This Month Warning Of Imran Khan Chairmen Of PTI

Meera breaks into tears during Amir Liaquat show

Lollywood Film Star

KARACHI: Famous Pakistani film star Meera broke into tears during Dr Amir Liaquat Hussain’ morning TV show “Subh-e-Pakistan” on Wednesday as she tendered apologies for her past controversial actions.

The actress, known for being involved in controversies, was apologising on Hussain’s appeal when broke into tears on live television.

The show host had requested her to apologise for filming objectionable scenes in Bollywood movies among other scandals she had been a part of.

Amir Liaquat said a sincere apology to God and self-reproach can wash away all sins. The emotional speech from the famous religious scholar greatly affected the glamorous actress as she put on a head-scarf and repeated after Hussain, who dictated the apology.

Meera said she was sorry for hurting sentiments of the nation and vowed not to indulge in any activity that can damage the goodwill of the country.

The lawyers who thronged the court in support of Mumtaz Qadri

ISLAMABAD: The lawyers who thronged the court in support of Mumtaz Qadri, the killer of Salman Taseer, do so in hope of a ‘heavenly reward’ as they believe defending the convict is part of their ‘religious obligations.’

They were there on a chilly Tuesday morning, in all shapes and sizes and ages – thin, plump; old, middle aged and young; dressed in crumpled gowns and with straggly beards or clean shaven, clad in smart winter coats.

There were so many of them that the small room at the Islamabad High Court could not accommodate them all and many had to be content to wait outside in the cold. Those inside were hardly more comfortable as they were pushed and shoved as they stood balancing themselves against the wall, in a room that grew warm and humid while it drizzled outside.

Among those who attended the hearing of an appeal filed by Qadri against his conviction by an anti-terrorism court (ATC) were member Punjab Bar Council Sajjad Akbar Abbasi, former presidents Lahore High Court (LHC) bar association, Rawalpindi, Taufiq Asif, and Ahsanuddin Sheikh, and former president Islamabad bar association Naseer Kayani.

All of them were there to assist the lead counsel for Qadri - former chief justice of LHC Khawaja Mohammad Sharif and retired Justice Mian Nazir Ahmed, who have come out of retirement to defend Qadri.

As a lawyer present there commented: “These two ‘defence’ lawyers are senior to the judges hearing this case.”

But it appeared that most of those present were doing their ‘religious duty’.

When Dawn asked a lawyer why he had associated himself with the case, Mohammad Waqas Malik replied: “Ghazi Ilam Din, who killed a ‘blasphemer’, was represented by Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah.”

When another lawyer reminded him that Ghazi Ilam Din was convicted and hanged, Malik shrugged and said: “It was during the government of non-believers and the judge who convicted Ilam Din was also a non-Muslim.”

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For them, standing for Mumtaz Qadri is a religious obligation

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Similar views were also expressed by the former chief justice of LHC Khawaja Mohammad Sharif after the court’s proceedings.

In the courtroom, it seemed as if there was a dominant narrative.

Mohammad Azhar Chaudhry, former vice-chairman of the Punjab Bar Council, said he returned Rs10 million that the previous PPP government had offered and refused to become a prosecutor in the Taseer murder case in 2011. And he did this, he said, because he is also a Qadri supporter.

Sajjad Abbasi, member Punjab Bar Council, told Dawn that his (Abbasi’s) legal and religious obligations compelled him to support Qadri.”

A senior office-bearer of the IHC bar association in a lighter tone whispered that “the prosecutor in this case will get a US visa for sure especially if he succeeds in getting Qadri’s appeal dismissed.”

“It would become difficult for the prosecutor to live in the country after this case.”

Others went so far as to say that the judge that had earlier found Qadri guilty had already migrated despite the fact that someone insisted that he was still in the country.

Former president of the LHC bar association, Rawalpindi, Ahsanuddin Sheikh, who is representing former chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry in the Rs20 billion defamation suit against Imran Khan, added: “Qadri has the right to engage the lawyer of his choice. I am assisting Khawaja Sharif in this case.”

Advocate Sheikh remained in the courtroom till the end of the proceedings and left only when Khawaja Sharif allowed him to.

