11 Pakistanis becoming part of cellular community every minute

Every minute roughly 11 Pakistanis become a part of the cellular community and more than 430,000 SMS messages and 160,000 voice minutes are being exchanged in less than one minute.

The telecommunications sector contributes 3% to the country’s GDP whereas the total telecom sector revenue reached at Rs. 357.7 billion in the year 2009-10 compared to Rs. 333 billion in the previous year.

This is despite the fact that the cellular industry in the country is paying the highest taxes in comparison to the entire region.

According to official sources,incomes of 6 out of every 1,000 persons in the country are tied with the telecom sector.

This is not only a moment of joy but also a reaffirmation to the common Pakistani man and woman that access to technology is not a privilege limited to the elite, but a right that is available to them that is accessible and affordable.

Half of Pakistanis including women have access to a cell phone together with rural areas (two-thirds in urban areas) while more than 86 percent of men have their own cell phone, 40 percent of women do.

These figures suggest a much higher access to cell phone (available in the household or within the extended family) than the figures for regular usage.

Talking to APP an official in Pakistan Telecommunication Authority said basic data services such as SMS, are used by 40.2pc cell phone users with higher usage in urban areas (45 percent) than in rural (36-7 percent). SMS usage is also more frequent among men.

He said internet usage remains low and is concentrated in urban areas. Internet and e-mail are more accessed used at home.

Pakistan has now edged ahead of India, its nuclear-armed rival.
New estimates put Pakistan's nuclear arsenal at more than 100

Pakistan's nuclear arsenal now totals more than 100 deployed weapons, a doubling of its stockpile over the past several years in one of the world's most unstable regions, according to estimates by nongovernment analysts.

The Pakistanis have significantly accelerated productionof uranium and plutonium for bombs and developed new weapons to deliver them. After years of approximate weapons parity, experts said, Pakistan has now edged ahead of India, its nuclear-armed rival.
An escalation of the arms race in South Asia poses a dilemmafor the Obama administration, which has worked to improve its economic, political and defense ties with India while seeking to deepen its relationship with Pakistan as a crucial component of its Afghanistan war strategy.
In politically fragile Pakistan, the administration is caught between fears of proliferation or possible terrorist attempts to seize nuclear materials and Pakistani suspicions that the United States aims to control or limit its weapons program and favors India.

Those suspicions were on public display last week at the opening session of U.N. disarmament talks in Geneva, where Pakistani Ambassador Zamir Akram accused the United States and other major powers of "double standards and discrimination" for pushing a global treaty banning all future production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium.
Adoption of what is known as the "fissile materials cutoff treaty," a key element of President Obama's worldwide nonproliferation agenda, requires international consensus. Pakistan has long been the lone holdout.

While Pakistan has produced more nuclear-armed weapons, India is believed to have larger existing stockpiles of such fissile material for future weapons. That long-term Indian advantage, Pakistan has charged, was further enhanced by a 2008 U.S.-India civil nuclear cooperation agreement. The administration has deflected Pakistan's demands for a similar deal.
Brig. Gen. Nazir Butt, defense attache at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, said the number of Pakistan's weapons and the status of its production facilities were confidential.

"Pakistan lives in a tough neighborhood and will never be oblivious to its security needs," Butt said. "As a nuclear power, we are very confident of our deterrent capabilities."

But the administration's determination to bring the fissile materials ban to completion this year may compel it to confront more directly the issue of proliferation in South Asia. As U.S. arms negotiator Rose Gottemoeller told Bloomberg News at the U.N. conference Thursday: "Patience is running out."
Other nuclear powers have their own interests in the region. China, which sees India as a major regional competitor, has major investments in Pakistan and a commitment to supply it with at least two nuclear-energy reactors.
Russia has increased its cooperation with India and told Pakistan last week that it was "disturbed" about its arms buildup.
"It's a risky path, particularly for a government under pressure," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, fresh from a visit to Islamabad, said in remarks at the Nixon Center on Thursday.

Wary of upsetting Pakistan's always-fragile political balance, the White House rarely mentions the country's arsenal in public except to voice confidence in its strong internal safeguards, with warheads kept separate from delivery vehicles. But the level of U.S. concern was reflected during last month's White House war review, when Pakistan's nuclear security was set as one of two long-term strategy objectives there, along with the defeat of al-Qaeda, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
A publicly released summary of the classified review document made no reference to the nuclear issue, and the White House deflected questions on grounds that it was an intelligence matter. This week, a spokesman said the administration would not respond to inquiries about the size of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor referred to Obama's assurance at last spring's Nuclear Security Summit that he felt "confident about Pakistan's security around its nuclear weapons program." Vietor noted that Obama has encouraged "all nations" to support negotiations on the fissile cutoff treaty. "The administration is always trying to keep people from talking about this knowledgeably," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a leading analyst on the world's nuclear forces. "They're always trying to downplay" the numbers and insisting that "it's smaller than you think."

