Awn Chaudhry: Biography, Career from Imran Khan’s Aide to Minister of State, and the NA-128 Dispute (2026)
Awn Chaudhry was one of Imran Khan's closest aides, was pushed out of the PTI in 2021 and is now a member of the National Assembly for the Istehkam-e-Pakistan Party and Minister of State for Overseas Pakistanis. This plain-English profile covers his rise, his break with the PTI and the disputed 2024 result in Lahore.
About this article: It was prepared with the help of AI tools from public sources and is being reviewed by our editors. If you spot an error, please let us know so that we can correct it.
⚡ The short answer
Awn Chaudhry, whose full name is Mohammad Awn Saqlain, is a politician from Lahore. For years he was Imran Khan’s personal aide. He fell out with the PTI in 2021, joined the group around Jahangir Tareen and helped found the Istehkam-e-Pakistan Party in 2023. He was declared the winner of NA-128 Lahore in February 2024, a result his opponent disputes. Since February 2025 he has been a Minister of State, with the portfolio of Overseas Pakistanis.
- ✅ Born on 10 April 1970, according to his public biography
- ✅ Member of the National Assembly for NA-128 Lahore-XII; took the oath on 29 February 2024
- ✅ Adviser to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on tourism and sports, 2022 to 2023
- ⚖️ His 2024 win was challenged by the PTI-backed candidate; the outcome of the petition was not found
Who is Awn Chaudhry?
Here is the simplest way to understand him. For most of a decade, wherever Imran Khan went, Awn Chaudhry was a step behind him.
He carried the files, managed the diary, arranged the meetings and stood at the edge of the photographs. He was the kind of aide every political leader has and the public rarely notices.
Then, in 2021, he was pushed out. He crossed to the other side, and the knowledge he carried with him made him useful to Imran Khan’s opponents. Today he sits in the government that keeps his former boss in prison.
Awn Chaudhry’s career is a study in proximity. He rose because he was close to one powerful man, and he rose again because he had been.
Background
He belongs to Lahore. His National Assembly profile gives his father’s name as Allah Buksh. His public biography gives his date of birth as 10 April 1970.
His family is in politics too. A brother sat in the Punjab Assembly for the PTI and was among the members who broke with the party in 2022.
No reliable source read for this article gives his education, so we leave it out.
The aide
He attached himself to Imran Khan in the years when the PTI was still a small party, and he stayed through its rise.
His role was personal as much as political. He acted as the leader’s secretary and coordinator. He was present at private occasions as well as public ones. When Imran Khan married Bushra Bibi in early 2018, he was one of the witnesses.
What does a political secretary do?
| Task | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| The diary | Decides who gets to see the leader, and when |
| The message | Carries instructions from the leader to party officials, and complaints back |
| The road | Travels with the leader to every rally and meeting |
| The secrets | Knows who called, who visited and what was promised |
It is a post without rank and with great influence. Whoever controls access to a leader holds a kind of power that elected office-holders envy. It is also a precarious post. The secretary has no base of his own. If the leader’s favour is withdrawn, there is nothing left.
In the Punjab government, 2018 to 2021
After the PTI’s victory in 2018 he was not given a seat or a ministry. He was sent to Lahore.
- From 2018 he was adviser to the Chief Minister of Punjab, Usman Buzdar.
- From December 2020 he was the Chief Minister’s chief coordinator.
Buzdar was a little-known politician whom Imran Khan had chosen to run the country’s largest province. Many in the party believed that trusted men from Islamabad were placed around him to keep an eye on things. Awn Chaudhry was seen as one of them.
The break
His fall was tied to that of another man: Jahangir Tareen.
Tareen was a wealthy businessman, the PTI’s chief financier and, for years, Imran Khan’s closest political partner. In 2020 a government inquiry into a sudden rise in sugar prices named sugar mill owners, Tareen among them. Cases followed. Tareen said he was being victimised by rivals inside the government. A group of the party’s members of the assemblies gathered around him.
