A judge in the eye of the storm on June 11, 2019As the nation worried about the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement and the inflationary crisis in the wake of the International Monetary Fund deal, the government has managed to pull another rabbit out of its hat. A reference has been filed with the Supreme Judicial Council against Justice Qazi Faez Isa of the Supreme Court of Pakistan […]
Silence between the Notes sheds lights on separation and despair on June 9, 2019As is evident from the title of the book, it is a rare anthology of the poems on the subject of the Partition. It is a monumental work. It is compiled by Aftab Husain and Sarita Jenamani. Both of them also substantially contributed to the book by adding four poems of them as well as […]
Prime minister’s advisers and special assistants on May 18, 2019The idea of a representative democracy, pithily narrated by Abraham Lincoln as “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, runs throughout the constitutional fabric of Pakistan since 1973. The fathers of the Constitution lay down in its preamble: “The state shall exercise its powers and authority through the chosen representatives of the […]
Our foreign economic rulers on May 7, 2019Some news channels were running a ticker that the prime minister had sent packing Tariq Bajwa, the governor of the State Bank of Pakistan. Others were reporting that pressure was being ramped up on the governor to tender his resignation. Others still said he had dug his heels and was refusing to bow down to […]
Slips of the tongue on April 30, 2019“To err is human; to forgive, divine.” All people commit sins and make mistakes. God forgives them, and people are acting in a godlike (divine) way when they forgive.” When the young Alexander Pope famously wrote these lines in a didactic poem entitled An Essay on Criticism as far back as the 17th century, he […]
A comedy of errors on April 24, 2019It all started with breaking news. Two private news channels reported that Asad Umar, the federal finance minister, would soon get his marching orders. The rumour mills went overboard. The information minister denied the authenticity of the report in so many words. Asad Umar himself rebuffed it in categorical terms. Notices were subsequently served on […]
High court practice on April 22, 2019Justice hurried is justice crushed and buried, so goes the saying. There is no gainsaying that Article 37(d) of the Constitution lays down that inexpensive and expeditious justice is to be meted out to the litigants. Be that as it may, by no stretch of imagination does ‘expeditious’ mean bypassing the substantial and procedural due […]
Naya Pakistan: promises and delivery on April 5, 2019Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf contested the 2018 general elections under its banner for change. Its manifesto promised to eradicate corruption and recover the plundered monies from foreign bank accounts where they were alleged to have been kept. It said the rupee would be strengthened and investors from around the world persuaded to invest in Pakistan. It said […]
Jacinda Ardern: a face of change on March 28, 2019It is Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, who has become the first drop of rain. It is she who has thrown her weight behind the Muslims in the most devastating times of their lives. A gauntlet was thrown down to her by a ruthless and cold-blooded terrorist, who brutally sprayed the Muslims […]
Criminal justice: expensive and grindingly slow on March 18, 2019Before analysing, dissecting and discussing the highly controversial policy announced by the National Judicial (Policy Making) Committee(NJPMC) on 11th of March 2019, which have kicked a hornets’ nest amongst the legal fraternity, inviting opprobrium, and rightly so and will open a can of worms for the litigants ) in respect of the jurisdiction conferred by […]