Talking to a Chinese dissident on September 16, 2017 Doctor Yang doesn’t look like a typical revolutionary. A diminutive, well-dressed man with an unassuming aura, he doesn’t fit the stereotype of an agitator. However, he has been a rebel at heart for a very long time. At the age of ten, he asked the local communist party leader why the fruits of liberalisation […]
Will it be third time lucky for Nawaz? on July 20, 2017 Sharif Exit 1: ‘I will not resign. I will not dissolve parliament and I will not take dictations from anybody’, thundered Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif while addressing the nation on TV and on radio in April, 1993. He also accused President Ghulam Ishaq Khan of hatching conspiracies against him and dared him to ‘test […]
Will it be third time lucky for Nawaz? on July 20, 2017 Sharif Exit 1: ‘I will not resign. I will not dissolve parliament and I will not take dictations from anybody’, thundered Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif while addressing the nation on TV and on radio in April, 1993. He also accused President Ghulam Ishaq Khan of hatching conspiracies against him and dared him to ‘test […]
Objectives Resolution II on July 5, 2017The Objectives Resolution acting as a precursor to the Islamisation of Pakistan continues to remain a matter of intense debate in our society today. Debates surrounding the Objectives Resolution when it was presented in the Assembly present a window into the minds of the people who framed the Resolution and subsequently the first Constitution of […]
Objectives Resolution I on July 2, 2017The ‘Objectives Resolution’ presented in Constituent Assembly of Pakistan during its fifth session in March 1949 has cast a long shadow over Pakistan’s constitutional and political history. The resolution has been made part of Pakistan’s constitutions on three different occasions. The official website of National Assembly of Pakistan refers to the resolution as the ‘grund […]
Manufacturing history on May 16, 2017The project of historical revisionism in Pakistan, with an ultimate aim to ‘Islamise the past’, has been going on since the foundation of the country. Following the secession of East Pakistan in 1971, a new Pakistan (with its own identity) came into being. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto appointed leading historians to write a history for this […]
A tale of two countries on May 8, 2017It has been 70 years since the Partition of India. The separation was an ugly affair, with both sides holding grievances against each other. After living side by side for more than a thousand years, Hindus and Muslims were declared separate nations by the All India Muslim League which used religion as the primary reason […]
Erdogan’s Turkey resembles Zia’s Pakistan on April 30, 2017In the decade following 9/11, Turkey had emerged as a shining beacon among Muslim-majority countries with its curious mix of the ancient and the modern. Democracy was working well in the country and its economy was booming without a dependence on oil money. The former ‘sick man of Europe’ was doing rather well at that […]