The ongoing farce and furore of the movements for azaadi (freedom) and independence, firstly in the shape of Qadri and Imran, and now exclusively of the Kaptaan (captain) on the airwaves are continuing to bewilder the ordinary people despite their being subjected to arduous and bruising socioeconomic crises. This uninterrupted melodrama of cyclical talks, confrontations […]
Myth of the investment cure
The most popular mantra amongst the political elite and the middle class intelligentsia these days for curing the ailing economy of Pakistan is the infusion of private investment, both foreign and local, along with the new economic strategy of public-private partnership. Everyone from the PTI to the Islamic parties, so-called secular parties, semi-religious right-wing Sharif […]
The withering SAARC
Thirty years since its inception, another South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Summit has ended in abject failure. Frosty ties between India and Pakistan clouded the summit. Millions have been squandered to keep this futile and deceptive alliance intact. The SAARC region hosts 23 percent of the world’s population and almost 44 percent of […]
Corporate plunder
The starkest contradiction of the present epoch is the grotesque inequality in which the vast majority of the human race is drenched: poverty, misery and deprivation in an era of plenty. Today, means of production and modern advanced technology have the capacity to produce much more than the total needs for a decent existence of […]
Pakistans murderous roads
In yet another tragedy, at least 60 people were killed, including 21 women and 19 children below the age of 14, and numerous injured following a collision between a passenger coach and a truck near Theri Bypass in Sindh’s Khairpur district on Tuesday. Only a week apart, a similar number of people were slaughtered in […]
Consequential events of November II
November 9th is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and later on the collapse of the Soviet Union. In China, the Deng faction of the Communist Party had already ushered in the process of the capitalist counterrevolution in 1978. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the regimes […]
Consequential events of November I
The gruesome incident in which a Christian couple was beaten to death and their bodies burnt in the brick kiln where they worked for allegedly desecrating a Quran in the town of Kot Radha Kishan, symptomises the malaise that is ripping apart the decayed social fabric. The victims were only identified by their first names, […]
Exploitative system of Capitalist system
The last few decades have seen the question of the environment pushed to the forefront on a world scale. The ‘green parties’ in Europe and donor-funded NGOs in the developing world have championed this ‘agenda’ predominantly. It is being recognised that capitalism has taken its toll on the earth’s environment, leading to unpredictable and cataclysmic […]
Malakand: lingering terror
It is often cited that the serene landscape of Malakand and Swat was freed from the despotic rule of the so-called Taliban under Sufi Mohammad and Mullah (Radio) Fazlullah’s Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariati Mohammadi (TNSM) almost five years ago. The stark reality is that the region is still under duress from the reactionary socio-cultural onslaught but this time […]
Pakistans Khanauri Sluice gate
There was a heart-wrenching story of mass suicides by Indian Punjabi farmers (7,000 until now) under the burden of unpaid debt of state and private lenders, in an Indian magazine (The Week, August 2014) some time ago. Besides the vast scale of human tragedy and stupendous official apathy, what was most striking was the fact […]