by Fazal Ali Saadi
As the Gilgit-Baltistan Assembly elections approaches, the familiar theatrics of Pakistan’s ruling parties have descended on the region once again. What is normally a tranquil, the mountainous territory has been transformed into yet another arena for the cynical power struggle of the Pakistani political parties. Streets and bazaars are draped in party flags, while candidates compete in making the tallest promises of roads, jobs, subsidies, development schemes, and the ever-vague “access to power.” Voters, long accustomed to this ritual, are being courted as if the only problem is a lack of government generosity, not a lack of constitutional rights.
But this election is not a genuine test of democracy. It is a managed exercise that exposes how little democracy actually means for a people who vote regularly yet remain permanently deprived of constitutional, democratic and fundamental rights.
Gilgit-Baltistan has no constitution, no representation in Pakistan’s parliament, and despite decades of elections, no path to provincial status or internal autonomy under the UN resolutions. For the ruling parties, elections in the region serve merely as a cheap legitimacy festival, not a genuine transfer of sovereignty.
After a delay caused by winter conditions, the Election Commission of Gilgit-Baltistan has scheduled polling for the GB Assembly on June 7, 2026. More than 958,000 voters—including 454,700 women—will elect 24 general members, who will then choose six women and three technocrats for the reserved seats.
On paper, this appears as representation. In reality, the assembly lacks control over important subjects such as defence, foreign policy, taxation, or even final legislative authority. These matters remain firmly in Islamabad’s hands. Elections without substantive power are not democracy; they are a photo ops for authoritarian rule.
What is critically missing from the electioneering is any serious debate over Gilgit-Baltistan’s status. Instead of constitutional reform, voters are offered development schemes that depend on the federal patrons’ whims. Instead of citizenship equality, they are offered party flags. The ruling class parties—the PML-N the PPP—have historically used GB as a testing ground for electoral engineering, while the military establishment monitors political dissent that could disrupt the region’s stability.
Hence calling the 2026 election a “test of democracy” would be unfair as it will not lead to meaningful self-rule, fiscal control, or constitutional integration. Since none of those are on the table, the election is better understood as a pacification ritual. The real test would be whether GB’s people could vote on their own permanent status.
That contradiction defines politics in the region. People vote in Gilgit-Baltistan, yet they do not have representation in Pakistan’s parliament and other constitutional bodies like NFC and CCI. Governed through orders, fiscal decisions, and administrative arrangements shaped by Islamabad, they are denied the full political rights of a province. Their land, water, minerals, glaciers, tourism economy and strategic geography are central to Pakistan’s future, yet they have no voice in national decision-making.
That’s why the election must be judged by a higher standard than which party forms the next government in Gilgit-Baltistan. The real question is whether the next Assembly will merely maintain the status quo or confront the structural marginalisation that has long defined Gilgit-Baltistan’s relationship with Pakistan.
How long can a region be asked to vote without being granted full constitutional recognition?
The region has seen elected governments before. Since the 2009 Empowerment and Self Governance Order, elections were held in 2009, 2015 and 2020 — each accompanied by promises of empowerment. Yet the central question remains unresolved: how long can a region be asked to vote without being granted full constitutional recognition?
This democratic deficit has real consequences. Ambiguous constitutional status fragments accountability. Local representatives are blamed for failures beyond their control, while federal authorities through the bureaucracy exercise influence without direct electoral accountability to local people and their representatives. Bureaucratic structures remain powerful, and development priorities are often imposed from above. Local demands are filtered through party hierarchies in Islamabad rather than negotiated through a fully empowered provincial framework. The result is a democracy weakened before the first ballot is cast.
Voters know the pattern all too well. Leaders of Pakistan’s mainstream parties descend on Gilgit-Baltistan during election season. They arrive with motorcades, speeches and carefully staged affection for the mountains and their people. They praise the region’s beauty, bravery, hospitality and strategic importance. They speak of rights, development and empowerment. But once the votes are counted, the leaders and their promises dissolve into the background. They return to Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar or Karachi. The embedded journalists pack up their cameras and leave. The pledges, so vivid on the stump, fade into bureaucratic files. For years afterward, Gilgit-Baltistan is treated as a distant afterthought: useful in speeches, valuable on maps, attractive in tourism brochures, but rarely central to national policy. The region continues to wait for a recognition it has long been denied.
The seasonal politics has shattered public trust.
This seasonal politics has shattered public trust. If Pakistan’s mainstream parties and their local chapters want Gilgit-Baltistan’s votes, they must show up long after the ballots are counted. They must raise G-B’s constitutional issue in Parliament, fight for its fiscal rights during every budget debate, and on other forums defend its land when there is no rally to win, and walk into disaster-struck valleys when no cameras are rolling. Local people don’t need your occasional sympathy. They demand unwavering representation.