Rao Rahim, a young Islamabad-based lawyer, claimed that 33 lawyers were representing Qadri and scores others were supporting him.

He added that at the first hearing on January 27, at least 90 lawyers had attended the proceedings while this time around the number was less.

A security official deployed in the IHC said the number of Qadri’s lawyers was not more than three dozen.

However, as compared to January 27, the strength of Qadri’s supporters outside the IHC building had nearly doubled. They had gathered on the service road adjacent to the IHC much before the proceedings began. Carrying the flags of Pakistan Sunni Tehrik (PST), they stayed there till the end.

Qadri’s brother Malik Mohammad Safeer was also among them. He said his brother had done nothing wrong. “He (Qadri) is satisfied in jail and has asked us not to visit him in the prison.”

Earlier, a young lawyer had said in the courtroom: “He is approaching the court for the legal route. Otherwise, look at what happened in Bannu. People broke into the jail to free the inmates.”

Pakistan: Fast Boller Junaid Khan Injured During Balling Practice

Police has Captured Victim of Six Year Old Boy

Pakistan And The IMF

Every time I tell someone that I am working on the history of Pakistan’s relationship with the IMF, there is one question that always comes up: “Is the IMF evil?”

There are many iterations of this question, but it always boils down to this: “They say once a country borrows from them,” said one particularly keen questioner, “that country can never repay the debt and remains in their clutches forever, is it true?”

I’m always struck by the level of fear and awe that the Fund commands in our popular imagination. It is run by the Jews, some say. It operates like a medieval money lender, it has usurious terms on its loans, nobody who falls in their clutches ever gets out. The better off try and connect it with some imperialist ambitions: it is a tool of US foreign policy, used to reward those who serve the imperial masters and punish those who disagree. It engineers the overthrow of governments and works in cahoots with the CIA, another told me rather insistently, brushing aside my questions that would cast doubt on the assertion.

Protesters condemned conditions of the IMF on Pakistan and urged international financial institutions to write off Pakistan’s loans.— File Photo

 answer to the question is always the same: no, the IMF is not evil, but it’s also not as innocent as it would like us all to believe. Does this mean that it is only slightly better than what popular imagination would say? No, the fact of the matter is actually far more humdrum than what popular imagination would like to believe. The Fund is actually just another bureaucratic body, trying to pursue an increasingly difficult mission, in an increasingly divided world.

The popular imagination in Pakistan is used to perceiving this country as permeated by foreign interests, a mindset that is in part a legacy of the many frontline roles the country has played in superpower campaigns. It’s also used to perceiving all government bodies with extreme distrust and an equally extreme disdain. International institutions that interact regularly with the government, therefore, find themselves sucked into the perceptions that arise from this distrust and disdain. 

And few international bodies have had a longer and more intrusive role to play in Pakistan than the IMF.

So what exactly has this long role been that the Fund has played in our economy?

Let’s start with the obvious. The IMF is an international institution created in the aftermath of World War II along with a whole number of other international institutions that were designed to help operate the post-war order that emerged from the ruins of the British Empire. Those institutions include the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Postal Union to give a couple of examples.

The IMF had a specific mandate. It was designed to help countries tide over temporary balance of payments difficulties. If the price of cotton collapsed in one year, for example, due to a bumper harvest in some other cotton producing country, small countries that relied on cotton exports to earn their foreign exchange would find their reserves of dollars deplete very rapidly. The depleting reserves would curtail their ability to pay for their imports which could end up crippling large sections of their economy if, let’s say, they couldn’t afford to make payments on oil imports any longer.

A small and temporary payments difficulty of this sort could cascade through the economy and create a much larger crisis, maybe even lead to default on external debt obligations. There needed to be, the architects of this new order agreed, some way for countries vulnerable to periodic balance of payments difficulties, to be able to borrow quickly to tide over short term problems without falling into a full blown crisis that could have international ramifications.

Total exports per capita (in real terms)

Those were the good old days when the world was a simpler place. Pakistan borrowed three times from the IMF during the Ayub Khan regime, and each of those facilities was a short-term Standby Arrangement of exactly the sort envisioned in the original Articles of Agreement under which the Fund was created.

