The Supreme Court (SC) recently dismissed several petitions contesting the 2013 elections for various deficiencies. Interestingly just before the 2013 elections the SC ordered the defective electoral rolls to be corrected, because of time constraints the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) was instructed to go ahead with the elections, verification of voters being mandated for…
Dear Readers, Pakistan-Afghanistan relations have largely remained estranged for a number of reasons. With a hostile India to the East that consistently threatens and tries to intimidate Pakistan, another irredentist neighbor will not be in Pakistan’s interest. Pakistan is aware that it’s prime security interest in Afghanistan remains in having a friendly government in Kabul…
Dear Readers, Because of the political and economic standoff since early August between PTI, PAT and the ruling PML(N) in Islamabad, the government was rendered almost inactive for some time. When PAT leader Dr. Tahirul Qadri recently announced ending his dharna in Islamabad, lmran Khan displayed no such intention and vowed to continue his sit-in…
To obtain power politicians tend to make a lot of promises. Most of them can hardly be kept, in a feudal society populism is simply a means to an end. A gullible populace can be faulted however for being taken for a ride again and again, and mostly by the same lot. For all its…
Smashing more than half a dozen vehicles parked around the Minhaj ul Quran Secretariat on June 17 in Model Town Lahore under the rather benign patronage of the Punjab Police, the man who perpetrated the vandalism refuses to go away from the public eye. Ahsan Rana’s blog says that with 10,000 plus downloads of a…
Most politicians can be economical with the truth even at the best times. With Khursheed Shah shedding crocodile tears in the Joint Session of the National Assembly about the PM buckling under pressure from the Army and the resultant threat to “democracy”, Mian Sahib crossed the failsafe line that an awakened public is now increasingly…
A man starts yelling “fire, fire” in a movie theatre, the stampede towards the exits results in injuries (even deaths) among the cinemagoers. Restraining or punishing the man would technically violate his freedom of speech, allowing such “freedom” would result in injuries and deaths to innocent bystanders, what should be the logical course of justice?…
The Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri show, or as my friend Ejaz Haider puts it, the “Lucky Irani Circus”, finally made it to where they wanted to be in the first place and where the Mian Nawaz Sharif regime did not want them at any time, at the “D Square” in front of Parliament….
Historically progressive, Pakistan’s bourgeoisie has compromised with imperialism and feudal/tribal elements, with almost all political parties in Pakistan run like feudal estates. The basic ingredient of any functioning democracy, the present form of elections has reduced Parliament to a mere ritual-like exercise with those elected considering power a free licence to loot, plunder and oppress…
The bankruptcy of our policies has put us under pressure internationally from disparate forces with vested interest. Domestically this only force-multiplies the effect of the constant attack by the forces of evil, their appetite for loot and plunder not yet satiated after more than half a century. The recent set of political, economic and diplomatic…
