Asma Jahangir’s victory in the Supreme Court Bar Association elections is a momentous event in the country’s political and legal landscape. Even the worst of her critics grudgingly admit that her principled stance has remained consistent in a country where intellectual honesty and integrity are in short supply. More importantly, her reasoned approach to recent [...]
How many of us remember the three-year-old girl who was kidnapped, raped and thrown in a sewer, or the 13-year-old boy from Korangi who was gang-raped on Eid-ul-Fitr last year, or the five-year-old girl who was raped, strangled and later recovered from a garbage dump at a ground in Gizri? According to the Human Rights [...]
Walking around with D.S. the other day, the mood was low. Taliban bombers had just attacked Baba Farid shrine in the latest of the ongoing attacks against such places – Ahdullah Shah Ghazi a few weeks ago, Data Darbar earlier. I was downtrodden, shuffling my feet in the dust, my head hanging in despair. “If [...]
Ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani is a favourite punching bag of far-right-wing political types. With regards to the case of Dr Aafia, the first thing out of the mouths of these people was that it was a set up devised by the PPP and orchestrated by Haqqani who they say is a puppet of [...]
I was talking to my friend M. recently about the strategic dialogues and after he went on for some time about a particular point, I had a feeling of déjà vu. I couldn’t shake that feeling which stayed with me for the rest of the day. It was only after I had eaten my evening [...]
by Nadeem Paracha Source: Dawn.com I don’t know what the situation would be once this column goes into print, but a TV channel’s all out, constant outburst against Zardari certainly seems something that has very little to do with democracy or the notion of free media. If the PPP is to be believed, this channel [...]
by Raza Rumi What are we fighting for? What are we aiming at? It is not theocracy, not for a theocratic state – Mohammad Ali Jinnah Sixty-three years after the country was created, the term secular remains the most contested and misunderstood political concept in Pakistan. Mention the word secular and there is a litany [...]
The following article appeared in Huffington Post on 21 October 2010. The author Aparna Pande is a research fellow at the Hudson Institute. The third round of the US-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue is being held this week in Washington, D.C., in the backdrop of domestic political crises, economic woes, terrorist attacks and rumors about an ever-impending [...]
A report in the American New York Times says that the US is going to cut funding and aid for certain troops that were involved in the deaths of some civilians. At first, this might seem like the US cutting support for the military, but since it comes during the same week that the Americans [...]
You have to hand it to the Chief Justice – he may have walked right up to the edge of the cliff, but he stopped before pushing the country into the abyss. Announcing a verdict on his suo moto hearing on the constitutionality of the 18th Amendment to the constitution (a bizarre bit of self-referential [...]