MUZAFFARABAD: Politics in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir has rarely suffered from a shortage of intrigue, but even its seasoned practitioners might have struggled to predict that one of the first legislators of the new Assembly would need a little help from a coin.
For weeks, political parties had counted their lawmakers, interviewed aspirants, distributed tickets, negotiated loyalties and worked out every conceivable permutation for eight reserved seats in the 53-member Legislative Assembly.
Yet when the ballots were counted on Monday, all that political arithmetic failed to answer one deceptively simple question: who should get the fifth seat reserved for women?
Pakistan Peoples’ Party candidate Zobia Khurshid Raja and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz nominee Riffat Abid had received five votes each.
The ballot box had spoken, but rather unhelpfully, it had said the same thing about both women.
The presiding officer, the Secretary of the Election Commission, therefore, turned to the procedure provided for resolving a tie: a toss.
And suddenly, after an election fought through three phases and weeks of intense political manoeuvring, the political future of two women rested on a coin landing on one side rather than the other. Fortune smiled on Raja.
The PPP candidate was declared elected, while Abid, who had received precisely the same number of votes, was left to contemplate one of politics' more unusual defeats.
Both candidates received five votes, and the tie was settled by a toss under the applicable election procedure. The toss gave the PPP its second women's reserved seat and prevented the PML-N from taking four of the five.
There was a certain irony to the result. Political parties normally complain that elections can turn on money, influence, administration, defections or backroom deals. In this instance, at least, nobody could accuse the winning candidate of having bought the coin's loyalty.
The moment also provided an unexpectedly theatrical conclusion to an otherwise highly predictable election for the reserved seats.
The Legislative Assembly constitutionally has 53 members: 45 elected from general constituencies and eight chosen indirectly for reserved seats. Of the eight reserved seats, five are for women and one each for technocrats and other professionals, Ulema and Mashaikh, and Jammu and Kashmir state subjects residing abroad.
But the new Assembly remains incomplete.
Elections could not be held in seven of the 45 general constituencies because of the security and law-and-order situation, five of them in Poonch and two in Sudhnoti. Consequently, only 38 directly elected legislators were available to vote for the reserved seats.
PML-N Leads Race
The PML-N had emerged as the dominant party from those contests, winning 25 seats, while the PPP secured 11. Sajid Iqbal Abbasi, elected on the platform of Awami Dast-o-Bazu, subsequently joined the PML-N, further strengthening its position.
That arithmetic meant the broad outcome of the reserved-seat elections was hardly a mystery.
Chaudhry Abdul Rehman Arain of the PML-N had already been elected unopposed to the seat reserved for Jammu and Kashmir state subjects living abroad after no rival candidate filed nomination papers.
Polling was, therefore, required for seven seats on Monday.
On the technocrats and other professionals’ seat, PML-N candidate Barrister Syed Iftikhar Ali Gillani received 26 votes and was elected.
The party's Pir Mohammad Mazhar Saeed Shah also secured 26 votes to take the seat reserved for Ulema and Mashaikh.
The contest for the five women's seats produced three PML-N winners: Maryam Zaman, better known as Maryam Kashmiri; Maryam Idrees; and Sehrish Qamar.
The PPP's Farzana Yaqoob comfortably secured another.
That left the final seat, six women having contested the five positions after the PPP's Shaheen Kosar Dar withdrew her candidature.
It was here that the carefully arranged parliamentary numbers produced their mischievous little surprise.
Raja and Abid finished with five votes each, and the coin completed what the ballot papers could not.
The result gave the PML-N six of the eight reserved seats, including the overseas seat won unopposed, while the PPP secured the remaining two, both through women.
The PML-N now has 31 members of its own in the Assembly. With Abbasi joining its ranks, its strength rises to 32. The PPP has 13 members after adding its two women members to the 11 elected from general constituencies.
For the moment, therefore, 46 members have been elected to a House constitutionally comprising 53 members. The remaining seven general seats await elections.
The PML-N has the numbers to form the government comfortably, although the Assembly that will govern the territory remains numerically unfinished.
Forty-six newly elected lawmakers took the oath in Muzaffarabad on Monday, with outgoing Speaker Chaudhry Latif Akbar administering the oath. The process for electing the speaker, deputy speaker and eventually the leader of the House is expected to follow.
But beyond the numbers, the reserved-seat election has brought five women with distinctly different political journeys into the Assembly.
Maryam Zaman
Maryam Zaman, better known as Maryam Kashmiri, is among the more recognisable female organisational faces of the PML-N in Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir.
