Guest Contributor – Zubeida Mustafa

Re-configuring the MQM

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

On August 22 the MQM’s almost week-old peaceful rather low-key ‘fast-unto-death’ outside Karachi’s Press Club erupted into obedient frenzy at the urging of its remote-controlling leader, himself safely enshrined in London. That sacred cow of democracy, the media, had the premises of two big-time TV houses—- located a virtual stone’s throw away—- stormed: live.

The Press Club is at once at the commercial, official, industrial and historic heart of Karachi. Sticks and stones breaking bones; baton charges; arson: The impact of the vicious unruly mob was instantly apparent—- panicking people thronging the markets, and obstructing hordes heading home from work. The resultant traffic jam was rapid and extensive. LEAs heading to the rescue were also caught in it. More than a handful badly injured; one dead; another dying: Probably the whole of Pakistan’s TV audience witnessed the rampage vicariously and read tickers of the concern being voiced by the President; PM; military top brass and prominent politicians. The CM, the DG Rangers, officials and functionaries visited the trouble-spot. The interior minister intended phoning officialdom in London, where MQM’s Altaf Hussain has long been a British resident, turned citizen. Continue reading “Re-configuring the MQM”

Poster play

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

NO matter how we love him, our COAS is no poster boy. For one thing, the face as displayed on the July poster comes out rather reminiscent of Saddam—and that is not the right kind of resonance whether the pitch be civil, military or sufiyana.

There was as good as no collective popular reaction to the sentiment the poster so ardently expressed. The ISPR issued a brusque statement of dissociation. The media, however, soldiered on. We the people were soon in possession of the name of the poster-pasting party, said to be duly registered with the ECP more than a year ago. A political party rooting for Bonapartism is the kind of nonsense that only our democratic climate can provide.

Continue reading “Poster play”

Culture agonistic

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

To understand the dynamics of our present cultural conflicts we need to go back to General Zia’s way of playing politics. His commitment to a self-interpreted Pakistan ideology and his martial power in super-imposing it on his subjects –- for that is what citizens become in a dictatorship –- had a profoundly disruptive impact.

He controversialised religion, making it into an instrument for repression and domination. Thus, legislation in the cloak of Islamisation haunts us in the blasphemy laws and Hudood Ordinance. Selected religious bodies and clerics gained a new voice, latent with intrusive powers, to guide public morality and personal conduct. He formulated distinctions between shura and parliament which often took the form of a dissociation from or incompatibility with “westernis ed” political and social practice and inevitably enhanced bigotry. Continue reading “Culture agonistic”

Wanted: truer democracy

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

LOCALLY we are hearing rather a lot about what PMs in truer democracies than ours did after getting not-so-honourable mentions in PanamaLeaks. In Greenland (or was it Iceland? Do a Google) the impugned prime minister resigned. In that hallowed parliamentary prototype Great Britain, the PM’s public and parliamentary response after a Panama reference to family embarrassed him has been exemplary, as Nawaz Sharif’s challengers love to remind. Maybe our PM has other role models. Our Youth Bulge electoral segment may not know that even before the internet, in Great Britain’s truly salubrious democratic clime, the Iron Lady’s Dennis was not allowed to menace once the veil was lifted on his delinquencies. He went right off the island if not offshore (Mummy stayed in office). Continue reading “Wanted: truer democracy”

Change: at all costs?

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

IT is time we stopped taking the easier choice of setting out to scrap a faulty political setup and system and focused on laboring to better it: That means allowing it to function and, in that very process, rectifying its deficiencies. For what is the innovative alternative?

We have tried both parliamentary and presidential democratic modes. We have undergone four varieties of military dictatorship. We have framed and discarded more than one constitution. We have journeyed from centralising West Pakistan’s provinces into one unit, into the mysterious provincial autonomy of the Eighteenth Amendment to the 1973 constitution. Continue reading “Change: at all costs?”

Memories: Tributes to Naushaba Burney

The Children’s Literature Festival in Karachi ended on Saturday 26 Feb 2016. Where were you Naushaba? We used to be the two “senior juniors” in this event ever since it was launched by Baela Raza Jamil in 2011. We travelled together to Lahore, Islamabad, and Quetta and enjoyed the company of the youth. This time it was lonely without you.Your family and friends miss you. Here is how they remember you.(ZM)

OUR MOTHER WHO WANTED TO BE THE BEST … AND WAS

By Samya Burney on behalf of her siblings

AMMA always worked when we were kids as she enjoyed the stimulation and also needed the money. However, she worked part-time for quite a while when we were young so that she could balance her career and time with us. She finally decided to go back to working full-time when she accepted a job at PIA, writing speeches for the chairman as well as articles for Humsafar, among other things. Continue reading “Memories: Tributes to Naushaba Burney”

An erratic coalition

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

Pakistan has done many stupid things within the rubrics of foreign and domestic policy. And joining a coalition of predominantly Arab states against ‘terrorism’ where the terrorist and the nature of the activity are defined ad lib could prove one of the most regrettable. There is such a thing as rational neutrality, but it seems to be something with which we are non-aligned.

Of course we are financially indebted to Saudi Arabia (the coalition’s convener) more recently and currently than we are indebted to Iran: But that could also be because Iran has been sanctioned out of prosperity; rather the way Saddam’s Iraq was. And the coalition’s focus is on Iran and Shi’ite ‘insurrectionary’ segments or regimes Iran may be sympathising with in the very troubled Middle East and Gulf states. Iran has never taken a side that is overtly or covertly hostile to Pakistan or vice versa. Are we coalescing to create adversaries for ourselves and foster sectarian differentiations? Continue reading “An erratic coalition”

Remembering Najma Sadeque

Najma

By Deneb Sumbal Sadeque

Dear Mum’s friends, peers and colleagues,
On this day, last year my mother, Najma Sadeque, left us so unexpectedly. Losing a parent is always hard, but losing a mother like her is impossible to describe. You feel a huge vacuum and yet feel her strong presence. Someone who didn’t just leave an example for me, but for so many others who reminiscence often. She is still missed by those who loved and revered her. Continue reading “Remembering Najma Sadeque”

After the assassination

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

Taking the assassination of Benazir Bhutto as a watershed, in what direction has the traumatized PPP travelled? One could say it parted ways from both its own realities and national ones. Playing upon the deep-seated tradition of deference to the dead and intense emotional rebound to the political tragedy, her successors rapidly recast the dynamically minded Benazir into a figurehead of persecuted martyrdom.

The process facilitated the PPP’s emergent leader in personally securing party control and subsequently obtaining and retaining executive and legislative leadership.

It is now political blasphemy for the party hierarchy not to pay unthinking homage to voices that speak with oracular authority from what has become the Bhutto-Zardari shrine. The tragic irony is that this idolization is sounding a death-knell for the uniquely vital mainstream national party: Continue reading “After the assassination”

Cultural Diversity: Life in Karachi

By Rumana Husain

Please note: This paper was presented at the Second Silk Road International Cultural Forum in Moscow, Russia on September 15, 2015, in the session on Cultural diversity contributes to innovation, and later with slight modifications as The Tangible and Intangible Aspects of Cultural Diversity at a Roundtable Discussion in the Rumi Forum where the overriding theme was Respect Difference and Diversity to Foster Peace and Harmony, on October 14, 2015.

Cultural diversity, tangible and intangible, affects and influences our lives, wherever we may be living. We imbibe diversity, consciously or unconsciously. The result is perhaps more significant in cultures which are still predominantly traditional, within today’s modern urban condition.

Continue reading “Cultural Diversity: Life in Karachi”