Awn Chaudhry sided with Tareen.
- He was asked to resign from his Punjab post.
- In mid-2021 he was removed from office and then from the party.
He has said since that he was dropped for refusing to abandon a friend. The party’s view was that he had joined a faction working against its government.
The sugar inquiry explained
Because so much followed from it, the episode deserves a closer look.
In the winter of 2019 to 2020 the price of sugar in Pakistan rose sharply. The Prime Minister ordered an inquiry. Its report, published in the spring of 2020, said that mill owners had been allowed to export sugar, had received public subsidies for doing so, and had then profited again when the shortage at home pushed prices up.
The mills named belonged to families from every major party. The largest single beneficiary named was a group owned by Jahangir Tareen, the Prime Minister’s own closest ally.
Imran Khan presented the report as proof that he would spare nobody. Tareen said the figures were misleading and that he was being singled out by rivals in the Prime Minister’s office. Investigators registered cases. Tareen went to court and rallied members of the assemblies to his side.
By 2021 the governing party had a faction inside it of thirty or more members who answered to Tareen and not to the Prime Minister. They did not leave the party. They simply waited. In 2022 their votes helped to end its governments in Islamabad and Lahore.
With the other side, 2022 to 2023
In April 2022 Imran Khan was removed as Prime Minister by a vote of no confidence. The Tareen group’s members in the Punjab Assembly helped to bring down the PTI’s provincial government soon afterwards.
The new Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, made Awn Chaudhry his adviser on tourism and sports. He held the post from April 2022 until the government’s term ended in August 2023.
A man who had spent years at Imran Khan’s side now sat at his successor’s cabinet table.
A witness in court
His closeness to Imran Khan’s private life had one more consequence. A case was brought alleging that the former Prime Minister’s 2018 marriage had not met the requirements of Islamic law about the waiting period after a divorce. As a witness to the marriage, he gave evidence.
A trial court convicted Imran Khan and Bushra Bibi in February 2024. An appeal court set the conviction aside and acquitted them in July 2024.
His role in that case is one reason the PTI’s supporters regard him with particular bitterness.
The IPP
After the unrest of 9 May 2023, dozens of PTI figures left the party. On 8 June 2023 Jahangir Tareen launched a new party to receive them: the Istehkam-e-Pakistan Party, or IPP. The name means “stability of Pakistan”.
Awn Chaudhry was one of its founders and became its additional secretary general. He sat beside several former PTI leaders at the press conferences where they announced that they were joining.
| The IPP in brief | |
|---|---|
| Launched | 8 June 2023 |
| Founder | Jahangir Tareen |
| Membership | Mostly former PTI office-holders |
| 2024 election | Won a handful of seats, helped by an understanding with the PML-N |
| Leadership after 2024 | Tareen lost his contests and left politics; Abdul Aleem Khan became the party’s head |
| Position | A junior partner in the federal coalition |
Critics called it a “king’s party”, assembled with official blessing to draw off the PTI’s leaders. Its founders said the country needed an end to confrontation.
NA-128: the disputed seat
In the election of 8 February 2024 he stood for the National Assembly from NA-128 Lahore-XII. The PML-N did not put up a candidate against him.
His main opponent was Salman Akram Raja, a well-known Supreme Court lawyer standing as an independent with the PTI’s backing.
| Awn Chaudhry | Salman Akram Raja | |
|---|---|---|
| Party | IPP, supported by the PML-N | Independent, backed by the PTI |
| Votes on the official result | 172,576 | 159,024 |
| Outcome | Declared the winner | Challenged the result |
What the challenger says
Salman Akram Raja said the counts from individual polling stations, on the forms known as Form 45, showed him well ahead, and that the consolidated result, on Form 47, did not match them. Journalists who had interviewed voters in the constituency before polling day had also expected a PTI win.
