LAHORE: Lieutenant General (retd) Nigar Johar Khan, the first woman to reach three-star rank in Pakistan’s army, has been named health adviser in the technocratic council now running Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, handing one of the most prominent military doctors responsibility for the hospitals of her home province at a moment of deep political strain.
She is one of 11 advisers appointed to assist Governor Faisal Karim Kundi after President Asif Ali Zardari proclaimed an emergency and governor’s rule on Sunday, suspending the elected government of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) under Articles 232 and 234 of the Constitution.
Announcing the line-up, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar described the members as experienced professionals chosen on merit. Others include former Federal Board of Revenue chairman Tariq Mahmood Pasha for finance and National Assembly member Samar Haroon Bilour for information.
For many in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the choice of health adviser carries a personal resonance. Nigar Johar was born in Panj Pir village in Swabi district to a Pashtun family and has long been held up there as proof of how far a girl from a small town in the province can go.
Her rise was steady and, at each step, unprecedented. She graduated from the Army Medical College in 1985 and spent more than three decades in the Army Medical Corps. In 2015 she became the first woman deputy commandant of the Combined Military Hospital in Rawalpindi, and in 2017 the third woman ever promoted to major general.
On June 30, 2020, the ISPR announced that she had been promoted to lieutenant general and appointed surgeon general, the first woman in either post. At the time she was commandant of the Pak-Emirates Military Hospital in Rawalpindi. Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa later appointed her as the first woman Colonel Commandant of the Army Medical Corps.
She holds the Hilal-i-Imtiaz (Military) and Tamgha-i-Imtiaz (Military), a master’s degree in public health and a diploma in medical administration. She also trained as a national instructor in hospital preparedness for emergencies. Her career was dramatised in the 2021 television film Ek Hai Nigar, in which actress Mahira Khan played her.
That background is what the federal government is betting on. According to the official profile released with the council, she has extensive experience in hospital administration and emergency care and helped manage hospital capacity, safety measures and vaccination during the Covid-19 pandemic.
She inherits a province where public hospitals are stretched by militancy, displacement and a shortage of specialists. Federal officials cited 1,232 militant attacks nationwide in the first nine months of the year, most of them in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, and the new administration has set up a separate secretariat for 12 districts worst affected by terrorism.
Her portfolio was pulled into controversy within two days. Social media posts claimed that ending or investigating the Sehat Card Plus health insurance scheme was among her first priorities. On Tuesday the information adviser, Samar Haroon Bilour, dismissed the claims as fake, saying no decision to discontinue the programme had been taken, and also rejected a circulating notification about the head of the province’s teaching hospital boards.
The scheme, launched under the PTI and extended to nearly every family in the province, is among the party’s most popular achievements. Any move against it would be read politically, a risk the new administration appears keen to avoid.
Nigar Johar has not made a public statement since her appointment. As a retired officer, she takes the role as a civilian adviser.
The council itself remains contested. PTI chairman Gohar Ali Khan called the takeover undemocratic and said peace could not be built by weakening provincial autonomy. Secretary-General Salman Akram Raja said the measures were aimed at weakening the party rather than tackling insecurity, and that the PTI leaders did not know where former chief minister Sohail Afridi was being held. The interior ministry later said Afridi had been detained.
The party also asked why the whole province had been placed under federal control when, by its account, the security threat was concentrated in 12 districts. A petition challenging the proclamation was filed in the Peshawar High Court on Monday.
The government says the step was forced on it. The federal cabinet accused the provincial administration of deliberately disengaging from the fight against militancy, and Governor Kundi urged unity to open what he called a new chapter in the province’s development.
Amnesty International warned that the measures could undermine fundamental rights and widen the military’s role, and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan had earlier cautioned that emergency rule could deepen political tension. Internet monitor NetBlocks reported disruption to connectivity in parts of the province after the proclamation.
The arrangement is not open-ended. Because the president acted without a resolution from the provincial assembly, both houses of Parliament must approve the emergency by October 21. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has been placed under governor’s rule before, in 1975 and 1994, and the debate over whether the province should be singled out has run for weeks.
For Johar the window may be short, and the ground politically mined. Her record suggests she is used to being the first to try.
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