Pakistan: the apartheid hub on January 4, 2014Following Nelson Mandela’s death last month, many a Pakistani politician — past and present — has been dubbed ‘our Mandela’. While all juxtapositions were respectively incongruous on their own unique scale of absurdity, what takes the cake is the inability to perceive the irony that anyone in Pakistan can have anything to do with anti-apartheid […]
Jinnah, Bhutto and the legacy of intolerance on December 21, 2013The raison d’être of Pakistan’s creation in 1947 was religious intolerance. The much touted Two Nation Theory smacked all commonalities between Hindus and Muslims of United India out of the South Asian ballpark and defined the two communities as being so dissimilar that they could not exist together as one nation, despite having done precisely […]
IJT a sardonic joke? on December 7, 2013The Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaba (IJT), the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), has metamorphosed into a bit of a joke in recent times — one that is more sardonic than funny. The IJT resorts to violence ostensibly to safeguard their much touted ideology of peace; vie to safeguard women’s integrity by harassing them into conforming to […]
The pipeline puzzle on November 23, 2013The pipeline gods clearly do not support the creation of an energy sharing pipeline web in South Asia, which would knock down two pretty nasty birds with one ingenious stone: the energy shortfall and regional security concerns. The pivot of this web linking Central Asia with South East Asia would have to be Pakistan, where […]