The more interesting borrowing history began in the 1980s. Those were the years the world economy was emerging from a debilitating decade of stagnant growth and high inflation that the 1970s became famous for. But the renewed global growth came at a cost. Many parts of the Third World, as it was known at the time, fell into a massive debt crisis, as the levels of their borrowing fast exceeded their ability to repay. Latin America was at the epicentre of that crisis, and by mid decade a massive effort had to be launched to ensure that the region did not default on its external loans, in part by urging those banks that had extended loans to them to soften the terms on which repayment would be made.

The Fund’s mission underwent an important change during that time. When the dust settled from the Latin American debt crisis, the Fund was no longer confined to lending only to paper over temporary balance of payments problems. From that point onwards, the Fund’s mission grew to include reviving economic growth in stagnant economies.

This was a critical turning point, and it carried the Fund deeper into the borrowing countries economic management than it had ever gone before. Reviving growth, it turned out, was a far more complex affair than simply papering over a temporary balance of payments problem. The Fund staff had to become party to the myriad and complex dysfunctions that afflicted the borrowing country’s economy, and the terms of its loans entered into areas that they had never imagined they would be entering.

From here on, the Fund found itself examining the budgets of every borrowing country and urging structural changes in the economy that they could not have done in the earlier times. Privatisations, trade liberalisation and altering the institutional architecture of the state were all far reaching requirements that the Fund began to insist upon from borrowing countries in this time.

This new and intrusive commitment is what sparked the first big criticisms of the IMF. In Latin America, the Fund was accused by left leaning critics of being a tool of Western capital, seeking to pry open the economies of the region for penetration by American companies seeking profitable terms of investment. In later years, the criticism was echoed from Africa as well.

The next big growth in the Fund’s mission came in the wake of the collapse of the USSR in 1991. As Eastern European countries lined up for bailouts, the Fund threw its weight behind the “shock therapy” programmes dreamed up by champions of free market thinking. The long and painful years of collapsing infrastructure and unemployment that followed were blamed on the Fund, and the kind of thinking it had embraced in its search to kick-start growth in “transition countries” of the former Soviet bloc.

In the late 1990s, the Fund found itself sucked into a new kind of crisis altogether, with the onset of the East Asian financial crisis. This was no ordinary debt crisis, nor a temporary balance of payments issue, and not an issue connected with transitioning from a centrally planned economy to a liberal market economy. The sudden drain of foreign exchange reserves that countries like South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand experienced in this crisis was the popping of a large bubble, and there was little to no guidance available within the economics profession on how to properly manage the aftermath of such an event.

Another critique of the Fund emerged following its bailouts of East Asian economies in this episode. It was championed by some of the biggest names in the economics profession, like Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner, who argued the Fund acted to safeguard the interests of western bond investors rather than the common citizenry of the countries in question.

And most lately, the Fund has again found itself in the middle of a new type of crisis, this time centred on the United States and particularly Europe. For the first time, the Fund departed from its traditional recipe for crisis management, and has advocated moving away from strict fiscal discipline as the main remedy for crisis, arguing that a rapid unravelling of the myriad stimulus schemes put in place in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis is undesirable, and that large economies such as Germany should shoulder some of the pain of rescuing smaller European economies like Greece and Portugal.

Pakistan’s story in the Fund

The interesting thing to note through all this is that none of the large critiques developed about the IMF applies to the case of Pakistan. Western investors are not exactly battering down the doors to gain access to our economy or its natural resources. Our financial system is hardly so large or so deeply connected with the global economy to present a risk to the international financial system, like was the case in East Asia in the late 1990s. We are strategically important to the superpower, but nowhere near as important as Russia was in the 1990s, or Eastern European countries were during the decade of their transition, nor has our opening up involved anywhere near the complexities that were involved in transitioning from communist to liberal capitalist systems in the former Soviet Union.

