PML-N Keeps Bahawalpur Seat as Channar Wins NA-168 By-Election, PTI and JI Sit Out

Malik Munir Iqbal Channar of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz won the NA-168 Bahawalpur-V by-election on September 27, 2026, securing 79,306 votes against 42,623 for independent runner-up Wali Dad Cheema — a margin of 36,683 votes that kept the seat inside the Channar family for a second consecutive term.

A seat contested by only two names

The by-election was called after PML-N's Malik Muhammad Iqbal Channar, who had represented NA-168 since the 2024 general election, died in August 2026. The party turned to his son, Munir Channar, to defend the constituency, a common practice in Pakistani politics when a sitting legislator dies in office and a family successor is fielded to preserve local political capital built up over years of constituency service.

What set this contest apart was who chose not to run. Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and Jamaat-i-Islami both boycotted the poll outright, while the Pakistan Peoples Party went further and withdrew its own candidate mid-campaign to formally back Channar instead. That left Cheema, contesting as an independent, as the only candidate offering voters an alternative to the PML-N nominee — a dynamic that helps explain the size of Channar's margin as much as any groundswell of support for him personally.

How the vote played out

Election Commission officials said polling across the constituency's 292 stations was largely peaceful, serving a registered electorate of 483,143. The commission reported routine complaints of the kind that accompany most by-elections — voters turned away over paperwork, slow-moving queues — and one brief disruption at a single polling station after a scuffle broke out among party workers, which officials said was contained without further incident or a suspension of voting.

Turnout in the by-election, as is typical for Pakistani by-polls held outside a general election cycle, fell well short of what NA-168 saw in 2024, a pattern local election-watchers attribute to the absence of a genuine multi-party contest rather than to any single administrative failure.

Why PTI and JI stayed out

Neither party detailed a single, specific reason for boycotting NA-168, but the decision fits a broader pattern this autumn. PTI has spent much of September 2026 focused on street mobilisation rather than the ballot box, including a planned Islamabad march that the party postponed to October 4 after the federal government imposed Section 144 orders and heavy security costs on the capital. A party consumed by organising and defending a national protest movement, and facing the kind of security-related restrictions that have also fed into talk of governor's rule being floated for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, had limited organisational bandwidth to mount a serious by-election campaign in a Punjab constituency where PML-N already held a strong institutional advantage.

Jamaat-i-Islami's absence is harder to read as strategic calculation and more consistent with the party's generally limited electoral footprint in Bahawalpur, where it has not historically been competitive against PML-N's rural network of biradari and patronage ties.

What the result signals

A lopsided win in a seat the winning party already held, against a single independent challenger, is not by itself a strong signal of PML-N's national standing — the contest was never going to be close once PTI and JI stepped aside and PPP threw its weight behind Channar. What it does confirm is that PML-N's organisational machine in southern Punjab remains intact and capable of turning out roughly the same coalition of voters that elected the elder Channar in 2024, and that the PPP-PML-N coalition arrangement governing at the centre extends, at least in this instance, to cooperation in by-elections rather than competition between the two parties.

The bigger contest to watch is not this seat but whether PTI's boycott strategy — skipping unfavourable by-elections while devoting its resources to street mobilisation — holds up as a sustainable approach, or whether it cedes ground the party will find harder to win back the longer it sits out contests it might otherwise use to test its post-2024 organisational strength in Punjab.

Build Better Pakistan's Politics Desk covers Pakistan's electoral contests and party realignments as results come in.