Breaking up the herd
For decades, Pakistan’s blasphemy law has been blatantly misused in the country – to settle a petty dispute, to resolve a business rivalry, to take revenge from a neighbour over…
An ambassador of tolerance
The Pakistani nation has recently celebrated the 142th birthday of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah with great enthusiasm. The 111th founding day of the Muslim League, the political party he led…
Welcome to the Trump show
The world was watching and, no doubt, cringing. It would be easy to mock the four-day-long cavalcade of near lunacy that was the recently concluded Republican National Convention since, on…
Balance in the Gulf
The exhibition of pettiness and skulduggery within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in the last few days, combined with, essentially, the all-out war between Saudi Arabia and Iran over the…
Messages of peace
The Indian authorities have released several Pakistanis who were languishing in their jails. The group comprised fishermen and others, including a family that had mistakenly crossed the border. The Edhi…
Populism over pragmatism
Charles the First once said, “Democracy is the power of equal votes for unequal minds”. This saying now echoes across Europe after Britain decided to exit the European Union over…
Return of Nawaz Sharif
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has returned from the salubrious environment of the UK to the suffocatingly humid, energy-sapping climate of the country. Not that he would feel the change. The…
Aligarh’s response to the Raj
The war of Independence in 1857, in which all ethnic groups took active part, was the climax of upfront resistance to the British Raj. The passionate freedom fighters, however, could…
End of liberalism?
I have not been a liberal all of my adult life. As a student, I did not even know of the real differences between liberals and conservatives, beyond superficial lifestyle…
Does America deserve Trump?
As the US warms up for presidential elections next year, Donald Trump has become a household name in the Continental United States as well as abroad. The celebrity-cum-billionaire has been…
