Archive for February, 2013

By Xari Jalil –  Traffic accidents claimed more lives in Lahore last year than terrorist attacks in the whole of Punjab Umar* a young student was killed in May last year leaving behind a trail of mental scars for the mourning family. Riding on his motorbike on Lahore’s main Canal Road, Umar had been speeding […]

By Umar Aziz Khan – Not central to the politics, yet fascinating in its own right, is the science of sizing up crowds and political rallies Since it’s bad form to speak ill of the recently deceased, one resists the impulse to point out the sins that the late Jamaat-e-Islami Amir Qazi Hussein Ahmed has […]

By Fahd Husain – Men, women and children braved four bitterly cold nights of the capital under the sky to register a message: Improve the system Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri swept on to the Pakistani political landscape like a tropical hurricane, hit landfall in Islamabad, and dissipated after taking a toll on the government. But did he […]

By Ali Arqam – The shocking killing of polio aid workers and the subsequent pullout of UN agencies have taken Pakistan back to Square One The uncertainties of Pakistan’s political history continue to dog the present. Even as the Pakistan People’s Party-led coalition government moves towards completing its five-year term, sceptics worry that an external […]

By Kamran Yousaf –  The sabre-rattling before a quiet return to damage-control was manifest in variables from bunkers set up by India to wagging the dog to deflect attention from domestic issues It was undoubtedly the worst crisis between Pakistan and India since the November 2008 Mumbai attacks. The recent skirmishes between the armies of […]

By Irfan Bukhari Q&A with Dr Farooq Sattar, Minister for Overseas Pakistanis and Deputy Convener of the MQM’s Rabita Committee What do you say about the fact that only your party has opposed the court’s order for delimitation of constituencies? This says a lot about the conduct of other parties. MQM’s objection is principally that […]

Why, does, then it seem so hollow? Reams and reams of column inches and television space have been used up — and that, no doubt, will continue to be the fare in the coming weeks — to determine the Q phenomenon. Weeks into his ‘clarion call’ at Minar-e-Pakistan for the powers-that-be to purge a rotten […]

Ali Arqam: The remarkable protests by the Shia community and its sympathisers may have led to a pyrrhic victory that empowers the agents of destruction It took almost three days for thousands of Shia protesters, mostly those of Hazaras descent and their supporters from other communities, not to mention political parties across the country, to […]

My younger daughter, who’s just six-and-a-half, placed a bet with her older sibling, who’s all of eight-and-a-half, and won. The upstart had wagered that Imran Khan will not join the Qadri long march. I consoled the older one, saying even I had suspected he would! You could say, with some conviction, that this was the […]

By Injila Baqir Zeeshan –  Shake off that winter stupor and let the world know hibernation’s over Once upon a time, we longed for winters in the agonizing, never-ending summer days. Come winter and in the evenings, friends and families gathered around a warm hearth, talking contentedly, munching on roasted honeyed peanuts, holding hot cups […]