What happened next
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| February 2024 | The challenger goes to court. The Election Commission tells the Islamabad High Court that the notification of the result has been withdrawn |
| 22 February 2024 | The Election Commission restores the notification and tells the challenger to take his case to an election tribunal |
| 29 February 2024 | Awn Chaudhry takes the oath as a member of the National Assembly |
| Later in 2024 | An election tribunal calls for the full record of several Lahore constituencies, including NA-128 |
| 2025 to 2026 | No report of a final decision on the petition was found |
He says he won fairly. The Election Commission stands by the result. The challenger, who has since become the PTI’s secretary general, says the seat was taken from him.
⚠️ What this article does and does not say
NA-128 is one of the most disputed results of the 2024 election. This article reports the official figures, the challenger’s claim and the steps taken in court. It does not say who received more votes, because that is the question the election tribunal exists to answer, and no final answer was found.
✅ Key point: Form 45 and Form 47
Form 45 is the count from one polling station, signed by the presiding officer, with a copy for each candidate’s agent. Form 47 is the returning officer’s total for the whole constituency. In theory the second is simply the sum of the first. Most of the disputes of 2024 came down to a claim that the two did not match. Settling such a claim means opening the record and, if necessary, the ballot bags, which is slow work.
How slowly the tribunals move
His is not the only seat in this position.
After the February 2024 election, losing candidates filed hundreds of petitions. An independent election-monitoring group that tracks them reported that by January 2025, almost a year later, tribunals across the country had decided 112. In Punjab, the province with the most disputes, the nine tribunals had decided only 45 of 192, fewer than one in four.
The law says a petition should be decided within 180 days. Three things slowed the process: a long argument over which judges should sit on the tribunals, a change in the law allowing retired judges to be appointed, and the sheer volume of paper in each case.
For a sitting member, delay is a kind of victory. He keeps the seat, votes in the house and may hold office while the petition waits. For the challenger, a decision that comes in the fourth year of a five-year term is worth very little.
Minister of State
On 27 February 2025 the Prime Minister enlarged his cabinet. The coalition’s smaller partners received posts, and Awn Chaudhry was sworn in as a Minister of State.
His portfolio is Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development. He works under the federal minister for that subject.
What the job covers
| Area | What it involves |
|---|---|
| Workers going abroad | Licensing the agents who recruit them; agreements with countries that hire Pakistani labour |
| Workers already abroad | Welfare officers in embassies; help with disputes over wages; bringing home the bodies of those who die |
| Remittances | Schemes to encourage money to be sent through banks |
| Complaints at home | Property disputes and fraud cases affecting overseas families |
Roughly nine to ten million Pakistanis live abroad. The money they send home, more than 30 billion dollars a year in recent years, is the country’s largest source of foreign currency.
Press reports from 2026 show him meeting provincial governors and community delegations about the problems of expatriates.
💡 Tip: minister of state and coalition arithmetic
A government that depends on small parties must give them something. A full ministry is a large prize. A post of minister of state is a smaller one, and there can be many of them. When a cabinet suddenly grows, as it did in February 2025, the list of new ministers of state is a good guide to which allies the Prime Minister needed to keep happy.
What supporters and critics say
Supporters say he was loyal to a friend when it cost him his place, and that he has worked steadily for his new party. They say he knows how government works from the inside and is an energetic minister. They regard the election result as settled by the Election Commission.
Critics are harsh. PTI supporters call him a turncoat who used what he knew about his former leader’s private life against him. They regard his seat as stolen. More neutral observers note that he has never built a following of his own, and that each of his posts has come by appointment or arrangement.
Each view has merit. He did stand by Tareen at a cost. He has also gained from every change of fortune since. Whether voters in Lahore chose him is a matter still before a tribunal.