"It's hard to say how much the U.S. knows," said Hans M. Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists and author of the annual global nuclear weapons inventory published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. "Probably a fair amount. But it's a mixed bag - Pakistan is an ally, and they can't undercut it with a statement of concern in public."
Beyond intelligence on the ground, U.S. officials assess Pakistan's nuclear weapons program with the same tools used by the outside experts - satellite photos of nuclear-related installations, estimates of fissile-material production and weapons development, and publicly available statements and facts.

Four years ago, the Pakistani arsenal was estimated at 30 to 60 weapons.

"They have been expanding pretty rapidly," Albright said. Based on recently accelerated production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, "they could have more than doubled in that period," with current estimates of up to 110 weapons. Kristensen said it was "not unreasonable" to say that Pakistan has now produced at least 100 weapons. Shaun Gregory, director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at Britain's University of Bradford, put the number at between 100 and 110.

Some Pakistani officials have intimated they have even more. But just as the United States has a vested interest in publicly playing down the total, Pakistan sees advantage in "playing up the number of weapons they've got," Gregory said. "They're at a disadvantage with India with conventional forces," in terms of both weaponry and personnel.
Only three nuclear countries - Pakistan, India and Israel - have never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. India is estimated to have 60 to 100 weapons; numbers are even less precise for Israel's undeclared program, estimated at up to 200. North Korea, which has conducted nuclear tests and is believed to have produced enough fissile material for at least a half-dozen bombs, withdrew from the treaty in 2003.

Those figures make Pakistan the world's fifth-largest nuclear power, ahead of "legal" powers France and Britain. The vast bulk of nuclear stockpiles are held by the United States and Russia, followed by China. While Pakistan has no declared nuclear doctrine, it sees its arsenal as a deterrent to an attack by the Indian forces that are heavily deployed near its border. India has vowed no first use of nuclear weapons, but it depends on its second-strike capability to deter the Pakistanis.

The United States imposed nuclear-related sanctions on Pakistan and India after both countries conducted weapons tests in 1998, but lifted them shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. With U.S. guidance and a $100 million assistance program, Pakistan moved to increase international confidence by overhauling its command and control structures.
evelations in 2004 about an illegal international nuclear procurement network run by Pakistani nuclear official Abdul Qadeer Khan, which supplied nuclear materials to Libya, Iran and North Korea, led to further steps to improve security.
he 2008 agreement that permits India to purchase nuclear fuel for civilian purposes was a spur to Pakistani weapons production, experts said. Pakistan maintains that the treaty allows India to divert more of its own resources for military use.

As Pakistan sees India becoming a great power, "nuclear weapons become a very attractive psychological equalizer," said George Perkovich, vice president for studies and a nonproliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The 1998 test date is a quasi-holiday in Pakistan, and the test site was once declared a national monument, part of the nuclear chest-thumping that, along with political instability, makes U.S. officials as nervous as the actual number of weapons.

In December 2008, Peter Lavoie, the U.S. national intelligence officer for South Asia, told NATO officials that "despite pending economic catastrophe, Pakistan is producing nuclear weapons at a faster rate than any other country in the world," according to a classified State Department cable released late last year by the Internet site WikiLeaks.

Publication of the document so angered Pakistan's army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, that he told journalists there that the Pakistani people believe that the "real aim of U.S. [war] strategy is to denuclearize Pakistan," according to local media reports.

In 2009, Congress passed a $7.5 billion aid package for Pakistan with the stipulation that the administration provide regular assessments of whether any of the money "directly or indirectly aided the expansion of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program."

While continuing to produce weapons-grade uranium at two sites, Pakistan has sharply increased its production of plutonium, allowing it to make lighter warheads for more mobile delivery systems. Its newest missile, the Shaheen II, has a range of 1,500 miles and is about to go into operational deployment, Kristensen said. Pakistan also has developed nuclear-capable land- and air-launched cruise missiles.

Top Most Searched Items Things on Google Most Searched Things On Google 2010-2011

Here are top 5 keywords which are being searched on web these days:
1) Google: Being the biggest and fastest search engine which can give you the information about everything besides this Google has gmail (fastest e-mail service), blogger (which made easy for you to create blogs and earn money), AdSense (which has made the earnings easy), AdWords (which has opened the easiest ways for advertisers to advertise in the internet world) and many more things. These things make Google most searched keyword.

2) Twitter: Twitter has suddenly become one of the most popular website in the world. Net surfers around the world do open Twitter these days for following the famous personalities and making new friends.

3) Michael Jackson: After his sudden death suddenly Michael Jackson has become the most searched person in search engines. People are searching his biographies, cause of death, new song of Michael Jackson which has just come, Michael Jackson's songs, pics and many more things about him. The sale of Michael Jackson's music albums has also increased.

4) Barack Obama: U.S. President Barack Obama has been ruling the internet since Nov. 4 2008. The day when he became president. He has become one of the most famous personality of the world with in a year. Barack Obama is popular again after being given the Nobel Prize.