Our region too, has no sustained history of interaction with the Fund. India signed one facility with the IMF in 1991, Bangladesh has had three facilities since 1990, Sri Lanka has had two while Nepal has had three. Pakistan, by contrast, has had 12 IMF programmes since 1988, more than all the other countries of the region combined. Our story with the Fund is uniquely ours, it does not partake of any of the larger critiques developed about the Fund over the decades.

Even in the case of other South Asian countries, it is hard to employ any of the critiques of the Fund that have grown out of the experience of other regions in other times. The role the Fund has played in South Asia is fundamentally different from the role it has played in Latin America, Africa, East Asia, Eastern Europe or the European Union today. The nature of the crises in which it has had to intervene in South Asia is also fundamentally different from the debt crisis of the 1980s, or the foreign currency crisis of East Asia in the late 1990s, or overseeing the transition of post communist societies in the early 1990s, or the restarting of growth in the EU today. In short, the story of the IMF and Pakistan has been told very sparsely, and is not widely understood.

What exactly is this story?

One place where the story has been told is in a paper written in 2013 by two former Fund staffers of Pakistani origin that was circulated amongst a select group and is now available online from the website of the Asia Research Center at the London School of Economics. The authors are Dr Ehtisham Ahmad and Azizali Mohammad, both of whom have held senior positions in the Fund and have a reputation that is global in scope.

The paper’s title gives away the biggest clue: Pakistan, the United States and the IMF, great game or a curious case of Dutch Disease without the oil?

Right at the outset, we can see that they are casting the role of Pakistan IMF relations within the matrix of larger Pakistan-America relations. The subheading tells us more; Dutch Disease is a technical term used by economists to describe a situation where a country is used to easy money from a particular source — let’s say oil exports. The country in question is therefore unable to develop any other sectors of its economy or break its dependence on the stream of easy money flowing in through a single source. That, of course, is a gross simplification but in a nutshell describes the problem at hand.

Consider how Dutch disease works in a typical case. Take a country that exports oil, and the resultant inflows of foreign exchange are so large that its currency is very strong in comparison to that of its trading partners. People in that country will not be able to invest in manufacturing because whatever they produce will be so much more expensive that what they can simply import from abroad, rendering the country unable to develop an export base beyond oil and oil based products. 

Look at how the Gulf countries, for instance, have been utterly unable to build any economic sector beyond oil that is competitive globally, and you’ll understand how the phenomenon works.

Consider the impact this has on the host economy. With a narrow base for the economy, the country’s exports will remain stuck in one product, and the revenue base of the state will not grow either. So long as oil prices are high, in the example of the oil producing country we’ve taken, the government will be happy to accumulate plenty of reserves, generate ample revenue from the oil economy, and pay for imports to help sustain its consumption. High levels of consumptions will come easy to this sort of country, but only while international factors like high oil prices help pay for it.

In the case of Pakistan, the authors of the paper argue, the Fund’s role appears to have produced an effect similar to Dutch disease, except there is no oil or any other resource in the picture. The resource that has produced continuous inflows of easy money that prevent a broadening of the revenue base as well as hinder the accumulation of reserves through broadening of the export base, is what they call a “locational rent”.

In a nutshell, what this means is that Pakistan was too important to fail. During the 1980s, the country was too important a player in American foreign policy, and was kept afloat through generous aid programmes. When the aid dried up, the IMF stepped in and disbursements continued. Once the aid resumed following 9/11, the Fund became less important as a source of foreign exchange for Pakistan. 

Following 2008, a complex system was instituted to channel civilian aid with very high accountability mechanisms through the Kerry-Lugar bill. Military aid continued in the form of CSF “reimbursements”, and the IMF was engaged to provide balance of payments support to shore up the reserves. But at no point was Pakistan cut off from its continuous injections of external assistance, except perhaps for a brief period following the nuclear detonations in 1998, and even then the Fund came to the rescue with a small facility in 2000 that prevented the country from slipping into a balance of payments crisis.

This history of continuous injections from abroad inculcated a warped sense of priorities in successive governments. Rather than focusing on reforms to “mobilise domestic resources”, that is, to encourage tax reforms and encourage productivity to promote exports in a rapidly globalising world, the emphasis for successive governments came to be on ensuring the release of the next tranche of dollars from the Fund. And the Fund itself, under instructions from its patrons in the US government, readily obliged each tranche by going easy on the reviews and giving Pakistan a continuous series of waivers.

