The incident came while PM Shehbaz was concluding his speech at the inaugural ceremony of the refurbishment project of Units 5 and 6 of the Mangla Dam Hydroelectric Power Plant, carried out with the support of the United States Agency for International Development.

“Sit down, no later. Please. I will talk to you. Please listen to me. [We] will talk to you Mr Prime Minister,” he consistently said and tried to stop AJK PM Sardar Tanveer Ilyas, who rose from his seat to say something, from interrupting his speech. Though it was inaudible Ilyas was expressing his concerns with the premier.

Ilyas, who belongs to the PTI, became the 14th prime minister of AJK in an election boycotted by the combined opposition in April.

On October 3, officials were left red-faced when PM Shehbaz refused to launch a flood relief assistance dashboard after finding inadequacies in it. The primary reason for Shehbaz’s anger was the design of the dashboard that according to him was not being updated in real-time.

“If real-time information doesn’t arrive in this then it’s of no use. Then we are wasting each other’s time. I’m not going to inaugurate this today,” he said an official said that data from the meteorological department was not yet integrated with the dashboard.

“This should be trashed,” he said and described it as a “joke”. “I’m not negating your effort but this is not the dashboard we all imagined. This is a stationary thing in which you fill in figures.”