The opposition is trying to keep it together after rumours of differences in some of the more prominent parties that make up the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), but the main takeaway as far as anybody else particularly the government is concerned is that they are still firmly united on the number-one agenda of the movement; that is the resignation of the prime minister. That much is simple enough to understand. But the attitude of the…
Posts published in “Pak Media comment”
Former foreign and defence minister Khawaja Asif has formally joined the sizeable ranks of PML-N leaders and associates who have been under NAB probe over questionable wealth. Some of them are languishing in jails while others have been freed on bail after detentions spanning more than a year, in some cases. Asif was arrested — kidnapped, according to Maryam Nawaz — by a NAB team on Tuesday evening after he had come out of an…
Editorial in Dawn, December 31st, 2020AN internal crisis is brewing within the Pakistan Democratic Movement alliance and the days ahead call for some difficult decisions that will have far-reaching consequences. Even as they say they share a common democratic goal, the challenges for each opposition party in the PDM are quite different, as are the leadership’s individual positions on the political spectrum. The JUI-F, which has the least to lose, is taking the hard-line stance…
by Muhammad Anis & Zia Ur Rehman in the News, Dec 31, 2020KARACHI: Leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) on Wednesday agreed that the province’s population in the 2017 exercise was not documented correctly and demanded the federal government to conduct a fresh census in the province. A PPP delegation consisting of provincial minister Saeed Ghani, senior leaders Taj Haider and Waqar Mehdi met the MQM-P leaders at its…
The writer is a research fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore.In the last five years, Pakistan has remarkably turned around its fight against the twin threats of extremism and terrorism. The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2020 also acknowledged this fact. As per GTI 2020, the downward trajectory of terrorist incidents has resulted in a 90 percent decline in terrorism-related casualties. Furthermore, of the 37 terrorist groups active in Pakistan in 2015,…
The past week saw a new faction coming to the surface from within the cracks of JUI-F. The PDM alliance’s president Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman’s recent statements seemed to have taken many in his own party by surprise and dissent has followed. And on Tuesday, this culminated in the announcement of a JUI-Pakistan, headed by Maulana Muhammad Khan Sherani; splitting from the Fazl-led JUI-F. The effect that this will have on the party itself will be minimal,…
This year will likely never be forgotten, but the hope is that we remember it more for the lessons it taught us than the misery it wreaked upon the world. The year has been, almost all of it, dedicated to the nightmare that is the Covid-19 pandemic – with life as we knew it coming to a halt, major economies almost nearing collapse and people facing lockdowns which kept them inside their homes for months…
by Fahd Husain in Dawn, December 31st, 2020What do you do when the expected happens unexpectedly? Many in the PML-N are asking each other such a question a day after the PPP disclosed Pakistan’s worst kept secret that it would contest the by-elections and the Senate polls in the coming weeks and months. Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari — speaking at the conclusion of the party’s central executive committee meeting on Tuesday evening — said it as clearly…
Lately, I’ve stopped writing my regular OPED, given the extreme partisan single minded views generally expressed by readers and the absence of a pluralistic approach to a sane dialogue. Admittedly I do not subscribe to a ” on the one hand and on the other hand” type of journalist jugglerly to try and keep everyone happy, keep the money from my employers or media house flowing, but have very harsh, unvarnished and forthright views, untainted…
by Raza Habib Raja in The Express Tribune blogs, Dec 30, 2020The writer is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Maxwell School of Public Affairs, Syracuse University. .In 2019, while the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Maryam Nawaz was speaking at a huge rally in Mandi Bahauddin, a party stronghold, a Twitter trend, “#رنڈیاِنمنڈی” (Prostitute in Mandi) was becoming viral. The disgusting trend was thoroughly misogynistic and was being propagated by none other…
Is Pakistan too difficult to govern?: by Rana Jawad Asghar in The Express Tribune, Dec 31, 2020
The writer is an adjunct professer of epidemiology at the Universioty of NebraskaFrom popular and intellectual books, research essays and clueless TV analysts, everyone blames Pakistan, as it is too difficult to govern. But is it? Is Pakistan really ungovernable? Or are we making excuses for our rulers? This line of thinking came up when successive governments failed to live up to their fairytale pre-election promises. Instead of correcting the way they governed it was…