Raja Muhammad Zulqarnain Khan

Raja Muhammad Zulqarnain Khan (15 March 1936 to 7 November 2026) was a Kashmiri politician who served as President of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) from 25 August 2006 to 25 August 2011. Across a public life that began in 1960 and ran for more than six decades, he was a union council chairman, a member of the AJK Legislative Assembly, a minister in several governments, a member of the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Council and, finally, the region's constitutional head of state. He died on Saturday 7 November 2026, aged 90, and the AJK government declared a day of mourning and a state funeral.

He came from a well known Rajput family of the Bhimber area, whose ancestral home was at Dhamawah near Kasguma (also written Kasgama or Kasmah). His father, Khan Bahadur Raja Muhammad Afzal Khan, held senior posts in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, including the home (interior), education and revenue portfolios, and was regarded as a confidant of Maharaja Hari Singh. After the creation of Pakistan his father served as Commissioner of Lahore. The family claimed royal ancestry as Rajas of Chibh (Bhimber). Raja Zulqarnain was educated in Srinagar, New Delhi and Lahore, and studied French.

His political career began in 1960 alongside the Kashmiri leader Khurshid Hasan Khurshid (K. H. Khurshid). When Khurshid founded the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation League, Raja Zulqarnain became its first secretary general in 1962. In 1967 he won local government elections and became chairman of the union councils of Kasguma and Kalri, and two years later he received his first ministerial responsibility in the AJK government.

In 1975, in what reports describe as the region's first parliamentary elections, he was elected to the AJK Legislative Assembly from the Samahni constituency of Bhimber. He returned to the assembly in 1985 and 1991. Under Prime Minister Sardar Sikandar Hayat Khan, from 1985 to 1990, he held portfolios including finance, planning and development, health and revenue, and after 1991 he served as finance and planning and development minister in the government of Sardar Abdul Qayyum Khan. He became one of the senior figures of the All Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference. In 1996 he was elected to the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Council, serving until July 2001, and he also worked as an adviser to the council chairman.

After the Muslim Conference won the July 2006 elections, the party put him forward for the presidency. On 27 July 2006 he was elected President of AJK with 40 votes, against eight for the Pakistan Peoples Party candidate Sardar Qamar Zaman, and he took office on 25 August 2006, succeeding General Muhammad Anwar Khan. His five year term was one of the most unstable periods in AJK politics, with Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan, Sardar Muhammad Yaqoob Khan and Raja Muhammad Farooq Haider Khan all serving as prime minister amid repeated no confidence motions. Reconstruction after the devastating 2005 earthquake and the resettlement of families affected by the raising of Mangla Dam were major issues of the time. In October 2008 he flagged off the first trucks to cross the Line of Control at the Chakan da Bagh crossing near Rawalakot, welcoming cross LoC trade as a confidence building measure that could help resolve the Kashmir dispute peacefully. As president he also served as chancellor of public universities in the region, and the AJK Assembly speaker credited him with a role in establishing Mirpur University of Science and Technology (MUST). He completed his term on 25 August 2011 and was succeeded by Sardar Muhammad Yaqoob Khan.

His later years were shadowed by the rental power case. In January 2016 the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) arrested his son Raja Babar Ali Zulqarnain in connection with the rental power projects investigation, and a NAB team searching the family home in Mirpur was involved in a scuffle in which a deputy director was injured. In April 2019 NAB raided his Rawalpindi residence with arrest warrants, alleging kickbacks in the rental power project. The sources reviewed for this profile do not report a conviction of Raja Zulqarnain himself.

He remained an influential figure in Bhimber politics. He supported Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf candidates in the 2021 AJK elections, and in 2026, after meeting a senior Pakistan Muslim League (N) delegation, he announced that he and his family were joining PML-N, with his son Raja Babar Ali Zulqarnain formally joining at a rally in May 2026.

He died on 7 November 2026 after what one tribute described as a brief illness. President Asif Ali Zardari, Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar, National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, AJK President Najeeb Naqi Khan, AJK Prime Minister Syed Iftikhar Ali Gillani and AJK Assembly Speaker Chaudhry Tariq Farooq were among those who paid tribute. The AJK government declared one day of mourning on 8 November 2026, with flags at half mast, and announced that funeral prayers would be held at 11am that day in his native area of Kasguma in Bhimber district, where he was to be buried with full state honours. His cause of death has not been made public.

Note on dates: most obituaries (Samaa, 24 News) and an IDSA reference book give his birth date as 15 March 1936, consistent with his reported age of 90. Aaj News gave 15 March 1933, and BBC Urdu in 2006 described him as 73 and born in Jammu.