Raja Pervaiz Ashraf: Biography, Education, Prime Minister Years, Rental Power Cases and Role in 2026

Who is Raja Pervaiz Ashraf?

Here is the short version. Raja Pervaiz Ashraf never expected to be Prime Minister. He got the job in the middle of a crisis, kept it for nine months and handed over at the end of a full term. Nobody had done that last part before.

He is a party loyalist of the old kind. He lost three elections before he won one. He took on the most thankless ministry in the government during the worst power shortage the country had seen. He was then blamed for it, mocked with a nickname and dragged through the courts for a decade.

And yet he came back. Ten years after leaving the Prime Minister’s office he sat in the Speaker’s chair.

Raja Pervaiz Ashraf’s career is a lesson in endurance. He has been written off more than once, and each time he has returned to a high office.

Early life

He was born on 26 December 1950 in Sanghar, a district in the interior of Sindh, according to his public biography.

That birthplace surprises many people, because he is known as a Punjabi politician. The explanation is simple. His family belongs to Gujar Khan, a town in the Potohar plateau south-east of Rawalpindi. Like many families from that region, they held farmland in Sindh.

So he grew up with a foot in two provinces. He speaks Sindhi as well as Punjabi and Urdu. For a leader of the PPP, a party born in Sindh and long weak in Punjab, that was a useful gift.

His National Assembly profile gives his father’s name as Raja Sangar Khan.

Education

He graduated from the University of Sindh in 1970. The university is at Jamshoro, near Hyderabad, and is the oldest in the province.

His public biography says little about what he did in the years between university and politics. We do not fill that gap with guesses.

Three defeats, then a win

His path into Parliament was slow.

Those three defeats tell you something about the man and his district. Gujar Khan is in the north of Punjab, an area that supplies many soldiers to the army and usually leans towards the Muslim League. Winning there on a PPP ticket is hard work.

He kept at it. He also rose inside the party, becoming its secretary general, one of the top organisational posts.

Minister for Water and Power, 2008 to 2011

The PPP won the 2008 election, and Yousaf Raza Gillani became Prime Minister. Raja Pervaiz Ashraf was given the Ministry of Water and Power.

It was the hardest job in the cabinet. Pakistan was short of electricity by thousands of megawatts. Cities went without power for eight to twelve hours a day, villages for longer. Factories shut. People rioted.

He made a promise he could not keep. He said that power cuts would end by a fixed date. The date came and went, and the cuts grew worse. Opponents never let him forget it.

What were rental power plants?

His answer to the shortage was a policy that came to define his career.

Building a large power station takes years. The government wanted electricity in months. So it decided to rent small power plants, often mounted on barges or skids, from private companies. These were called rental power projects.

Critics in Parliament and in the press said the contracts were wasteful and that some of them were tainted. Two politicians took the matter to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s judgment

In March 2012 the Supreme Court declared the rental power contracts illegal. It ordered that they be cancelled and that the money be recovered. It also told the National Accountability Bureau to act against those responsible, including the former ministers who had overseen the policy.

By then he had left the ministry. He had been moved in a cabinet reshuffle in February 2011. But his name was now tied to the affair. The press gave him a nickname, “Rental Raja”, and it stuck.

He has always denied wrongdoing. His position, then and since, is that the policy was approved by the cabinet as a whole, that it followed a plan drawn up before his time and that he took no money.

How he became Prime Minister

In the summer of 2012 the government was thrown into crisis.

1. The Supreme Court had ordered Prime Minister Gillani to write to the authorities in Switzerland to reopen old cases against President Asif Ali Zardari.
2. Gillani refused. He said the President had immunity.
3. The court convicted him of contempt in April 2012.
4. On 19 June 2012 the court ruled that he was disqualified from Parliament and had ceased to be Prime Minister.

The PPP needed a new Prime Minister at once. Its first choice was another minister, Makhdoom Shahabuddin. But within hours of his nomination a court issued a warrant for him in a separate case. The party switched to its second name.

On 22 June 2012 the National Assembly elected Raja Pervaiz Ashraf.

Many people asked how a man facing questions over rental power could become Prime Minister. The party’s answer was that no court had convicted him of anything.

Nine months as Prime Minister

He led the government from June 2012 to March 2013. Four things marked those months.

The Swiss letter

The Supreme Court made the same demand of him that it had made of Gillani. This time the government found a way out. After weeks of drafting back and forth with the court, a letter was finally sent to the Swiss authorities in late 2012. The wording satisfied the judges and still asserted the President’s immunity. The long stand-off between the government and the court ended.

The arrest order

On 15 January 2013 the Supreme Court ordered his arrest in the rental power case, along with that of several others.

The timing was extraordinary. On that very day a huge sit-in led by the cleric Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri was camped in front of Parliament, demanding that the government go. The crowd cheered the news.

