I am writing this after being perturbed by yet another disturbing incident involving the assassination of three members of the Hindu community at the hands of a gang of tribal murderers in my home district of Shikarpur. Among the killed were a doctor, a paramedic and a grocer, while another doctor was grievously injured and […]
Beyond the security paradigm
Three inferences can be drawn from the recent Ankara Conference on Afghanistan: one, no matter how many powerful nations may congregate to resolve a conflict, they cannot succeed unless the main party to the conflict, even a non-state actor — the Taliban — agrees; two, geostrategic goals cannot be achieved without accommodating regional interests; three, […]
Three questions to three national leaders
One, to Mian Nawaz Sharif: how would the ouster of President Zardari guarantee both a change for the better and strengthening of democracy if you relied on street power rather than on the constitutional method of changing the government? Leave aside the issue of the PML-N’s capacity to oust a powerful president who enjoys the […]
Outsourcing political issues to the court
Where judicial activism has admirably exposed the executive’s excesses and transgressions, it has also spurred the politicians to conveniently bring matters to the Supreme Court (SC) that are political and best suited to be taken up in parliament. As a result, the SC is becoming more of a political arena than the apex court of […]
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf in focus
Imran Khan, the chief of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), is seen by many as an alternative leader to the much tried PPP and PML-N leaderships, though nothing substantial has come up yet to give a hint of such a possibility in the near future, given the narrow base of his party and the poor performance in […]
The PPP in focus
Last week, I analysed the PML-N’s politics using the metaphors of ‘dots of hope’ and ‘morbid haze’ to signify hope and despondency respectively. Today, I will focus on the PPP’s politics using the same metaphors, though building a seamless narrative of the PPP is rather unrealistic because unlike the Sharifs-run PML-N, the existing PPP has […]
The PML-N in focus
True, neither is politics pure ethics, nor are politicians stony ideologues wedded to altruism and social good. Our politics has rather acquired a range of multifaceted masks used by various cults to perform the rites of worship to the goddesses of wealth and power. There exist no boundaries between the right and the left or […]
The killing spectrum
The mythological Greek god Cronus devoured his children to avoid being overthrown by them. He got away with that because he was a god, but no modern state being both a creature of the collective ‘will’ of its citizens and a vehicle of civilisation and human glory can get away with allowing its citizens to […]
The alibis galore
Benjamin Disraeli, a British prime minister, would say there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics. I share the same scepticism as regards the gory charts and figures depicting the horrible state of our economy and society, and more so in this country where statistics has been as much a con job […]
Nationalism or national policy?
Though our economic team is busy mending the torn deal with the IMF and the military and political leaderships are busy with their US counterparts to reset the button of the Pak-US cooperation shut by the Abbottabad operation, a well-calibrated nationalist fever has touched new heights. The joint parliamentary resolution talks of cutting off NATO/ISAF […]