Ishtiaq Ahmed

On February 22, 2013 I bid goodbye to Aakar Patel who had taken great care of me in Bangalore. Delhi was my next destination. Coming to the Indian capital is the closest I can ever be to Lahore in India with Amritsar a photo-finish second, or, perhaps it is the other way around. Delhi is […]

Ultimately the economic or material base of a society determines its politics and other societal forms and manifestations. Most certainly this adage is as true today as it was in the past, and nobody put it better than Bulleh Shah: Panj rukan Islam de te cheyaan tukk/Cheyaan jai na hovey te panje jaande mukk. (Islam […]

I suspended my series on my recent seven-week lecture tour of India to cover the May 2013 Pakistan election. It also gave me a chance to do some book reviews. It is time to resume the Indian series. On February 5, 2013, I bid farewell to my Initiatives of Change family at the Asia Plateau, […]

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s stand on peace and friendship between India and Pakistan has always impressed me. During his second stint as prime minister he met his Indian counterpart, Inder Kumar Gujral, at Male in May 1997, and both agreed to work for peace. Later, he and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee signed the Lahore […]

The publication of a massive 9062-page, 10-volume work, India-Pakistan Relations, 1947-2007: A Documentary Study by Avtar Singh Bhasin, who retired after a three-decade long career in the Indian External Ministry, is a work of outstanding merit produced with a passion and devotion that would elicit respect and admiration from anyone who has worked with the […]

Mian Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) won most votes and seats in the May 11, 2013 Pakistan general election. Partly this derives from the first-past-the-post system that favours the big, established parties. The counter-argument that Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) would produce an upset was popular among the media ‘analysts’. That the Pakistan People’s […]

Hopefully when this article appears on Sunday morning, May 12, 2013, Pakistan would, despite the reign of terror let loose by the Taliban on the very idea of democracy, and especially on some parties, have completed the election process, and a result should be in, or very soon. Whosoever wins a majority or most seats […]

The death of more than 400 workers, mostly women, in Bangladesh as a result of a garment factory building collapsing has rudely reminded us that millions of human beings work under the most atrocious conditions. International companies with famous brand names want clothes produced as cheaply as possible. This they achieve through entrepreneurs in the […]

In these troubled times when the moral authority of the ruling class of Pakistan has touched the nadir, it should not be surprising that questions are being raised what went wrong, how and why. Answers to these questions will not be easy to find and may take a long time to be formulated by historians […]

In today’s column, I shall delineate the humanist tradition of Punjab as bequeathed to us by our sages, sufis and gurus. I define humanism simply as a worldview that recognises the equal worth of all human beings irrespective of the incidents of race, religion, sect, language and other such attributes. Such a standpoint is premised […]