5) Paris Hilton: Believe it or not! But Hotel Heiress Paris Hilton is also among the most searched celebrities around the world for her all the strange habits.

Arif Nizami launches his new English daily “Pakistan Today”

Pakistan Today, an English daily headed by Arif Nizami, the former editor of The Nation, has launched in Lahore and is preparing to launch in Karachi. It has joined the growing list of English dailies the public now has to choose from. Amidst rumours about its style and substance, there is genuine curiosity about what a new publication can offer to readers.

Babur Nizami, the chief operating officer of Pakistan Today, had high hopes for the paper and was confident of its success. “The paper was launched to a very good response. We’re targeting the market leader – that is, Dawn-and expect that in six months time we will be in at least the number three slot,” he said. He backed up his ambitious claim with a description of what the newspaper will be offering. Above all, Pakistan Today is aiming to provide a publication which is reader-friendly, with bright graphics, coloured photographs and creatively designed layouts. “Even the Op-Ed pages will have pictures and we are offering coloured comics for the first time,” said Nizami.

Rumours about the newspaper being a tabloid were firmly squashed and attributed to a misunderstanding about type and layout. Pakistan Today was launched in the Berliner format, with different page dimensions compared to other newspapers. “The Berliner is not the tabloid format,” said a former Pakistan Today staff member. “It’s just a flexible and reader-friendly, but I think there is some confusion about the term,” he said. The newspaper ran a piece about the format on page 4 of their October 5 issue.

Journalists from leading English publications are looking forward to seeing where its editor will take his infant paper. “I think the launch of Pakistan Today is good news. Arif Nizami is a seasoned journalist,” said Shamimur Rehman, from Dawn. “We are looking forward to the launch of an independent, neutral newspaper,” he added. Muhammad Ziauddin, the executive editor of The Express Tribune, shared his hopeful attitude. “Arif Nizami is an experienced journalist who has been working very professionally for over three decades. I hope he makes this venture successful,” he said.

All new ventures require good employees and it remains to be seen how successfully Pakistan Today will recruit its team. A recruiting advertisement from Ritemoves.com offers “unique opportunities for recent college and university graduates, as well as for talented professionals who are looking for a more dynamic experience.” According to Babur Nizami, the newspaper has culled “mostly experienced reporters” from publications such as The News, The Nation and The Express Tribune. It has also targeted young graduates from institutions such as LUMS and Beaconhouse National University. Although the consistency and quality of its reporting remains to be seen, those at the helm of Pakistan Today are hoping that the combination of style and content grabs readers.

Several people declined to comment on the launch of the newspaper, saying that there is no way to tell how good it will be until they see it themselves. Part of the scepticism lies with the fact that the paper does not have a serious web-presence yet, beyond a rather-empty looking website. As other newspapers are investing in improving their online appearance, it is likely that Pakistan Today could garner more positive feedback if it was more easily accessible to people outside of Lahore.

Within Lahore, Babur Nizami was very pleased with the marketing of the new project. “We have billboards and streamers and we distributed free copies of the paper before its official launch,” he said, adding that the response to the campaign had been overwhelmingly positive.

As Pakistan’s media continues to expand, competition will arguably force all stakeholders to scrutinise quality and offer better products. The launch of Pakistan Today is good news for journalism at large, if it gives readers more news to choose from. Whether or not it rises to its claim of eventually becoming one of the country’s leading publications can only be seen in due time.

Rapes assuming epidemic proportions in Pak's Sindh province

120 cases of rape, including six of gang rape, were reported in Pakistan's Sindh province between May 1, 2008 to October 31, 2008, provincial Home Minister Dr Zulfiqar Mirza has said.

Responding to the queries of lawmakers, Mirza also informed the Sindh Assembly that the maximum number of rape cases- 33- were reported in Karachi alone, while 15 cases of sexual assault and nine of gender harassment were also reported in the province during the same period.

Although the Sindh Home Department has established complaint cells at every police station of the province, women do not report such cases due to social compulsions and restrictions, he added.

The ratio between the number of crimes, including rape and gape rape, and conviction of the accused was very low because of the lack of protection for the witnesses, The Nation quoted Mirza, as saying in response to another question.

However, his department had submitted a plan to the chief minister for rehabilitating the witnesses at safer places, he added.

To another question, Mirza told the House that 38 cases of physical abuse of women, 37 of domestic violence and one case of acid-burn were reported during the same period.

He said that an Anti-Honour Killing Cell had been established in Sindh Police, currently functioning in the Sukkur region with the assistance of UNDP. However, no women police officer was working at the facility.

Awareness and education could change the mindset of people to honour women and avoid violence against them, the provincial Home Minister remarked.