All of the 12 facilities that Pakistan has signed with the IMF since 1988 have had two objectives: one, to close the gap between revenues and expenditures in order to prevent the deficit from getting out of control and; two, to raise the level of the foreign exchange reserves. For almost a quarter century now, these are the two core priorities that Pakistan has been grappling with.

And every programme has had fundamentally similar conditionalities to achieve these objectives. Raising revenues has meant instituting new taxes on consumption, called the General Sales Tax, which is designed to help document the economy and broaden the base of the revenue machinery. Raising foreign exchange reserves has meant boosting export competitiveness, and freeing the currency from political influence.

In order to achieve these objectives, it was considered necessary to reform the tax machinery and to grant autonomy to the State Bank to manage the reserves. Each programme that Pakistan has signed has tried to accomplish these objectives, but in every case the authorities have been unable to follow through with their commitments. The authors of the paper mentioned earlier refer to “10 red cover reports on tax policy and administration” that were developed over the decade of the 1990s to little avail. The tax code remained moth eaten, riddled through with exemptions and the tax bureaucracy remained as uninterested in pursuing documentation and implementing a transparent sales tax as it ever was.

Same was the story with State Bank autonomy, except for a brief period in the 1990s again, but which became outmoded in the years following 9/11. To this day, the government remains hesitant on this measure, unsure how to follow through on this commitment without giving away the important controls it exercises over the central bank for purposes of borrowing as well as setting the currency and managing the reserves.

A careful look at the IMF and its role in Pakistan over the decades shows that the Fund is certainly not evil, as the popular imagination would like to believe. But it also is not the purely technocratic “lender of last resort”, coming in with purely economic advice in times of crisis either. In fact, the Fund appears to be responding to political compulsions as much as to its own bureaucratic interests when dealing with Pakistan.

Nobody in the world wants to push an unstable, nuclear armed country too hard on difficult economic choices. Such a course of action was indeed adopted against other countries, most notably Sudan in the mid 1980s, when it was unplugged from the global financial system once the IMF refused a bailout. That country slid into unviability very fast and was engulfed by civil war within a decade. Nobody wants to risk similar consequences with Pakistan. So it’s a lot cheaper to keep the country afloat with a couple of billion dollars a year in subsidised inflows, whether through formal aid channels or through the IMF.

But the very fact of keeping the line open, of keeping the country afloat, ends up underwriting a status quo that is increasingly becoming unsustainable, as the expenditures required for the upkeep of the state increasingly outstrip revenues, and the shortfalls on the foreign exchange inflows increase every year. So Pakistan presents the international community with a difficult choice: how to deal with a country that uses its own instability as a bargaining chip for larger and larger bailouts, that would prefer to keep living on bailouts instead of reform domestically and fundamentally rewrite the rules of engagement between the state and the economic elites?

Loud and clear.

Within Pakistan, there is no constituency for change, the rhetoric of some parties notwithstanding. Given the ferocity with which power struggles are waged domestically, nobody, not even military governments, have had the space to attempt to rewrite the social compact between ruler and ruled, which means first and foremost the economic elites. With no constituency for change, the status quo has found new ways to defeat any attempts at reform. So documentation of the economy has not happened, the base of exports has not broadened, the institutional architecture of the state has not been reformed to close of discretionary spaces of decision making. In short, the rulers have always opted to retain the tools with which to reward allies and punish enemies, rather than move to boost productivity and generate revenues.

What this means is that the IMF’s role has been to underwrite the status quo more than the urge to reform. This is a very different role to what it has played in other regions in other times. Contrary to what the popular imagination has conceived, the Fund has worked to give Pakistan exactly what it wants rather than hoist difficult choices upon the state, and by doing so has stalled any possibility of change. It has not done so because it is evil.

