The ECP under fire
The ECP is under fire from all sides. Parliamentarians are angry because their matriculation and graduation degrees are being challenged by the ECP with a view to disqualifying them from…
Politics minus culture
The extended exercise to select a caretaker prime minister has shown that the price Pakistan is paying for its lack of a culture of democratic politics is much greater than…
The insolence of office
One thing is certain: Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘To be or not be’ could not have been written by a committee. It would have taken hours of wrangling before any committee agreed…
Institutional pillage
`Fiscal Neanderthals`. This is how a friend used to describe the finance and FBR bureaucracy and their parliamentary `handlers` after each bout of resistance to tax reform and the introduction…
The decade after
As President Barack Obama started out on his journey to the Middle East, Iraqis were marking the tenth anniversary of the invasion of their country — an invasion that was…
Shattered dreams
Apart from being the day of the Lahore Resolution, March 23 has, and should have, another significance for us. On that day, in 1956, the country, hitherto governed under the…
Mirrors shown by India and UK! Articles 62, 63: Don’t falter Fakhru Bhai! 180 million are with you!
The hue and cry over Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan never appears to quite die down. It rises in tandem in noise…
Undermining the elections
In our own little world of feudal-colonial-authoritarian traditions, the aspirations for democratic values and institutions are evenly matched by a discomfort with both values and institutions. How deep is that…
Continuing uncertainties
Politicians attribute the outgoing regime's completion of its term to the longest-ever period of 'consensus' politics in Pakistan's history. Just one measure of what that consensus delivered is, that in…
Bangladesh & 1971 syndrome
Bangladesh is again plunging itself into another phase of political turmoil and violence. The decision by the Dhaka-based International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) to award capital punishment to two key leaders…
