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Aasim Sajjad AkhtarDawn |
NOT so long ago, America’s president effectively enjoyed the mantle of world leadership. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 had elevated the...
TO say that Punjab is Pakistan’s heartland is to state a simple fact. Even if one were to separate the Seraiki belt from the administrative unit...
MOB lynchings under the pretext of blasphemy have become commonplace. In exceptional circumstances, law enforcement officials intervene and take...
BEYOND sensational late-night arrests of opposition MNAs, impunity for abductors and unending intrigue, there is a remarkable degree of continuity and...
IT is not as if we have not been here before. Balochistan has bled for so long that the mainstream Pakistani consciousness has tuned it into the...
ANOTHER Aug 14 has passed by with familiar proclamations about the evil designs of the proverbial ‘foreign hand’. As usual, outside conspirators...
WORKING people in Pakistan are literally struggling to breathe. If they seek some relief from the heat by turning on a couple of fans and using a...
IT is August 2021. Pakistani spymasters, pro-establishment ideologues and then prime minister Imran Khan unanimously celebrate the re-conquest of...
ON Feb 8, a significant number of Pakistan’s people, mostly the young, threw out the selectors’ script and cast their vote for the PTI. Most knew...
ALMOST five months since one of the most manipulated general elections in our checkered history, there is an ominous quiet before yet another...
‘STABILISATION’ is the favourite word of mainstream economists. The IMF loves it, and has recently hinted that Pakistan’s economy has...
PAKISTAN is burning up. And so is much of its neighbourhood. The Indo-Gangetic plain, spanning the breadth of the subcontinent, is currently the...
IT has been 20 years since the iconic peasant movement on the Okara military farms reached its zenith. Having been intimately involved with the...
IT has been half a century since the humbling of the world’s mightiest military, the US army, by Vietnamese guerilla warriors. It was, by all...
NOT a day goes by in the land of the pure without disclosures of despicable acts against the most vulnerable. Sex crimes perpetrated by ‘learned’...
SOON after the Babri Masjid was demolished by Hindu nationalist mobs in December 1992, Fahmida Riaz wrote an epic poem entitled Tum bilkul hum jaise...
LONG before Pakistan’s latest hybrid regime imposed its unannounced ban on the social media site X, TikTok was shut down four times between 2020-21....
PAKISTAN is on fire, and not in a good way. Interrelated demographic, ecological and economic crises are escalating. The incoming government owes its...
FEB 8 has come and gone. The post-poll rigging and smoky backroom deals will carry on for some time. The frenzied wheeling and dealing will then give...
SIXTY years after it was created, Islamabad is still said to be 10 kilometres from Pakistan proper, an oasis of greenery, prosperity and technocracy...
PAKISTAN’S ethnic peripheries continue to burn. Working class households in peripheries and metropolitan areas alike continue to be strangulated by...
ELECTION season is when the bourgeois political class makes all sorts of promises and at the same time says nothing at all. Take, for example, the...
THERE is no single issue that clarifies one’s political position in Pakistan than the Baloch question. This was made brutally clear this past...
THE powers that be have declared that general elections will be held on Feb 8. Ask any seasoned observer, however, and they will tell you that there...