A Tribute To Faiz Ahmed Faiz.1911-2011

The year 2011 will be celebrated worldwide as the centenary of the great poet of Southasia, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Paksir as tribute to Faiz will carry and post art on Faiz and his poetry. Over the year, Paksir will also be posting fresh material on his Facebook profile and Paksir.blogspot.com.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Pakistan’s unofficial poet laureate, was born almost exactly a hundred years ago, on 13 February 1911, in Sialkot, the hometown he shared with Pakistan’s national poet, ‘Allama’ Muhammad Iqbal. Faiz passed away in 1984, aged 73, in Lahore, the city he came to call home during the last years of his life.


Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s hundredth birth anniversary will be celebrated this year across Southasia and the globe. His poetry of resistance, with its vigorous challenge to authoritarianism, is as relevant today as when it flowed from his pen several decades ago. Revered for having stood up to exploitation, injustice and state coercion, Faiz’s legacy lives on as scores of writers and artists in Pakistan and India continue to struggle for an equitable, plural and tolerant society. Not surprisingly, Faiz was imprisoned and declared persona non grata by the Pakistani state, in the vain hope that incarceration would still his sharp verse. But that only sharpened it; through the ages, dissent has only been fuelled by censorship and clampdown, and the human spirit has triumphed.

Muslim future in India

It has become a part of our nationalism to highlight communal trouble in India. We don’t realise that this kind of thinking is not good for the Muslims there. Scholars think that if India and Pakistan proceed on their hostile course and threaten each other with nuclear weapons, Muslims in India will face the possibility of subordination, expulsion and genocide.

This is gleaned from the history of what happened to such minorities elsewhere in the world. But if things remain normal, the Muslims of India will face the following four options: assimilation, pluralism, secession and dominance. This is the thesis of the volume Living with Secularism: The Destiny of India’s Muslims: Edited by Mushirul Hasan; (Manohar, India, 2007).

The following Indian states have Muslim minorities, as indicated by percentages: Assam (28 per cent), Kerala (23 per cent) West Bengal (23 per cent), Uttar Pradesh (17.3 per cent), Bihar (16 per cent) and Karnataka (16 per cent). Needless to say the largest number live in UP, where the total population is more than that of Pakistan.

Indian scholar Mushirul Hasan wrote, Will secular India survive? (2004) and challenged the doctrine of Hindutva spread around by the BJP. After 2004, Hindutva has not gone away. It threatens the Muslims more than the other communities because: 1) Muslims are the largest religious minority in India and the latter has the second largest Muslim population in the world; 2) Muslims are erstwhile rulers of India and the memory presents them as a threat to the Hindu majority; 3) Muslims are considered as members of a settler colony by Sangh Pariwar; 4) Muslims get excluded because of majoritarian nationalism with Pakistan as the ‘other’, and because Indian Muslims are seen as a separatist population; 5) Muslims are targets of all communal riots; 6) Muslims serve as instruments of Hindu unity under Hindutva because India is presented as being under threat from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir; 7) Muslims spoil the Indian monolithic identity as a Hindu Rashtra and are an obstacle in India’s unification.

What will happen to the Muslims of India? Muslim threat is expressed by the fact that their population, although only 13 per cent of the total, has grown to this number in fifty years, more quickly as compared to the Hindus. Is this fear comparable to the Christian fear of ethnic supersession by Muslims through birth rate, aroused in Lebanon after 1943, ending in the civil war of 1975-88? There is a Muslim majority in Kashmir and large Muslim minorities in West Bengal and Assam near the border of an adjoining Muslim state that equally arouses fear and loathing.

Southern and coastal India don’t hate the Muslims as much as the Indian north and northwest, but may begin to have communal riots as the BJP and its friends spread their influence there. It is possible that the Muslims may actually be squeezed into the coastal areas in the South to join the non-threatening ‘middlemen Muslims’: Memons, Khojas, Bohras, Navayats, Marakayyars, Lebais, Rawthors and Mapillas. They pose no threat to the majority dominance.

Muslims in Hyderabad, Bhopal and Junagadh are humorously equated to past elite but they are, in fact, local poor Hindu converts who can never challenge Hindus unless they step out of poverty and acquire education.

But the final solution lies in Indo-Pakistan relations. Conceptual solutions don’t appeal in South Asia because the social sciences have been neglected here. Indirect solutions, like free trade that brings prosperity to the masses, and getting rid of the paranoia of the state — read dominance of intelligence agencies — could normalise relations and remove the fear of war and save the Muslims of India from being persecuted.

India must save Pakistan

Pakistan is in need of help. India alone can provide the help—and will also benefit from this. Pakistan faces the danger of self-destruction if it fails to make amends with its folly of mounting the tiger of Islamic extremism. Look at the bizarre events that led to, and have followed, the assassination of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab and a courageous voice of secularism, last week. Which civilised nation can have a blasphemy law of the kind that has disgraced Pakistan? Taseer was killed because, in an atmosphere of fear created by the forces of religious terrorism, he stuck his neck out to call it a “black law” and pleaded for presidential clemency for a poor Christian woman who has been sentenced to death under that law. Shamefully, not only have a large number of clerics justified his killing, but they, and a significant section of Pakistan’s civil society, have also idolised his killer as a holy warrior.