Words used in this article
| Term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Political secretary | A leader’s personal aide who manages access and messages |
| Chief coordinator | An appointed post linking a chief minister’s office with departments and the party |
| Adviser to the Prime Minister | An appointee who advises on one subject; need not be a member of Parliament |
| Minister of State | A junior minister |
| Seat adjustment | An agreement between parties not to contest against each other in chosen seats |
| Form 45 / Form 47 | The polling-station count and the constituency total |
| Election tribunal | A special court that hears challenges to election results |
| King’s party | A party believed to have been created or favoured by the establishment |
Timeline: Awn Chaudhry at a glance
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1970 | Born |
| 2010s | Serves as Imran Khan’s personal and political aide |
| 2018 | Witness to Imran Khan’s marriage; appointed adviser to the Chief Minister of Punjab |
| December 2020 | Becomes the Chief Minister’s chief coordinator |
| Mid-2021 | Removed from his post and from the PTI |
| April 2022 | Appointed adviser to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif |
| 8 June 2023 | Founding member of the IPP |
| August 2023 | His term as adviser ends |
| 8 February 2024 | Declared the winner in NA-128 Lahore |
| 29 February 2024 | Takes the oath |
| 27 February 2025 | Sworn in as Minister of State |
| August 2026 | Described in an official release as Minister of State for Overseas Pakistanis |
Why his story matters
- It shows how personal Pakistani politics is. A career can be built, lost and rebuilt on closeness to one man.
- It shows how the PTI came apart from within. The Tareen split of 2020 to 2021 began the process that the crackdown of 2023 completed.
- It shows what remains unsettled from 2024. More than two years after the election, the argument over seats like his has not been closed.
To follow the events that brought him into government, read our explainer on the vote of no confidence and on the National Assembly.
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Frequently asked questions
❓ Who is Awn Chaudhry?
He is a Lahore politician who was Imran Khan’s personal aide, left the PTI in 2021, helped found the Istehkam-e-Pakistan Party and is now a member of the National Assembly and a Minister of State.
❓ What is Awn Chaudhry’s full name?
Mohammad Awn Saqlain, according to his National Assembly profile. His first name is also spelt Aun.
❓ Which constituency does Awn Chaudhry represent?
NA-128 Lahore-XII.
❓ Which party is Awn Chaudhry in?
The Istehkam-e-Pakistan Party (IPP), of which he is additional secretary general.
❓ Is Awn Chaudhry a minister?
He was sworn in as a Minister of State on 27 February 2025. An official release of August 2026 gives his portfolio as Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development.
❓ Why did Awn Chaudhry leave the PTI?
He sided with Jahangir Tareen when Tareen fell out with Imran Khan’s government, and was removed from his post and the party in 2021.
❓ Did Awn Chaudhry really win NA-128?
The official result gave him 172,576 votes to Salman Akram Raja’s 159,024. Salman Akram Raja disputes this and filed an election petition. No final decision was found for this article.
❓ What is Awn Chaudhry’s age?
His public biography gives his date of birth as 10 April 1970.
❓ Was Awn Chaudhry an adviser to Shehbaz Sharif?
Yes. He was adviser to the Prime Minister on tourism and sports from April 2022 to August 2023.
Sources
- National Assembly of Pakistan, member profile: Mr. Mohammad Awn Saqlain — read on 8 October 2026.
- Wikipedia, “Aun Chaudhry” — as last edited on 7 September 2026.
- Aaj English, “ECP restores notification of Awn Chaudhry’s victory” — 22 February 2024.
- Associated Press of Pakistan, “Notification regarding Aun Chaudhry’s victory withdrawn: IHC told” — February 2024.
- ARY News, “Salman Akram Raja challenges Aun Chaudhry’s election win in IHC”
- Free and Fair Election Network, “Election Tribunals: Sixth Update” — February 2025; figures on decided petitions.
- Daily Pakistan, “PML-N expands federal cabinet to 46 members with inclusion of coalition partners” — 27 February 2025.
- Press Information Department, press release naming him Minister of State for Overseas Pakistanis — 27 August 2026.
- Associated Press of Pakistan, “Governor Kundi, minister discuss issues of overseas Pakistanis from KP”
