A right royal mess
If anything has changed in Nawaz Sharif’s style of governance in his third term in office, surely it is for the worse. Not only has the government increasingly become a…
The ‘controversial’ judge
Who is Pakistan’s most controversial judge to date? The answer in nine out of ten cases is likely to be ‘Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry’, the recently retired chief justice of Pakistan.…
Privatisation or predation?
King Richard (aka the Lionheart) once declared, “I would have sold London if I could find a buyer”. London was spared; instead bishoprics were sold, gold and silver treasures of…
On the verge of mutiny
Predictably, the Punjab government’s ill-thought move to enhance the province’s counterterrorism capacity by sidelining the police has resulted in deep resentment within the force, especially the Police Service of Pakistan,…
Playing on the wrong pitch
Two noteworthy recent launching events have captured many of the frailties and complexities of the Pakistani discourse. If we can learn the valuable lessons available to us from them, both…
Our response to Dhaka
In 1994, a work-related training took me and my friend Zaffar Junejo to Bangladesh. After an extensive two-week field and classroom learning sessions at the Centre for Development Management, run…
Invitation diplomacy
Shahbaz’s Sharif’s meeting with Manmohan Singh in the Indian capital last Thursday was the second by a leading Pakistani official with the Indian prime minister in the three months that…
No room for diversity
Pakistan has become an excessively bigoted place. We suffer from striking levels of intolerance across ethnicities, sects, faiths and so much else that we now seem inclined to sacrifice human…
A rainbow over India
By most accounts reference to Turk-i-Shirazi, in an oft-quoted Hafiz verse, alludes to a good-looking lad, the Persian poet’s muse. Agar aa’n Turk-i-Shirazi bi dast aurad dil-i-mara; bi khaul-i-hindu yash…
Regulating the NGO sector
Economic development strategies in the last 50 years have been relatively successful in alleviating poverty and raising the living standards in developing countries. The Millennium Development Goal of poverty reduction…
