourhood, the building of schools, clinics, hospitals, roads, bridges, safety walls and more.
This politicisation of the public on a grass root level is a dangerous exercise for the colonial occupier. Therefore, Pakistan’s military establishment was unhappy and refused to send rangers or extra force of police from Punjab to undertake security responsibilities on the polling day.
Tanveer Ilyas initiated a bus service between PoK and occupied Gilgit-Baltistan ending a 70-year dependency of travellers on the Pakistan transport system. This was seen as a big crime.
How can the colonial master ever allow the people of two occupied territories of the same state to start communicating and travelling to each other’s occupied lands and exchange social, political and economic experiences they have concurred during the 75 years of occupation by Pakistan?
And finally, Tanveer Ilyas managed to secure a USD 15 million education project from Saudi Arabia. Are you kidding me??? An education project for an oppressed nation? This is totally intolerable and resulted in a high court stay order against the project.
After two months of the stay order, Ilyas publically complained that the education project was suffering from delay because the courts were interfering. That was it.
The High Court immediately issued a contempt of court against Ilyas on April 10 and by April 11 he was gone: disqualified from being a prime minister and a member of the legislative assembly.
The new prime minister of PoK Chaudhary Anwar ul Haq is a Pakistan military establishment stooge who will do three things to undo what Tanveer Ilyas did.
Firstly, Haq will starve local body councillors of any development funds thereby turning locals against democratically elected councillors.Secondly, Haq will take measures to limit, if not totally abandon, the PoK-Gilgit-Baltistan bus service.
And finally, he will ensure that the USD 15-million-dollar education project awarded by Saudi Arabia never fulfils the educational requirements of PoK.
If Haq tries to step out of line, which considering his family and his own political background I doubt he might dare to, he will share the fate of his predecessors.
Dr Amjad Ayub Mirza is an author and a human rights activist from Mirpur in PoK. He currently lives in exile in the UK.