Quite the contrary, it has done so because it is powerless before the larger interests that operate with the country, and the international partners, particularly the superpower, that would prefer to keep the country chugging along rather than risk any semblance of instability. The Fund is, therefore, not some powerful international agency pushing a foreign agenda upon us. Instead, it is a toothless bureaucracy trying to keep its head above water in the stormy seas that Pakistan is drifting upon.

Really admire Imran's love for his sons: Reham Khan

In this handout photograph released by the PTI, Imran Khan and new wife Reham Khan pose for a photograph during their wedding ceremony at his house in Islamabad. -AFP

ISLAMABAD: On the day of her marriage to PTI chairman Imran Khan, DawnNews anchor Reham Khan Thursday evening made her first public statement on the channel since her marriage.

The broadcast journalist described what drew her to the PTI chairman on the programme Infocus.
"I was looking for a man who would be a good role model for my children," Reham said.

"Really admire Imran's love for his sons...Pakistani men should emulate his example," she said.

PTI leader Arif Alvi, who was also on the programme, joked with her when she was discussing how she managed to marry the PTI leader.

She joked that she doesn’t have anything to teach Imran Khan saying that that PTI leader is a “very capable” individual.

When asked if she will enter politics, she said that while she has been active in social work she has no interest in politics.

"I don’t think a person such as me could be elected in the current system in Pakistan," she told the programme.

"I am interested in politics as a journalist, observer and historian," she said.

Reham said she will be returning as a host of her show in DawnNews.

The couple wed today in a simple ceremony at the PTI leader’s residence in Bani Gala. 


The low-key ceremony, was conducted by Mufti Saeed and was followed by a photo session of the newly-weds.

The cricketer-turned-politician was previously married to English journalist and activist Jemima Goldsmith for nine years. The marriage ended amicably in 2004

Reham Khan was previously married to psychologist Ijaz Rehman, with whom she had three children.

India and Pakistan: The fault is not in our stars

In the hands of zealots and fanatics, the stories become an argument against all peace initiatives, making the journey all the more strenuous. —Reuters

“The fault, dear Brutus”, Cassius says in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” is not in our stars, but in ourselves”.
Years and years of ‘Aman ke Aashas’ and cabinet level meetings, of confidence-building measures and sari exchanges, of showing up at swearing-in ceremonies and civil society initiatives ... and then they all come tumbling down.

Slowly, painfully, assiduously we pick up the beads and start threading them. Each pearl is accounted for, each step pondered over, but then one slip and the process has to start afresh.

Extravagant, excessive preparations are made to make an omelet of reconciliation. Then a singular egg turns out to be bad, and the food gets spoil.

It is not that we do not comprehend the need to establish friendly relations. The inevitable falling back to the narratives of peace and of building goodwill, the talks of overcoming the barriers and the friendly gestures all betray the understanding of the necessity of peace that persists among members of the public. If there was a lack of will, these processes would never have initiated, ab initiation.

When the anger subsides, the realization returns that belligerence is not a sustainable model; it cannot persevere, it has to stop.

Why, then, do these initiatives fail time and again?

It is because the animosity is too deep, the sentiments too fragile, the composure too fickle and the hurdles too many. It is this peculiarity which exists in men the world over, but most of all in the men of the subcontinent – the unyielding hubris, and the vanity. That is all it takes to lose focus of the objectives.

All it requires is one Vikram Sood and one Amir Liaqat, and a single moment of commentary in the presence of a jeering, thumping crowd.

All it demands is a single brainwashed soldier, who knows nothing better, and a moment of inhumanity that clouds the mind, to undo years of hard work.

This then gets shared, accumulates airtime, gains public attention and plays on the minds of the two nations – the nations, mind you, who are not wary of barbaric reactions themselves.

Gojra and Gujrat; Babri mosque in Ayodhya and Sri Krishna Ram temple in Karachi; the forced conversions in Uttar Pradesh and the forced conversions in Upper Sindh; all indicate to one aspect of the two nations: despite the animosity, and the overbearing pride in individuality, we are not too different.

We are more alike in treating our minorities than we would feel comfortable to admit.

In the hands of zealots and fanatics, the stories become an argument against all peace initiatives, making the journey all the more strenuous.

