Party games
With thoughts beginning to turn towards an election that now lies just over six months away, the situation of our political parties is naturally something to be contemplated and, perhaps,…
The Sharifs and the religious right
Political alarm bells have begun to ring after the recent secondary dissection of the rightist vote bank into sectarian divisions after a period of 40 long years. It was in…
Religious politics after NA-120
The house and the last resting place of Syed Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), is located in Ichra, an area of Lahore that falls in the National Assembly…
The religious right in Sindh
Despite intellectual property rights, the internet has broken the monopoly over books, libraries, distances, university degrees etc which are not confined to a few individuals now – including in Sindh.…
Dreaming of one-party rule in India?
“All politics is local”, said American politician Tip O’Neill. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), nothing is local anymore. Writing for Aljazeera, Prof Apoorvanand Jha…
The party’s not yet over
After almost half a century, the PPP is still not over, as its detractors had wished, despite the party losing its shine and raison d’être. As a relic of the…
India’s Hindu cow mobs rule as religious debate rages
As a truck screeches to a halt on an Indian highway in the middle of the night, devout young Hindus armed with sticks scramble inside, searching for cows they consider…
Is the party over?
The political parties are jubilant for various reasons at the unofficial results of the local government elections held recently in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf wants us to believe that…
Is the PTI a tea party?
Some years ago, I found myself as the only woman on a planeload of PML-N men travelling from Quetta to Karachi. I was seated across the narrow aisle to Mian…
The Jamaat’s journey
The Jamaat-e-Islami, which used to be a mainstream religious political party of the 1970s, has gradually faded into political obscurity due to wrong policies. Once a formidable political group with…