A blizzard of bigotry is sweeping across Pakistan. This is evident from Taseer’s assassination, the likelihood of more secular critics of the blasphemy law being killed in the months ahead, the sword of the death sentence hanging over the hapless Christian woman, and the many religiously inspired extra-judicial killings of non-Muslims and Muslims accused under the law. It is also evident from the long series of ghastly terrorist attacks on religious places and followers of minority communities, and also of Muslim communities deemed to have deviated from the path of “pure Islam”. If only a partially Talibanised Pakistan can look so scary, a Pakistan under the complete control of the forces of religious terrorism—a distinct possibility—will undoubtedly pose a far graver threat to itself, to India, and to the world at large.

Before it is too late, India must devise, and assiduously work on a strategy to stabilise and save Pakistan. India must help Pakistan strengthen its democracy; make its generals subservient to the people’s rule; and defeat the forces of Islamic extremism without wishing to break its unity or to erase its Muslim identity.

Why India? Because no outside power can be a true friend of Pakistan or of other nation-states in the Indian subcontinent. Outside powers are mostly interested in taking advantage of the hostility between India and Pakistan, as has been clearly shown by our troubled history since 1947. The longer India and Pakistan continue to look, and act as incorrigible enemies of one another, the stronger the nexus between Pakistan’s religious extremists and its military rulers will become. This will only accelerate the process of Talibanisation of Pakistan, and also the consequent export of terror to India.

There is yet another reason why India alone can help our hapless neighbour. We are both products of a common cultural, spiritual and civilisational heritage, and the unifying and regenerative power of that ancient heritage is far from exhausted. A tragic situation in our recent history, which was precipitated and exploited by our common colonial master, created Pakistan and India as two separate nation-states. But there is no reason why we must treat as unchangeable a flawed design that was imposed on us, and which our forefathers accepted out of a combination of myopia and helplessness, at the end of the colonial era.

India should pursue three bold ideas to help Pakistan and itself.

Firstly, India must strongly oppose America’s continued military occupation of Afghanistan and also condemn its drone attacks on innocent civilians in Pakistan. It is high time we Indians realised that the US has aided the rise of religious extremism in Pakistan both by supporting the Taliban covertly in the 1980s, and also by fighting it overtly now. Indeed, America would do itself good by leaving Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to manage our own affairs, and resolve our own disputes. Moreover, today’s economically weakened America has no stomach for prolonging its unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Therefore, here is an opportunity for India to play the role of a benign leader in South Asia, by winning the confidence of the peoples of neighbouring countries.

India’s ability to play the leadership role, and thereby establish a new design for a secular, democratic and cooperative South Asia, critically hinges on early resolution of the Kashmir dispute. The longer Kashmir remains strife-torn, the more oxygen it will provide to religious extremists in Pakistan and also to anti-India sections in its armed forces. Therefore, there is an urgent need to intensify efforts in India for a national consensus on resolution of the Kashmir dispute.

The third bold idea is to unleash the power of Indianised Islam to bring the Muslims of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh into a closer fraternity, not as a dominant or separate community enjoying exclusive rights and a privileged status over others (such as is given by the blasphemy law in Pakistan) but as an equal member of a secular, multi-religious subcontinental family. This calls for a new confederal constitutional arrangement between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, in which the three countries remain sovereign and yet adhere to the common principles of justice, secularism, democracy and protection of minorities in their territories. In other words, Pakistan and Bangladesh must be re-absorbed and re-integrated into the Idea of India, with this important recognition that Islam is as much a part of the idea of India as Hinduism and other faiths are.

Only those people remake history who pursue a bold and enlightened vision.

Moth-eaten Pakistan ruled by mullahs
January 09, 2011 6:59:52 PM


Mohammed Ali Jinnah may have seen himself as the ‘sole spokesman’ of Muslims in pre-partition India and the arbiter of their destiny in ‘the land of the pure’ after he was gifted a ‘moth-eaten Pakistan’ by the departing British rulers, but if truth be told, those who anointed him Quaid-e-Azam had little time and even lesser patience for his vision, such as it was or is made out to be by latter day interpreters of Islamic separatism in the sub-continent. True, Jinnah had famously declared that “Pakistan will not be a country ruled by mullahs with a divine mission”; it’s only natural that someone who enjoyed ham sandwiches with his afternoon coffee, had a taste for fine whisky, was fussy about the spats he wore and the cigarettes he smoked, and held the unwashed masses in utter contempt would find both faith and its extremities abhorrent, more so in shaping the affairs of state or determining the public and private conduct of individuals.

It is equally true that to get his Pakistan, Jinnah had shown little or no qualms in letting the Muslim League mobilise support using both faith and its extremities. The Great Calcutta Killing of 1946 and the subsequent riots like those at Noakhali bear testimony to this fact, as much as Jinnah’s endorsement of the ‘two-nation theory’ which was based on the presumed incompatibility between Muslims and Hindus: The two could not live together in either peace or harmony. There was nothing secular about this assertion, nor was it fuelled by issues of social compatibility or political empowerment of Muslims; it was entirely communal and premised on the need to preserve the Mussalman’s separate religious identity. The scorn with which Jinnah held Maulana Abul A’ala Maududi reflected his elitist bias; nothing more, nothing less.

