Chaudhary Muhammad Ashraf

Chaudhary Muhammad Ashraf was a Pakistani politician from Sahiwal who sat in the National Assembly for the Pakistan Muslim League (N) and was known as a longtime associate of Nawaz Sharif. He died on 25 September 2026 at the age of 90. Family sources said his funeral prayer would be offered the next morning at Masjid Shuhada in Farid Town, Sahiwal, and Pakistani television and online outlets carried the news the same day.

Ashraf was born on 20 October 1935. He came from Sahiwal District in Punjab and trained as a lawyer, later serving as a member of the Pakistan Bar Council. That legal path mattered for the committee work he would later do in Islamabad. His early national campaigns did not succeed: he ran for the National Assembly from Sahiwal-II for the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) in 2002, taking 38,207 votes, and for the Pakistan Democratic Party in 2008, taking 33,110 votes, finishing behind other candidates in both contests. Those runs kept him visible in local electoral politics before his breakthrough with the PML-N.

He was elected to the National Assembly as a PML-N candidate from Constituency NA-161 (Sahiwal-II) in the 2013 general election, receiving 94,012 votes and defeating a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf rival. He was re-elected from the successor seat NA-148 (Sahiwal-II) in 2018 and served until August 2023. During his parliamentary years he held the role of parliamentary secretary for education and chaired the National Assembly Standing Committee on Law and Justice, work that matched his legal background and his reputation as a party loyalist from southern Punjab. Obituary notices after his death also described him as having represented the PML-N in the assembly across a longer span of contests, underlining how closely his name was tied to Sahiwal's PML-N organisation.

After his death, Pakistani media described him as a veteran PML-N figure closely tied to Nawaz Sharif and to Sahiwal's political life. National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq and party colleagues were among those who expressed grief and recalled his parliamentary and social service. A specific medical cause of death was not detailed in the first public reports. He is remembered as a Sahiwal representative who carried the PML-N banner through National Assembly terms from 2013 to 2023 after years of earlier campaigns, and as a lawyer who brought that training into the chamber's law and justice work.