Patriotism becomes analogous to war cries, and public representatives, forever ready to pounce on a chance to gain some cheap publicity, dish out threatening statements, basking in their bubbles and relishing the short-lasting pertinence.

Unfortunately, the hawks always take over the narrative in these moments. The cardinal rule of perception is that the more intense, the more enduring statements would be perceived more readily by the public. These bring in ratings, and popularity. They ring home with the fable that has been etched in the conscience of the two countries. In the river of peace, the few ripples of pugnacity get noticed, and the relative sustaining calm gets easily ignored.

Philosophy believes the solutions do exist. Saadi Sherazi, the Persian poet had written:

Garat Khoway man amad nasazawar;


Tu khoway naik-e-khawaish az dast maguzar

[If my nature does not bode well with you, you don’t have to lose your own good nature because of it.]
Or like Marcus Aurelius, one of the five good emperors of Machiavelli, puts it: “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury”.

 

One of the two nations would have to show magnanimity; one of the two would have to sacrifice; and one of the two would have to take a leap of faith.

 

The warmongering would have to take a backseat, despite the excesses from the other side. Hearts would have to be won, foremost. Paranoia would have to be placated. Without this, the current state of affairs would persist.

Building any relationship requires working, but the one that comes with this much baggage requires the most. This is a rut, escaping from which requires considerable courage, ability to forgive and a lot more forbearance than we have shown the capability of.

The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Zikris Under Fire

Women standing on the steps of a Zikri praying area in Teertej, Awaran. —Fahim Siddiqi/White Star

 

THE traditionally secular nature of Baloch society has been under threat for some time, and things appear to be taking a turn for the worse. A report in this paper recently detailed the growing persecution of the small community of Zikris — a little-known Islamic sect — who are concentrated mainly in southern Balochistan. In July, several Zikris were injured when a bus carrying members of the community was the target of a roadside bomb in Khuzdar, and the following month their Khana-i-zikr in district Awaran was attacked. Six worshippers were killed and seven injured. Around 400 Zikris have moved out of the area after the incident. Members of the community have also been singled out in various cases of looting in Awaran and Turbat. These incidents have reportedly begun to vitiate the traditionally harmonious relationship between Zikris and other Muslim sects whose lives are often intertwined through ties of kinship.

Although the Zikris — unlike the Hazaras — are ethnic Baloch, there has been a consistent effort led by religious parties in the province to marginalise them on account of what are considered their unorthodox practices. These efforts gained further strength from regional developments, such as the Afghan war of the early ’80s, which led to the proliferation of madressahs in the province churning out jihadis for the next-door theatre of war. Upon returning home, the governance void that has long been Balochistan allowed them to entrench themselves, and sow discord among the Baloch along religious lines. By doing so, they also served the interests of state elements cynically patronising ideologically-driven extremist groups to counter the Baloch insurgency which, like the society from which it arises, is secular in character. A people divided are, after all, easier to control. This provincial government, with its nationalist credentials and representative aspects, is better placed than many others to demonstrate a real understanding of the problems that bedevil the province. But it has yet to demonstrate it has the courage to do something about them.

The Untold Story Of Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law.

Junaid Jamshed asks for forgiveness in a video

A few days ago, a video of erstwhile pop icon and widely heard Islamic evangelist, Junaid Jamshed went viral on the Internet, in which his remarks were perceived as blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his wife, Ayesha (RA).

 

By the time of the writing of this article, he has been charged under the Blasphemy Law (clause 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code). The clause reads:

295-C – Use of derogatory remarks, etc., in respect of the Holy Prophet:

Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representation or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.

The law prescribes a fixed death penalty for all those who are found guilty. The option of life imprisonment was made defunct after a 1991 Federal Shariat Court judgement.
 Junaid Jamshed has already responded with a public repentance, re-affirmation of his faith and a plea for pardon. 

Unfortunately, for Junaid Jamshed, the dominant religious narrative in the country holds that blasphemy is an unpardonable offence.


Junaid jamshed apology about his recent speech

Simply put – you blaspheme, you die.