Those who tirelessly flaunt Jinnah’s ‘secular’ credentials are given to quoting from his August 11, 1947 speech in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly whose members he assured that “in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state”. Less than a year later Jinnah imposed Urdu, a language in which he never spoke, leave alone read or write, as the national language of Pakistan not because he thought it would unite a geographically and culturally split country but because it was as much a part of the Muslim identity as the achkan he took to wearing in his new role. He no longer saw Islam as a matter of an individual’s personal faith but as the identity of his Pakistan.

Jinnah died without bequeathing his country with a stable system of democratic governance or a republican Constitution whose basic principles were inviolable. The constitutionalist-turned-rabble rouser-turned Quaid-e-Azam left his Pakistan to the likes of Maududi for whom the supremacy of Allah and the Quran in both private lives and public affairs was non-negotiable; the Generals of Rawalpindi who believed the Army alone was fit to rule Pakistan; and America which was looking for a client state to further its strategic interest in South Asia. Maududi, who believed “everything in the universe is ‘Muslim’ for it obeys god by submission to his laws”, wanted Islam to become the cornerstone of Pakistan as a ‘theo-democracy’ which, as one of his critics explained, would be an “ideological state in which legislators do not legislate, citizens only vote to reaffirm the permanent applicability of god’s laws, women rarely venture outside their homes lest social discipline be disrupted and non-Muslims are tolerated as foreign elements required to express their loyalty by means of paying a levy (jizya)”.

In the six decades since its bloody (some would say cursed) birth, Pakistan, or what remains of Jinnah’s ‘moth-eaten’ country, has moved closer to Maududi’s ‘theo-democracy’ and steered clear of the Quaid-e-Azam’s hocus-pocus of separating the church from the state and keeping the mullahs at bay which, he hoped, would leave the elite’s role in leading the country unchallenged and undiminished. The Jamaat-e-Islami may not rule Pakistan, but its twisted vision of a brutal state and a cruel society that together harshly enforce the “permanent applicability of god’s laws” is beginning to take shape and form. It’s easy to blame Gen Zia-ul-Haq for the Islamisation of Pakistan, but that would be tantamount to suggesting that prior to his interpretation of Islam as a penal code and Islamic Republic as a floggers’ and executioners’ paradise, Pakistan was a secular state where religion was restrained to the zenana and faith practised purdah. The socialism that Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto preached was as fraudulent as the liberalism of Clifton. Through spells of military dictatorship and civilian rule, Pakistan has evolved as a ‘theo-democracy’. To deny that would be to refuse to acknowledge a simple truth. We could couch it in language that would distract us from the reality, but it would not change the reality in any manner. That it is an imploding ‘theo-democracy’ is only matter of detail, of greater consequence to the world than the practitioners of Maududi’s prescription.

Last Tuesday’s murder of Punjab’s flamboyant Governor Salman Taseer, in a sense, demonstrates this point. More people outside Pakistan are shocked by the killing than those in Pakistan: At home, the killer, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, is being feted as a hero, a true keeper of the faith. Salman Taseer was killed by his bodyguard, a member of Pakistan’s elite commando force, for demanding the scrapping of his country’s hideous blasphemy law — an amendment Bill has been introduced in the National Assembly but is bound to be defeated. Worse, he declared his support for Asia Bibi, a poor, illiterate Christian woman who has been sentenced to death for blasphemy — Salman Taseer visited her in jail and posed for photographs. Qadri says he found this intolerable and did what a true Muslim should do in such circumstances; he is neither contrite nor repentant. Ironically, there has been little support for Salman Taseer and even lesser criticism of Qadri’s misdeed among those who are held up as shining examples of ‘liberal’ Pakistanis in an increasingly illiberal Pakistan. It is no less an irony that many of Qadri’s supporters are women.

This is not to suggest that the last of the stray voices have been drowned in the tidal wave of Islamism sweeping through Pakistan. Individuals who are horrified by the idea of living in a Pakistan ruled by mullahs are outraged and have been giving vent to their feelings. But as one commentator wrote, the battle against Islamism has been lost and that’s the grim reality. We could, of course, quibble over when exactly was the battle lost. Was it the day Pakistan was born? Or was it when the first pogrom, led by Maududi, against Ahmadiyas went unpunished? Was it lost when Pakistanis acquiesced to Zia’s Islamisation programme? Or when Pakistanis justified their Government’s trans-border jihad against India by not raising their voice against the slaughter of innocents? We reap as we sow.

