Category Archives: Guest Contributor

Playing with hellfire

Guest Contributor, Islamisation, Politics
TLYRA dharna

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

MUCH significance is being attached to the rise of the TLYRA (Tehreek-e- Labaik Ya Rasool Allah) and its political face TLP (Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan) ; and the MWM (Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen). There must be finer points of differentiation in party postures but the new bodies seem a Maulana TQ’s PAT derivative in terms of political leverage (intent is a matter of speculative personal opinion). But the future may be fraught with menacing linkages.

In 2012 Maulana TQ baulked from venturing to show how his national electoral vote-bank matched the heft of his staunch foot soldiers in road-camps. Awesomely righteous he remains; but a comparatively familiar game changer does not occasion the anxiety the undefined goals of these fresh but by-electorally promising moral stalwarts do – or, perhaps even more pertinently, could be projected as embodying. They are not waving the Daesh flag (anyone can chalk walls or paste posters of any sort) but they have made their debut  customized to the current international perception of militant Muslim obscurantism. Their apparent success and the government’s apparently craven surrender enables international global-jihadism terrorist-risk-perception tanked up thinkers to move Pakistan a notch higher on the flashpoint watch-list of alarmingly unstable, no matter how wistfully democratic, extremism prone Muslim countries. Continue reading Playing with hellfire →

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Fragility

Administration, Children and Youth, Culture and the Arts, Education, Guest Contributor, Human Rights, Justice, Politics
Sabeen Mahmud was killed for her liberal views

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

JUST a few weeks ago there was an example of the inter-related fragility of our political-religious equilibrium. The wording of the oath for elected representatives was altered. The drift of reaction was that the reworded version insulated avowal of the finality of prophet-hood.

The previous wording was rapidly restored before cries of heresy and the like gained violent momentum. But the matter gave clerical-conglomerate cause for a rally; and the fact of the cancelled alteration is there to be referred to by those who choose to find Islamic intent deficient in the way persons or parties of their naming practice politics. Continue reading Fragility →

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Narratives

Guest Contributor, Politics

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

You cannot exclude the religious factor in Pakistan, whatever you dub the republic and to whatever you ascribe the founding urge. And it can be asserted with equal validity that the secession of East Pakistan and proclamation of Bangladesh demolished the two-nation theory commonly claimed to be the rationale of Pakistan’s creation. Or that the RSS and Modi’s Hindutva confirms it. The communal Hindu-Muslim power struggle is a continuity in the subcontinent’s historical chronicle around which narratives fabricate –- some spontaneous and incremental; others conscious and didactic. They are often supplementary and reactive. Continue reading Narratives →

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Much ado about something

Guest Contributor, Law & Order, Politics

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

MUCH has been made of the legislative dexterity that allowed Nawaz Sharif to return to being official president of the eponymous PML(N). What leaves anonymous citizens confused is that there are (at least) two starkly different interpretations of that bit of legislation.

One reading has it that the move exposes parliament as a farcical misrepresentation where parliamentarians connive in trampling public interest underfoot and are better circumvented in the cause of the state’s eco-political interests. The other reading is that parliament is to be congratulated for asserting its electorally mandated legislative powers and has embarrassed extra interventionism. It’s a tug of war figuratively speaking right now, but the mandated government and the mandated opposition seem determined to keep on pulling till something snaps. Continue reading Much ado about something →

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Whatever lies ahead

Guest Contributor, Justice, Politics

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

WHATEVER lies ahead or went before, the IJIC inclusion of Nawaz Sharif’s family’s offshore assets as revealed in the PanamaLeaks, at a fortuitous but blessed moment for the political opposition, has culminated in his local political disqualification.
Diligent digital research yielded other Panama-originated leaks featuring sundry plutocrats – in drips as it were. Indeed an international basket of politicians has been highlighted by the ICIJ, so it doesn’t seem as if Nawaz Sharif was being targeted or a country prioritized for scrutiny by extra-territorial watchdogs. The leak was, however, a veritable tsunami of good luck for Imran Khan who had not been able to achieve his declared and entirely altruistic end of getting the ‘corrupt’ Nawaz to go despite a fiercely sustained battery of charges of election-rigging; state brutality; to say nothing of dharnas, lockdowns, jalsas, rallies and vehicular marches. Continue reading Whatever lies ahead →

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Taking to the streets

Guest Contributor, Politics
PTI street power

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

There is a difference between grass roots and street power.

To start with the MQM. It had the kind of street power that could both empty and fill the streets to considerable effect: Its leverage worked; but it was not admired. The MQM as factionalized –- imploded and exploded –- no longer commands that kind of street power.

Yet, alongside of its waning street power, its grass root political strength is more clearly perceived. Besides its thugs (I choose that word for its wider etymological ethnic resonances) it evidently has a broad constituency that remains loyal to cadres of a well-organized party whose workers stayed in touch with and served and protected the people they represented. The party leadership presently is amorphous even though the founder is unambiguously self-destructed, but the constituency remains. Continue reading Taking to the streets →

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May 12th 2007-17

General, Guest Contributor, History, Human Rights, Justice, Politics, Social Issues

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

May 12th   2017 is as good as come and gone. As I recall 2007—the year of CJP Iftikhar Chaudhry, for his persona was at once the catalyst and dynamic—that May 12th anniversary marker’s mood-content would be anachronistic today. Its villains and martyrs have squirmed and shifted, and are no longer held firmly within the mould of that year’s context.

Which also indicates its characters are operative: vital and politically relevant, not merely historical.   Continue reading May 12th 2007-17 →

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Flipping pages

Constitution, Defence and Disarmament, Foreign Policy of Pakistan, Guest Contributor, Politics, War and Peace
On the same page?

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

Our country’s history predisposes us to dwell on the tensions of the civil and military relationship and the resultant impact on our politics. Implicit in the spasmodically yet doggedly publicized affaire of Dawn ‘Leaks’ is the underwriting of the thought that the armed forces and the civil government are/may/will be at cross-purposes; or that one or both of these bulwarks of the state may have conflicting currents within them: A more perilously confusing state—domestically and internationally—than the frank impropriety of civil government being subservient to military diktat; or the armed forces blatantly flouting or choosing to act independently of civilian policy’s direction and directives. Continue reading Flipping pages →

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Learning the hard way

Constitution, Defence and Disarmament, Guest Contributor, History, Justice, Politics

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

IT is of course entirely politically incorrect to miss the doctrine of necessity, and still more reprehensible to think wistfully of the Eighth Amendment. I would hate to appear on the side of our uniformly distinguished dictators who (fairly successful in some ways though toxic in others) variously went a-looking for the essence of democracy; an indigenous democracy not overawed by modes as of Parliament and Capitol Hill; or quite humbly a basic democracy; using those very legal implements. But quoi faire? Our democracy flounders like the bat in democratic daylight and finds its wings when fighting the dark of martial law. Continue reading Learning the hard way →

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