Hindutva Personified on March 20, 2017 Yogi Adityanath, the new chief minister of India’s Uttar Pradesh state, is a popular priest and a powerful politician. He is also Hindutva personified. Adityanath is given to polarizing and divisive rhetoric, and he’s been accused of numerous inflammatory acts. These include, as chronicled by Indian Express, leading a “purification drive” to convert Christians […]
A dangerous new phase of militancy on February 20, 2017ISIS has claimed last Thursday’s massacre at Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine-the sickening culmination of a horribly bloody week in Pakistan that featured attacks in all four provinces and three major urban centers over just four days. This isn’t the first time ISIS has taken credit for an attack in Pakistan. It claimed assaults on a […]
India-Pakistan tensions: reflections of an ignorant interloper on October 6, 2016Truth, as the famous saying goes, is the first casualty of war. And yet this hasn’t stopped observers in both India and Pakistan from claiming to know the absolute truth about what happened on the morning of September 29, 2016. In India, many insist, as the government and military claim, that Indian forces staged a […]
Modis Kashmir conundrum on August 1, 2016This past April, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Jammu and Kashmir, the disputed state administered by India but claimed by Pakistan. He sought to strike a conciliatory tone in the restive, Muslim-majority region, where residents resent the constant presence and heavy-handed actions of Indian security forces, and where some want to become independent […]
Corruptions destabilising effects in Afghanistan on May 17, 2016Corruption is often associated with damage to state institutions and national economies due to the improper use of money. Yet in countries convulsed by conflict and violence, corruption also poses clear and present dangers to security. For proof, look no further than war-torn Afghanistan, indisputably one of the world’s most corrupt countries. Here, state corruption […]
Squandered progress in Pakistan on April 10, 2016Encouraging things are happening in Pakistan, but an enabling environment for extremism and other problems within society threaten this very real progress. Several years ago, a Pakistani economist lamented the lack of tower cranes in Pakistani cities — an absence, he said, that signified urban underdevelopment. In contrast, during a recent trip to Islamabad and […]
Will Lahore monstrosity be a wake-up call? on April 4, 2016Back in December 2014, Taliban terrorists attacked a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing 151 people, most of them students. It was the deadliest attack in Pakistan’s terrorism-tortured history, and prompted some Pakistanis to describe it as their 9/11. National leaders, meanwhile, described the massacre as a turning point in the nation’s approach to terrorism. They […]
Terror in Lahore: Pakistans toughest test on April 1, 2016On March 27, Easter Sunday, militants attacked Lahore’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal park, killing at least 72 people — many of them women and children — and wounding several hundred more. It was the deadliest attack in Pakistan since the December 2014 school massacre in Peshawar. Unlike the Peshawar attack that targeted an educational centre, Easter Sunday’s senseless […]
Terror in Lahore: Pakistans toughest test on April 1, 2016On March 27, Easter Sunday, militants attacked Lahore’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal park, killing at least 72 people — many of them women and children — and wounding several hundred more. It was the deadliest attack in Pakistan since the December 2014 school massacre in Peshawar. Unlike the Peshawar attack that targeted an educational centre, Easter Sunday’s senseless […]