Salman Taseer:

He died with his boots on

My first encounter with Salmaan Taseer was in 1983. I used to go to Regal Chowk located on Mall Road in Lahore every day in the evening to watch the MRD (Movement for the Restoration of Democracy) workers courting arrest. Those were the dreadful heydays of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law, with police arresting anybody seen standing near the chowk; most of the time police personnel outnumbered the protesters. Despite this, someone from the crowd would suddenly start raising slogans and the police (and intelligence agents in civilian clothes) would pounce on the guy and whisk him away. In the midst of all this depression, a day came for Salmaan Taseer to court arrest and suddenly there were at least 1,000 people; Salmaan suddenly emerged from nowhere and the whole area shook with loud slogans. I developed immense respect for him that day as it showed his courage and organisational skills. He was taken straight to the dreaded Shahi Qila (Lahore Fort) where he is said to have been beaten up.

Then came Benazir Bhutto in 1986 and Salmaan Taseer was again in the news. He was probably made secretary (information) of the People’s Party; however, Benazir somehow never gave him a position in the government and denied him even the senate ticket which depressed him. May be he was too vocal and intellectual for Benazir.

He was sidelined in the PPP polity and thus decided to switch to business; he had earlier started Taseer Hadi, a leading chartered accountancy firm. He proved to be a successful businessman and made lots of money. The good part is that he could never be accused of corruption, unlike many of his friends and foes in politics. And then he re-surfaced in May 2008 when Musharraf chose him as governor of Punjab.

He proved to be an active governor and brought lots of attention to this office which otherwise is a redundant one. It became a centre of the PPP workers who otherwise were lost after being repeatedly trounced by in elections by Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League. He became their voice and a one-man brigade against the PML.

His opponents on a number of occasions tried to raise his relationship with Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, with whom he has a son Aatish Taseer (who is an intellectual in his own right and author of a best-selling novel). Salmaan never clarified his relationship and desisted from talking about it. But apparently, Aatish visited him in Pakistan a couple of times including after his becoming the governor.

Salmaan Taseer was killed by his own bodyguard on January 4 in Islamabad and he was only 66. God in the Holy Quran says that “no people can hasten their term, nor can they delay it” (23.43). So Salmaan’s time had come just like it will for all of us. But Salmaan died like a courageous man, with his boots on. I am sure this is the way he would have wanted to go taking a principled stand for something he believed in. He did not die crawling.

The pity is that his death may cow down the remaining few sane voices in the country. One could perceive this while watching the programmes on various television channels following his murder. There is hardly an anchorperson bold enough to outrightly defend what Salmaan stood for and the politicians are a foregone conclusion anyway. Every politician becomes a martyr in Pakistan but nobody is willing to call Salmaan one. Is it because they do not believe in what he stood for, or are they scared of the repercussions?

The worst part is that the lower class folks I came across on Tuesday unanimously supported his death, ranging from the cooks to the chowkidars. They all said that he stood for blasphemy and deserved to die. This is a sad and dangerous trend.

The question is, who is going to change this mind-set and how? One cannot expect any sort of action from the present rulers because they lack the will, the vision and the intellect to do any such thing. The military has the might but it also has its limitations as such extremists are present in its midst as well and an intervention of any sort would be denounced and the political forces may suddenly unite against it. This leaves us with the media and the intellectuals.

The media will have to take the lead in this respect and give intellectuals showing the liberal democratic path space to air their views. Instead, what we saw the evening he died was television channels, including the Pakistan TV, giving the religious personalities lot of time to justify the killing. The English print media appears more sane and portrays a liberal voice, with few exceptions, but the Urdu press is overwhelmingly sensational and gives front page coverage to the religious extremists with banner headlines.

No one appears to be bothering to promote tolerance in the national polity and in culture. How can a nation aspire to have democracy without tolerance? It is a test of a nation’s civilisation and Pakistan has been failing since the late Seventies in this respect. All that Salmaan Taseer asked for was a few modifications in the blasphemy law (Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code which was inserted by the military ruler General Zia-ul-Haq in 1986). The law is constantly being misused by some sections to get their enemies into trouble. And once a blasphemy charge is made everyone gets cold feet, including the police and judges, and they invariably find the accused guilty as charged. It is not surprising that blasphemy cases, unlike the other cases, are decided in record time as the judiciary tries to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

Many religious zealots called for killing Salmaan Taseer after he called the blasphemy a ‘black law’; a nation-wide strike was called by the religious parties on the last day of 2010 against any amendments in the blasphemy law and many in the public meetings that day called for his death. Such terrorisation is a crime under law and there is hardly any justification for ignoring such threats.

Media has a responsibility in this respect and should act maturely and in the name of sanity if nothing else should desist from highlighting statements eulogising religious extremism. It is so far failing to do so.

About the author:

Anees Jillani is a prominent Pakistan Supreme Court lawyer

Murder in Pakistan

Leaders should stand up and rally the country against the forces of intolerance

Just when it seems things could not get worse for Pakistan, they do. It is not enough that the country has an economy in crisis or that terrorism remains undefeated. Now, close on the heels of the decision by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) to quit the governing coalition, raising the possibility that it will fall, the governor of the country’s richest and most populous province, Punjab, has been assassinated.