She belongs to Kutla in Muzaffarabad district and has been associated with the PML-N since 2012.
Over the years, she has worked primarily through the party organisation rather than elected office, rising through its women's structure and playing a prominent role in mobilising female workers.
During the latest election campaign, she was particularly active in organising women supporters and strengthening the party network at the grassroots.
Her selection also illustrates how seriously the PML-N treated the reserved seats after emerging as the largest party in the direct elections.
Former Pakistan prime minister and PML-N president Nawaz Sharif personally interviewed aspirants before approving the tickets. Maryam Nawaz and senior party leaders were also involved in consultations over the nominations.
Published reports identify Maryam Zaman as a Muzaffarabad-based leader of the PML-N women's organisation and confirm that she was among the candidates eventually selected for the reserved seats.
For Zaman, the election marks the transition from organising women to representing them inside the legislature, although, as with all reserved-seat members, the route to the chamber runs through votes cast by legislators rather than the electorate directly.
Maryam Idrees
Maryam Idrees comes from Chakswari in Mirpur district and represents a somewhat different political profile.
She is a central vice president of the PML-N women's wing and has also served on the party's manifesto committee.
Her academic credentials distinguish her among the newly elected members.
Idrees completed a master's degree in business administration from the International Islamic University Islamabad and is pursuing a doctorate in management sciences.
Her publicly available profile describes her as a lecturer, PhD scholar and columnist in addition to her political responsibilities.
She has participated in activities related to human rights, education, women's empowerment, child protection and social welfare, and has attended training programmes and conferences concerning management, business research and technology transfer, including engagements outside Pakistan.
She has also been visible in party organisational activity in Mirpur and Chakswari well before the latest election.
Her arrival in the Assembly therefore gives the PML-N a member whose résumé combines party organisation with academia and management studies, something relatively uncommon in a political culture where family pedigree and constituency influence frequently outweigh professional qualifications.
Sehrish Qamar
For Sehrish Qamar, election to the Assembly is less an introduction than a return.
She belongs to Mang in Sudhnoti district and is a senior figure in the PML-N's women's organisation.
Qamar previously served in the Legislative Assembly from 2016 to 2021 on a women's reserved seat and therefore enters the new House with legislative experience that the other newly elected PML-N women do not possess.
Her political association with the Sharif family also goes back through her family. Her father, Haji Shakeel Awan, has long been associated with former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif.
Qamar remained politically and socially active after leaving the Assembly and maintained her presence in Sudhnoti, attending party and public functions and continuing her work within the PML-N organisation.
When the party leadership drew up its latest reserved-seat list, her previous legislative experience made her one of the more familiar names among the contenders.
Her return also demonstrates the curious dual character of women's reserved seats. They provide an important route into a legislature where women remain heavily underrepresented in directly elected constituencies, but they can also repeatedly circulate political figures selected by party leadership rather than create a broad pipeline of women competing before the electorate.
Farzana Yaqoob
Among the five women, Farzana Yaqoob arrives with perhaps the most extensive political and governmental résumé.
The PPP leader is the daughter of former president and prime minister Sardar Muhammad Yaqoob Khan, making her part of one of the best-established political families in the Poonch region.
But her political career has developed beyond the family name.
She previously served as minister for Social Welfare and Women's Development in the government of Pakistan-administered Jammu and Kashmir and has worked on issues involving women's economic participation, social protection and public policy.
Her profile with the World Economic Forum identifies her as a former minister and a founding director, chief executive and founding member of the MANTAQ Center for Research.
The Institute of Policy Studies describes her as a policy adviser and Kashmir affairs expert and credits her ministerial tenure with initiatives including the territory's first drug rehabilitation centre and a financial inclusion programme for women entrepreneurs in collaboration with the AJK Bank.
Yaqoob has also participated in policy and international forums, giving her a profile beyond conventional constituency politics.
Her return to the legislature provides the PPP with an experienced former minister at a time when the party, despite finishing a distant second to the PML-N, will form the principal opposition bloc in the new House.
It also continues a political family tradition, a recurring feature across the region's parties, where surnames can often prove nearly as durable as manifestos.
Zobia Khurshid Raja
If Farzana Yaqoob arrived carrying years of ministerial experience, Zobia Khurshid Raja arrived with perhaps the day's most memorable election story.
The PPP politician belongs to Bagh district and has built an increasingly visible political and social-media presence in recent years.
Her Instagram account, which has attracted tens of thousands of followers, presents her unapologetically as a PPP political activist and prominently features the party and its leadership.