The arrest did not happen. The head of the accountability bureau told the court that the investigation was not complete and the evidence was not yet enough. He stayed in office.

Governor’s rule in Balochistan

In the same month, bombings in Quetta killed scores of people from the Hazara community. Families refused to bury their dead until the provincial government was removed. He flew to Quetta, met them and placed the province under governor’s rule.

Finishing the term

On 16 March 2013 the National Assembly completed its five-year term. That had never happened before under a civilian government in Pakistan. Earlier assemblies had been dissolved by presidents or swept away by coups.

A caretaker took over, an election was held, and power passed from one elected government to another. He was the Prime Minister who signed off on that handover.

The PPP’s two Prime Ministers, 2008 to 2013

The court cases

The PPP was routed in the 2013 election. He lost his own seat. The accountability bureau then filed a series of cases, called references, against him and others.

He was formally charged, or indicted, in January 2014. The trials moved slowly for years. Then, one after another, they ended in his favour.

In the Piranghaib case, Dawn reported that the judge found the bureau had not proved any charge of corruption and that the state had suffered no loss.

The bureau said it would appeal. In July 2020 it asked the Islamabad High Court to overturn the Sahiwal acquittal. The result of those appeals was not found for this article. So the fair summary is this: he has been acquitted by the trial court in each case decided so far, and it is not confirmed whether any appeal is still alive.

The return: Speaker of the National Assembly

He won back a seat in 2018. Then, in April 2022, politics turned again.

Imran Khan was removed as Prime Minister by a vote of no confidence. The Speaker, a member of Imran Khan’s party, resigned. The new coalition chose Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, and he was elected Speaker.

What does a Speaker do?

The Speaker chairs the National Assembly. He decides who may speak, rules on points of order and keeps order in the house. He also receives resignations from members and decides whether they are genuine.

That last duty became the heart of his term. More than a hundred members of Imran Khan’s party had resigned together. For months he declined to accept the resignations in bulk, saying each member must confirm it in person. Then, in early 2023, when those members hinted that they might return, he accepted the resignations in batches. The PTI called it bad faith. He said he had followed the rules.

He remained Speaker until the new assembly met in March 2024.

In the present assembly

In the election of 8 February 2024 he won NA-52 Rawalpindi-I, the Gujar Khan seat. He took the oath on 29 February 2024.

He holds no state office now. His role is in the party. He leads the PPP in Central Punjab, the region around Lahore where the party was once dominant and has been weak for a generation. Rebuilding it there is a hard task.

What he has said in 2026

• At a party convention in Lahore in July 2026, Dawn reported, he said the PPP would form the next government in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. He also urged the party’s coalition partners to choose their words with care.
• In August 2026, after polling in Azad Kashmir, he told a press conference that the vote had not been free or fair and that the party should think about rejecting the results. He said this was his personal view and that the party’s leadership would decide.

What supporters and critics say

Supporters call him steady, polite and loyal. He stood by the party in its worst years. He took a job nobody wanted in 2012 and got the government to the finish line. And the courts, in the end, cleared him.

Critics have a different list. They say the rental power policy wasted public money whoever profited from it, and that as minister he was responsible. They recall the broken promise on power cuts. As Speaker, the PTI says, he bent the rules on resignations to suit the government. And some say his rise owed more to loyalty than to ability.

Each view has merit. He was no reformer and never claimed to be. But a political system also needs people who can hold a coalition together under pressure, and he has done that more than once.

Words used in this article

Timeline: Raja Pervaiz Ashraf at a glance

Why his story matters

• It shows how a full term was finally completed. The 2013 handover set a pattern that has, with strain, held since.
• It shows the gap between accusation and proof. A nickname lasted twelve years. The charges behind it did not survive trial.
• It shows the value of patience in politics. Three lost elections, one lost seat and a decade in court did not end his career.

To see how a Prime Minister is elected and removed, read our explainers on the National Assembly and the vote of no confidence.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• National Assembly of Pakistan, member profile: Raja Pervez Ashraf — read on 8 October 2026.
• Wikipedia, “Raja Pervaiz Ashraf” — biography as last edited on 26 September 2026.
• Dawn, report on his acquittal in the Piranghaib rental power reference — 30 June 2020.
• ARY News, “Ex-premier Raja Pervez Ashraf gets clean chit in another graft case” — June 2020.
• The Express Tribune, “NAB challenges Ashraf’s acquittal” — July 2020.
• Dawn, “Parliament begins new PM election” — 22 June 2012.
• Dawn, report on the PPP workers’ convention in Lahore — July 2026.
• Minute Mirror, “Raja Pervaiz Ashraf urges PPP to boycott final AJK poll phase” — August 2026.