This killing of Salman Taseer, a leading figure in the main coalition partner, the Pakistan People’s Party, and a close confidant of President Asif Ali Zardari, is, however, more serious than the political crisis. Prime Minister Yousaf Reza Gilani’s position is relatively safe for the moment — indeed, even safer as a result of the killing. Even before it happened, the MQM indicated that it would not join a vote of no-confidence in Gilani. The main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N then voiced similar sentiments based, it has to be suspected, on the knowledge that without the MQM’s support, it would lose such a vote. Now, however, none of the main parties are going to want an election in such an emotionally charged atmosphere.

Unfortunately, Pakistan’s detractors will use this slaying to try and blacken its name. They will claim that bigotry and extremism have infiltrated every level of society.

It will be used too by those who want to pressure the country into pursuing their political and military agendas. They will say it proves it is a chaotic and dangerous state and that if it is not to fall apart completely, it has to take tougher measures against terrorists and extremists — as if it were not already fighting with all its might against them! But that has not stopped the leaders of Germany, France and the UK demanding it do more.

There will be those too, who use this killing to flaunt their fear and ignorance of Islam, claiming it as proof, after the church massacres in Baghdad and Alexandria, of growing Muslim extremism and bigotry worldwide.

That is demonstrably untrue. There is bigotry in Pakistan but then it exists in every society. Clearly the murder was an act of religious fanaticism. But it was individuals who were responsible, not a mass movement.

Taseer was murdered by one or perhaps more bigots who believed that he wanted to repeal the country’s blasphemy law. But he was a Muslim, not his murderer or those who, sickeningly, celebrate this evil deed. He worked for the good of his country trying to promote tolerance and understanding and peace between its different communities. He stood up against extremism and violence. It cost him his life and that makes him a martyr and his heartless, grinning murderer an ignorant instrument of evil.

But while Pakistan has lost a bold campaigner for truth and justice, there is comfort for it in the knowledge that Taseer was not alone. There is a host of other activists whose faith is generous and embracing and who refuse to be intimidated by the twisted advocates of hatred.

Pakistan is deeply shocked by this murder. This could be a defining moment for its leaders to stand up and rally the country against the deviant forces that would bring darkness to it and Islam. As for those Islamophobes who would see in Taseer’s murder proof of fanaticism, they should look instead to the Islam he stood for — a faith that pursues justice, truth and respect, the real Islam.

EDITORIAL

Jan 5, 2011 22:38

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Indians in tears over skyrocketing onion prices

Neighbor Pakistan steps in with emergency shipments as a shortage causes prices of the humble staple to more than double. Politicians scramble to contain the damage.

There is much that divides India and its traditional rival Pakistan: families long separated by partition, divided Kashmir, fear of a fourth war between the nuclear adversaries. But when it comes to the Great Onion Crisis of 2010, grateful India has found a friend across the border.

Onion prices across India have more than doubled to as much as 90 cents a pound this month, sending shock waves through vegetable market and kitchen alike in a country where many subsist on $1 a day. Some have taken to the streets in protest bedecked in onion garlands.

"Ever Had Biriyani Without Onions?" screamed a headline in the Mid Day tabloid.

So important is the humble onion that state governments in Delhi and Rajasthan fell in 1998 over rising onion prices and the "onion factor" helped overthrow the central government in 1980.

After initially ignoring the looming shortage, the government quickly banned exports, promised to release strategic "onion reserves," eliminated import duties and doubled the number of rail carriages devoted to the vital vegetable.

That's where Pakistan comes in. For most of the last week, it delivered on average about 50 trucks each carrying 10 tons of onions daily.

Little moved on Christmas, an Indian holiday, or Sunday, with shipments expected to resume Monday. Some Indian traders complain that the quality of bulbs from Pakistan's Sindh province was inferior to domestic production from Rajasthan or Gujarat states.

Some Middle East nations also are competing with India for Pakistan's onions even as the added demand drives up domestic onion prices in Pakistan. And India, the world's second-largest onion producer, is considering importing about 50,000 tons from the world's largest producer, China.

2010: Thank God It's Over

Before we say goodbye to 2010, a look back at the year's achievements and disasters, natural and otherwise.
With earthquakes in Haiti and western China, floods in Pakistan, a volcanic eruption in Iceland, and wildfires in Russia, the Earth was intent on releasing a lot of pent-up anger in 2010. Tremors and eruptions -- along with the more basic elements of fire and water -- seemed to shape the past year's events even more than traditional foreign policy actors.
Meanwhile, Europe struggled to regain its economic footing, China continued to rapidly grow its GDP, Middle East peace talks crumbled, and world leaders misbehaved (we're looking at you, Vladmir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi). But there were bright spots, too: A group of Chilean miners escaped after enduring two months trapped underground and long-suffering Burmese democratic activist Aung San Suu Kyi was released after spending nearly two decades in detention and under house arrest.

With a hope of a better world Happy New Year 2011.