Haroon Mustafa Janjua

Lamenting inglorious history in the process of nation building is counterproductive but still the hallmark of Pakistan. Few realise that advocating various past eras on policy fronts is not critical scepticism but dismissive suspicion and lethargy. Pakistan has been surrounded by countless issues including, but not limited to, inadequate infrastructure, dearth of leadership, insufficient resources, […]

Environmental concerns need to be the linchpin of all development considerations on various levels. Major environmental issues currently confronting Pakistan include climate change, water, energy, pollution and waste management, salinity and water logging, irrigated agriculture, biodiversity and more that are too numerous to count. Pakistan, being one of the highly vulnerable countries to climate change […]

The decline of biodiversity is one of the primal challenges facing the world. Humans are directly dependent on biological diversity, which includes plant life, fresh water resources, marine life and species living in and around natural habitats.The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan contains diverse habitats that support a variety of flora and fauna. Ideally, every […]

It is a fact that the media in Pakistan depicts the gender bias in our rigorously patriarchal society. The enormous influence the media has on constituting social change is also incontestable. However, it seems increasingly otiose to rely on the media to bring forth any change in this regard as long as Pakistan’s leading newspapers […]

Sectarianism has a definite connotation to religion since it is about discrimination, or hatred arising from attaching importance to perceived differences between subdivisions within a group, such as between different denominations of a religion, class, regional or factions of a movement as opposed to actions that are generally against public interest or destructive in nature. […]

How long is the ‘Musharraf bashing saga’ to continue? There must be a limit to irrational hatred and self-serving accusations. Where is this aggression against the former president and army chief coming from? There are the following primary groups: military haters, extreme rightists who include terrorists, Taliban, al Qaeda and similar groups, people with personal […]

Women comprise more than 50 percent of the total population of Pakistan. However, on an average, the status of Pakistani women vis-à-vis men is one of systemic gender subordination. Although there have been attempts by the government and enlightened groups to elevate their status in society, nevertheless numerous Pakistani womenfolk, especially in the rural areas, […]

The Crisis States Research Centre defines a ‘failed state’ as a condition of ‘state collapse’, i.e. a state that can no longer perform its basic security and development functions and has no effective control over its territory and borders. The index’s ranks are based on 12 indicators of state vulnerability, four social, two economic and […]

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is an icon in the millennium old literature of Bengal. He was an educator, social reformer and philosopher, best known as a poet and a painter. Gitanjali is the best known selection of his poetry for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, and its English translation was […]

Patiala, the powerful princely state in eastern Punjab, ruled by Maharaja Yadavindra Singh, witnessed intense communal and gender violence against Muslims. On September 3, 1947, Sikhs decorated a special train with Pakistan flags and picked up thousands of Muslims under the pretext that they would be sent safely to Pakistan. To their utter shock, armed […]