The coming election also occurs in a changed political landscape, but the pattern is familiar. In 2020, PTI did not win Gilgit-Baltistan through an organic party mandate. Instead, electables and independent candidates were hauled into the party in power at Islamabad, forming a government through post-election alignment with Islamabad’s ruling order rather than ideological loyalty. The 2023 disqualification of former chief minister Khalid Khurshid, the subsequent government under Haji Gulbar Khan, and further realignments only reinforced this perception. For many citizens, it reaffirmed an old lesson: in Gilgit-Baltistan, votes matter, but power’s final shape is decided after the ballots are counted – by electables, independents, defections and elite bargaining.
Such actions dangerously erode public trust, especially in a region with troubled history. Another election yielding nothing more than a government of convenience. The next Assembly must derive its legitimacy not only from numerical majorities but from the integrity of the process. Parties must respect the mandate they seek; candidates must clearly articulate their programmes. The Election Commission must ensure transparency. Caretaker authorities refrain from using state resources, transfers, postings or development promises to tilt the playing field. Above all, voters must be free to choose without pressure from patronage networks, sectarian mobilisation or administrative influence.
This election must address Gilgit-Baltistan’s real anxieties. Women make up nearly half the electorate, yet their presence on general seats remains minimal. Reserved seats are no substitute for full participation, especially when women bear the heaviest burdens in education, health, agriculture, household survival, and climate stress. Any party that treats them as mere vote banks isn’t serious about democracy.
The youth question is equally urgent. Young people are educated, connected, and politically aware but increasingly frustrated. Tourism, land values, and outside interest in local resources grow, while unemployment, weak universities, and scarce dignified work do not. They are asked to celebrate development that arrives without them as owners, planners, or beneficiaries.
Tourism exposes this contradiction. Gilgit-Baltistan has become the face of Pakistan’s mountain tourism economy. Its lakes, valleys, glaciers and peaks are sold to the world. But unregulated tourism is strains fragile ecosystems, local cultures, water supplies and land markets. The next government must decide whether tourism will enrich local communities or turn them into spectators in their own homeland.
Climate change makes this question existential. Glacial lake outburst floods, landslides, water stress and extreme weather are no longer warnings. They are lived realities across Hunza, Ghizer, Skardu, Ghanche, Astore, Diamer and other districts. Yet climate policy is written in Islamabad, with mountain communities treated as victims, not decision-makers. Roads, hospitals, bridges, schools, and power systems cannot be planned as if the mountains were stable. They are not.
Across GB, anxieties over ownership, land, communal rights, minerals, tourism investment are growing. Land is not mere property. It is identity, livelihood, inheritance and collective security.
Then there is the land question. Across GB, anxieties over ownership, state land, communal rights, minerals, tourism investment are growing. Land is not mere property. It is identity, livelihood, inheritance and collective security. Any development model that separates people from land will breed resistance, not prosperity.
This is where political parties must be tested. It is easy to promise jobs, roads and subsidies. It is harder to state a clear position on constitutional status, fiscal autonomy, local government, land rights, climate adaptation, women’s participation, youth employment, education, health and resource governance.
This is where parties must be tested. Promising jobs and roads is easy. Stating clear positions on constitutional status, land rights, minerals, climate adaptation, women’s participation, youth employment, and resource governance is what democracy demands.
Gilgit-Baltistan doesn’t need manifestos copied from Islamabad. It needs a mountain-specific social contract which must begin with constitutional dignity. The local people defend Pakistan’s frontiers, host strategic corridors, preserve glaciers, attract tourism and endure climate disasters, yet remain politically unrecognised. The isn’t a symbolic luxury. Constitutional status shapes rights, budgets, courts, representation, ownership and accountability.
This contract must also include empowered local government which is missing in GB since 2005. For too long, development has been centralised through departments, contractors, party brokers and bureaucrats. Villages and towns need functioning local institutions to manage sanitation, water, roads, waste, schools, tourism management and disaster response. Without local government, democracy remains distant.
Voters don’t need manifestos. They need answers of the questions about constitutional status, not promise, but deliver, protection of land being taken from locals, traded, climate adaptation plan, creation of jobs for youth, real empowerment of women beyond reserved seats, regulating tourism, revival of a genuine local government system, turning the Assembly from a debating club into a battleground for change. They should ask federalist party leaders an even simpler question: “will you return after the election?”
Gilgit-Baltistan stands at a difficult moment. Its geography has made it strategic. Its beauty has made it marketable. Its glaciers have made it globally relevant. Its people have made it ‘resilient’. But resilience is not a substitute for rights.
The coming election can either reproduce the old pattern or mark a shift toward a politics rooted in dignity, representation and local ownership. GB does not need another election that merely changes faces. It does not need political tourists who arrive for votes and disappear after victory. It needs an election that changes the terms of power — and a politics that listens after the ballots are counted.
Fazal Saadi, hailing from Ishkoman, is a development practitioner and researcher interested in understanding development-induced challenges of poverty and inequality.
The High Asia Herald is a member of High Asia Media Group — a window to High Asia and Central Asia