An idea of justice on February 18, 2018On 15 February 2018 I had the privilege of visiting Sahiwal on the invitation of the Principal of Government College Sahiwal (established in 1946 as Government College Montgomery) Prof Dr Akhlaq Hussain. My friend Shafiq Butt of Punjab Lok Sujag and Zakria Khan facilitated the visit as they arranged for my first visit to Sahiwal […]
The truth about the partition of Punjab on February 6, 2018On February 1, 2018 history was finally made when a panel consisting of the leading lights of Pakistani academia met under the chairmanship of Vice-Chancellor Prof Dr Hassan Amir Shah of Government College University Lahore in the Fazl-e-Hussain Seminar Hall to discuss the second edition of my book, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling […]
A walk down familiar roads but in the wrong direction on January 29, 2018I belong to an old locality of Lahore – Mozang – where my ancestors on the paternal side have lived for as long as they could remember. In the Civil and Military Gazette of 1880 a news headline read: ‘A man dies of snakebite in Mozang a village two miles from Lahore’ . By the […]
Pakistan should act responsibly on January 19, 2018The fatwa against terrorism signed by the leading Islamic seminaries and scholars should be welcomed by us all. Terrorism has not frightened the alleged enemies of Islam, Muslims and Pakistan. On the contrary, one can see them joining ranks to isolate Pakistan. Even our great friend China has no interest in its investments being hijacked […]
Who is guilty? The individual or society? on January 15, 2018The horrific rape and murder of tiny Zainab in Kasur, the outburst of public anger and protest and the usual brutality of the police once again put into sharp relief the rotten nature of our society and our polity. As a social scientist I would like to draw attention to an inherent bias in our […]
Promises kept and broken — III on January 10, 2018In this concluding article in the series on the Objectives Resolution I shall examine the extent to which promises made to the Muslims and minorities of Pakistan have been kept and broken. Let me underscore with great emphasis that I consider the Objectives Resolution the correct and authentic representation of the idea of Pakistan. The […]
Sovereignty belongs to God — II on January 3, 2018The debate on the Objectives Resolution of 7 March 1949 clearly brought out the consensus among Muslims of all varieties their conviction that Islam and state were inseparable, and Pakistan had to function as an ideal state under the sovereignty of God. The Objectives resolution makes the following observations: ‘Whereas sovereignty over the entire universe […]
Rights of Muslims and minorities — I on December 28, 2017Pakistan was created in negation of secular principles of state and government, Religious nationalism, in sharp contrast to territorial nationalism, was the core argument of the two-nation theory on which a separate Pakistan for Muslims was justified and finally established in mid-August 1947. Mohammad Ali Jinnah gave different pledges to different sections: to the British […]
Jinnah’a multifarious pledges on December 23, 2017I was shocked to read Mr Yasser Latif Hamdani’s observation that, “The established position in academia belongs to Cambridge school which has long overturned these myths about partition of India that Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed seeks to perpetuate. Ever since the time of Anil Seal and Ayesha Jalal, there have been many perceptive historians like Joya […]
The story of Dr Uttam Chand Ahuja of Okara on December 22, 2017Professor Vinay Kumar and I had been emailing each other for a long time. He was very eager to tell me his story about what happened to his family in Okara in 1947. On 3 February 2005, he visited the famous medical centre, the Karolinska Institute in Solna, a suburb of Stockholm, to attend a […]