But Raja attracted wider attention for something that happened away from an election campaign.
During the Joint Awami Action Committee agitation in October 2025, when clashes and tension engulfed several areas, an injured police officer needed urgent assistance near Chamyati.
According to information provided to Kashmir Times, Raja put the wounded policeman in her vehicle and transported him to hospital despite the volatile situation.
The episode earned her considerable attention because it occurred at a moment when relations between demonstrators and law-enforcement personnel were exceptionally tense.
Her action was subsequently recognised by the Pakistan government, which selected her for the Tamgha-i-Shujaat, or Medal of Bravery. Contemporary social-media reports also record the announcement of the award for her actions during the unrest.
Then came Monday.
Having demonstrated courage in circumstances where physical danger was real, Raja found that her next test required no bravery at all, only good fortune.
She and Riffat Abid received five votes apiece.
For Abid, from Dadyal in Mirpur district, the result was particularly cruel because she had done everything electorally required of her. She secured exactly as many lawmakers' votes as the woman who became an MLA.
There was no recount capable of manufacturing a sixth vote and no further legislator waiting outside to resolve the deadlock.
The election rules had an answer, if not necessarily one that would satisfy anyone searching for philosophical perfection in representative democracy.
The coin was tossed, and Raja won.
Her victory gave the PPP two of the five women's seats and provided the new Assembly with an anecdote likely to survive long after the precise parliamentary arithmetic of 2026 has been forgotten.
Women in the House
There is also a more serious story behind Monday's unusual result.
Five seats are constitutionally reserved for women in the 53-member Assembly, ensuring female presence in a political institution where women have historically found it difficult to win direct elections.
The arrangement guarantees representation, but it also places considerable power in the hands of party leaderships.
Unlike legislators elected from geographical constituencies, the women on reserved seats do not run before the wider electorate for those positions. Parties nominate them and elected legislators vote through a secret ballot.
That makes internal party influence, organisational loyalty and the calculations of parliamentary leadership especially important.
The backgrounds of this year's five winners illustrate the system's strengths as well as its limitations.
Maryam Zaman represents years of grassroots party organisation. Maryam Idrees brings academic and professional credentials. Sehrish Qamar brings previous legislative experience. Farzana Yaqoob has ministerial and policy experience, while Zobia Khurshid Raja combines political activism with a growing public profile.
Yet none needed to seek a direct popular mandate for the seat she now occupies.
The irony is difficult to miss: seats created to ensure women's political representation are ultimately decided overwhelmingly by a legislature whose directly elected membership remains dominated by men.
And this year, even those male legislators could not completely settle the matter.
For one seat, they had to ask a coin.
The lightness of Monday's coin-toss drama should not obscure the considerably heavier political landscape awaiting the new government.
The PML-N has emerged with commanding numbers.
Its 25 directly elected seats and six reserved seats give it 31 members, while Sajid Iqbal Abbasi's decision to join the party increases its strength to 32 in the currently constituted 46-member House.
But the constitutional strength of the Assembly is 53, meaning seven directly elected seats remain vacant.
Those vacancies are themselves a reminder of the conditions in which the election was held.
Polling could not take place in five constituencies in Poonch and two in Sudhnoti because of the law-and-order situation. The region is still living with the political consequences of the Joint Awami Action Committee agitation, public anger over governance and economic issues, disputes surrounding the electoral process and legal challenges to results in some constituencies.
The next government will therefore enjoy a comfortable parliamentary majority without necessarily inheriting a comfortable political environment.
Attention is now focused on who will head that government.
PML-N president Shah Ghulam Qadir and party secretary general Chaudhry Tariq Farooq have figured prominently in discussions over the prime ministership, while the party leadership has been holding consultations over the shape of the administration.
The election of the speaker and deputy speaker is expected to precede the choice of leader of the House.
For the PML-N, these contests should be considerably easier than winning public confidence in a region emerging from months of protests, disrupted elections and political confrontation.
Monday nevertheless offered Muzaffarabad a brief moment of political theatre before those larger questions returned.
For all the elaborate machinery surrounding an election, politics sometimes ends in wonderfully primitive arithmetic. Zobia Khurshid Raja and Riffat Abid each persuaded five legislators to vote for them, leaving neither ahead and neither behind; the ballot box could separate them no further, so a coin was summoned to finish the job.
In a territory where politicians routinely insist that every vote counts, Monday supplied a mischievous amendment to the old democratic maxim.
Sometimes, after every vote has been counted, it also matters which way the coin falls.
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