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Mandates in the Mountains

Pakistan’s northern territories are no longer silent frontiers. They are young, connected, politically conscious and increasingly unwilling to be treated as peripheral trophies.

By Shakeel Ahmed Shah | July 2026

Pakistan’s northern territories are entering a consequential political moment. Gilgit-Baltistan has already voted in its June 7 assembly election, while Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) is scheduled to go to the polls on July 27. Taken together, these elections are more than regional contests. They are a revealing test of how national parties seek influence in Pakistan’s most strategically sensitive peripheries, and how far that influence can still be converted into local legitimacy.

The first verdict has come from Gilgit-Baltistan. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has emerged as the largest party, ahead of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), while independents and smaller formations have retained enough weight to influence the next government. On paper, this gives the PPP the first claim to power. In practice, it places the party inside the familiar political grammar of the north: no mandate is complete until it is negotiated, aligned and made workable beyond the polling station.

That is why the post-election behaviour of independents matters. Four winning independents have joined Abdul Aleem Khan’s Istehkam-i-Pakistan Party (IPP), a party aligned with the PML-N at the federal level. This does not erase the PPP’s lead, but it complicates the mandate’s meaning. The GB result is, therefore, not just a story of PPP’s return; it is also a story of how independents become instruments in the wider architecture of power. The votes were cast in GB, but the geometry of government formation cannot be separated from Islamabad.

This is not new. GB elections have often reflected the political climate at the centre. PPP, PML-N and PTI have each benefited from that pattern at different moments. Yet the 2026 election also shows that GB cannot be reduced to a federal echo. Its voters are negotiating their own anxieties: constitutional recognition, parliamentary representation, jobs, land rights, climate vulnerability, public services and dignity within the federation. The north participates in national politics, but it does so with a local memory.

The likely PPP-PML-N understanding in GB should, therefore, be read less as ideological convergence and more as political necessity. Coalition-making may be presented as a source of stability, and in a fragmented house, it may be necessary. But stability becomes fragile when it appears to soften a mandate rather than serve it. If PPP leads the next government with PML-N support, its central challenge will not be merely arithmetic. It will be to convince GB’s citizens that their vote has not been translated into another Islamabad-compatible arrangement.

The controversies surrounding the election make that challenge sharper. Questions over delayed results, re-polling decisions and allegations of irregularities may not overturn the broad outcome, but they matter profoundly in a territory where constitutional status remains unsettled. In ordinary provincial politics, a disputed constituency is a procedural problem. In GB, it becomes part of a larger democratic wound: people are repeatedly asked to vote within institutions that still do not grant them full representation in Pakistan’s constitutional order.

AJK now approaches its election under even heavier pressure. In 2021, PTI swept the region, converting national momentum into a regional majority. This time, the environment is very different. PTI’s relationship with state power has changed, its organisational space is more constrained, and its ability to convert support into seats will be tested. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that institutional difficulty automatically means electoral disappearance. In Pakistan’s recent politics, grievance itself has become a political resource.


For PPP and PML-N, AJK offers both opportunity and danger. They can coordinate, avoid vote-splitting, and benefit from federal alignment. The GB experience may tempt them to believe that a similar formula can work in Muzaffarabad. But AJK is not simply another northern assembly to be managed through candidate adjustment and post-election arithmetic. Its election is unfolding in the shadow of a deeper legitimacy crisis.

The July 2026 election in AJK is taking place amid a broader challenge to its legitimacy. This region isn’t just a typical northern assembly that can be managed from with candidate adjustments and post-election calculations.

The recent mobilisation around the banned Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC) has changed the political mood. The dispute over the 12 refugee seats has moved beyond a technical constitutional question. For some, these seats preserve the historical continuity of the Kashmir cause. Many in AJK raise a sharp democratic objection: why should constituencies outside the territory help determine a legislature responsible for the daily governance of those living inside it? The courts may settle the legal question, but elections cannot ignore the political wound.

This is what makes AJK the harder test. GB asks whether a fragmented mandate can be assembled into a government without losing credibility. AJK asks whether an election can command trust when a major public movement has already challenged the very structure of representation. If PPP and PML-N win through coordination but appear indifferent to this grievance, they may gain office while losing the larger argument.

The battle for Pakistan’s north is therefore not only between PPP, PML-N and PTI. It is between two political models. One model treats GB and AJK as strategic territories where governments are assembled through alliances, independents, reserved seats and federal influence. The other recognises them as political societies with their own agency, anger and aspirations. The first model may still win elections. The second is necessary to build legitimacy.

This distinction is vital because both GB and AJK occupy a special place in Pakistan’s strategic imagination. They are linked to borders, rivers, mountains, tourism, CPEC, Kashmir diplomacy and national security. Yet the people who live there continue to ask ordinary democratic questions: who represents us, who decides for us, and why are our votes powerful enough to form governments but not powerful enough to resolve our status?

The July election in AJK will test whether PTI’s earlier dominance can survive a transformed national environment. It will also test whether PPP and PML-N can turn coordination into confidence rather than another episode of elite management. GB has already shown that the north can produce a mandate, but also that mandates in the north are quickly surrounded by negotiations.

The party that defines the next phase will not be the one that counts independents fastest or bargains offices most efficiently. It will be the one that understands a simple truth: Pakistan’s northern territories are no longer silent frontiers. They are young, connected, politically conscious and increasingly unwilling to be treated as peripheral trophies. Islamabad may still calculate the north, but the north is learning to read Islamabad back.

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