Category: Notes from Pakistan

The blog – Notes From Pakistan – started last year (2012) in August. It has yet to see a whole year completed. However, I feel fortunate enough that without any publicity and promotional campaigns, it has been received well. Thousands of seekers, from abroad as well as from Pakistan, visited and read various posts.

I hope they found what they sought for and what brought them here!

Many thanks to all the readers who came to the Notes From Pakistan!

Hope they will keep coming and I promise to be true to the mission and values of the Blog!

Now after the 9^thgeneral elections, there is much lure and a sort of euphoria among the intelligentsia even beyond Pakistan to dub the results as unprecedented, historic, revolutionary, and what not. In addition, a revived belief in populism is gaining strength. This needs to be clearly analyzed and understood because we as members of civil society ought to be aware of correctly recognizing and meeting our responsibility. That’s my part of euphoria.

It is being argued that the mandate that PPP, PML (N), and ANP have got would have been weightier had the elections been free and

This picture was published by The Express Tribune on April 18, 2013:

The event has not been taken notice of. The same series of events happened earlier and ignored when finally Lal Masjid Operation became a necessity.

Is the same crisis brewing again, who knows!

See a previous post on Lal Masjid: Echoing Lal Masjid

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The Charter of Liberty responds to the Charter of Democracy issued by Pakistan Muslim League (N) and Pakistan Peoples Party and signed by their respective leaders and former Prime Ministers of Pakistan Mian Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. The 70-page document presents a critique of the Charter of Democracy and is an independent Charter of Liberty also. It seeks to present a solution to the myriad problems and unimaginable sufferings faced by the ordinary people of Pakistan to achieve freedom and prosperity for all its individual citizens.

The Charter says that the charge-sheet against the political parties is not different from the one they make

(Calvin Coolidge, 1872-1933)

It was in January 2007 that a letter appeared in some newspapers. Its writer was a former cricketer. He was part of the national cricket team which toured India in 1952-1953. He also received an award from the president for his services to the game of cricket. He had a heart-rending story to relate: An engineer by profession, he spent a good part of his life in Middle East. On coming back to Pakistan, besides his family dwelling, he built a house in DHA, Lahore, with an intention to give it on rent to meet their daily living expenses out of the rental income.

But as it happens, the tenant did not pay the rent for many years and he had to knock at the doors of the courts to seek justice. After five years’ tiring litigation,

Hence, I think I should give only the links to such news items and of course from such newspapers which I happen to see.

[Roznama Express, March 31, 2013]

—–

[Roznama Express, April

[Barry Goldwater, American Politician and Senator, 1909-1998]

  

It is said that every government is a perfect target for criticism. But interestingly this time in Pakistan though the Pakistan Peoples Party government is under heavy fire and of course it must be and even if outside government it should remain so; however, what should be the real target is Pakistan Muslim League (N). This article is an attempt at highlighting that point.

As for PPP’s politics both before and after February 18 elections and through the events that unfolded within the last 7 months, it is established beyond doubt that PPP is as usual on a collusion course with the elitist set-up, and is just continuing the policies of

Gaza City: Police in Hamas-ruled Gaza have started grabbing young men with long or gel-styled spiky hair off the streets, bundling them into jeeps, mocking them and shaving their heads, two of those targeted and a rights group said Sunday. It is the latest sign that they are imposing their strict practices on the population. The crackdown began last week, and two of those targeted told The Associated Press said they were rounded up in separate sweeps in Gaza City included more than two dozen young men. – AP

[The News, April 9, 2013]

See the previous post: Talibanand Hamas – the same ilk? – 1

It’s just a co-incidence that the following article, which probably first time talks of the state of the Rule of Law in Pakistan, was completed on February 10, 2007. I realized the fact later.

This article was carried by The News in its edition of Political Economy on March 18, 2007 with a different title, The State of Misrule. Then, Business Recorder published it in two parts on March 24, and 25, 2007, without

[Nafisa Shah, PPP MNA]

Lately in Pakistan, politics, politicians, political parties and their supporters have become an antithesis of whatever we associate with the name of morality. But the way this truth manifests itself under the present Pakistan Peoples Party government is dangerously alarming.

We know our given world is amoral, and it is we who try to make it morally meaningful. The physical and botanical world is absolutely beyond any moral apprehension. The zoological world shows some crude or not so crude signs of actions which may appear as morally motivated, but sure they are not. Taking care of each other, or of those who