To draw the battle lines now
AN unspoken dispute stalks India’s Congress party. It may define the battle lines for the scattered opposition groups to align against a ferocious but not invincible right-wing assault on democracy.…
Xi’s corruption crackdown targets embattled finance sector
Xi Jinping’s crackdown on official corruption has ripped through a secretive missile force, the Communist Party elite, the national football team, and now risks hammering a finance industry already grappling…
Economic pragmatism vs ideological rigidity
Compare last week’s newspaper headlines with those from the 1990s and it would seem that little has changed in Pakistan’s economic circumstances. Currently, as in the 1990s, the country is…
Battle of rights and ideas
“The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that educator must himself be educated” (‘Theses on Feuerbach’, by Karl Marx)…
In an ideological wilderness
In the midst of all this political turmoil and some evocative October anniversaries, I feel obligated to begin with the tirade of Captain (r) Mohammad Safdar at the National Assembly…
Winning the battle of narratives
Initiatives taken by the government and various operations carried out by the security forces and law-enforcement agencies – who have rendered unparalleled sacrifices – have ostensibly broken the back of…
The decisive battle
Chairing a high-level security meeting in Lahore on Wednesday attended by all the Corps Commanders in the Punjab, the CoAS General Qamar Javed Bajwa announced the launching of "Radd-ul-Fasaad". Focused…
Battle for our heart and soul
The tragic events of this past Sunday are a stark reminder of how deep religious extremism has penetrated the country’s social fabric. The manhandling of religious evangelist Junaid Jamshed at…
The battle of Armageddon
The nineteenth century reformer, Jamal ad-Din Afghani (1838-1897), wrote, “Every Muslim is sick, and his only remedy is the Quran.” But to some writers in the west, notably the Irish…
A battle of ideologies
For a while now a debate has raged in development economics between the ‘bottom-up’ school (main protagonist: Bill Easterly) and the approach to the ‘top-down’ school (Jeffrey Sachs and the…