 

No ifs, ands or buts about it. The credibility of this assertion is built on an apparently universal consensus (ijma) on the subject across all four Sunni schools of thought. By maintaining this front of scholarly consensus, the religious leadership disallows any concept of an alternative position.

This idea of a unanimous scholarly endorsement of an unwaivable death penalty for blasphemy has been relentlessly repeated: in the Federal Sharia Court Judgment on the blasphemy law in the ‘90s, in the Parliament, in the popular print and oral narrative on television channels, and has seeped deeply into the consciousness of the Pakistani population.

In the collective imagination of mainstream Pakistan, blasphemy is not a pardonable offense and anyone who believes otherwise is also committing blasphemy, and must similarly pay with their life.

Junaid Jamshed’s plea for mercy has raised a question about whether or not a repentant blasphemer may indeed be pardoned.

This is also not the first time the issue is coming under inspection.

The question was asked centuries ago by Hanafi Jurists such as Abu Hanifa, his student Abu Yusuf in Kitab al-Kharaj, Imam Tahawi in Mukhtasar al-Tahawi, Imam Sufyan ath-Thawri, Imam Abu Bakar Ala al-Din Kasani in Bada'i as Sanai, Taqī al-Dīn al-Subki in al-Sayf al-maslūl ‘alā man sabba al-Rasūl, and a vast number of other eminent Hanafi scholars.

All were led to the question that Junaid Jamshed is currently plagued by:

Is blasphemy a pardonable offense?

 

The answer, it is clear, was a categorical yes.

The stance that ‘blasphemers who ask for a pardon would be spared the death penalty’ has already been established by the founder of the Hanafi school of thought, Abu Hanifa.

Within the Hanafi position, it simply does not go higher than Abu Hanifa, and it is the Hanafi school of thought that is foremost in significance, in terms of religio-legal debates in the Supreme Court, the Federal Sharia Court and the Council of Islamic Ideology.

Moreover, a long line of students and followers of Abu Hanifa, legal heavyweights of their respective eras, further corroborated this position in many of their works. Centuries of Hanafi scholarship have maintained the same categorical answer to our original question: Yes, blasphemy is a pardonable offense.
 
Keep in mind: as per the principles (usul) of the Hanafi jurisprudence, a consensus of Abu Hanifa and his students cannot now be challenged.

This is one of the primary principles of taqlid in traditional Islamic legal thought.

The letter of the law 295-C makes no mention of the permissibility of pardoning a blasphemer.

In fact, it is a Federal Sharia Court interpretation of the law that serves as the operational blueprint of the application of the law, which rules out pardon.

They considered the same sources as listed above, and somehow reached the opposite conclusion: that the authoritative position of Imam Abu Hanifa and his students is that blasphemy is not, in fact, a pardonable offense.

How could this possibly have happened? How could such a clearly stated position, maintained for centuries, be so misinterpreted?

In my pursuit of answers, I discovered that in the 15th century a Hanafi scholar, Al-Bazzazzi, misquoted the Hanafi position on pardon that had been established since the time of Abu Hanifa.

It is important to note that he was not offering an alternative stance; he meant to describe the original position but erroneously ended up misrepresenting it entirely. It is baffling to consider how he could have strayed so far from the original position.

Imam Ibn e Abidin, one of the most revered scholars in South Asia, chancing upon his erroneous depiction, was moved to write an impassioned critique of this divergent position – not only explaining Bazzazzi’s error as a 'misreading of two important works' (Al Sarim-ul-Maslool ala Shatim-ur-Rasool by Ibn Taymiyyah and Al Shifa by Qadi Iyad), but also summarily dismissing the idea that blasphemy is unpardonable as “ridiculous”.

 

Excerpt from translated summary of Ibn Abidin’s Radd al-Muhtar ala al-Dur al-Mukhtar.

 

Excerpt from Ibn Abidin’s Radd al-Muhtar ala al-Dur al-Mukhtar in Arabic.

One of the most important scholarly figures in Islamic legal tradition, and one of the most revered figures in Deobandi madrassahs across Pakistan, Imam Ibn Abidin had the wisdom and foresight to warn that these competing narratives, if allowed to exist, would create undue confusion and chaos. He counseled the scholars to be meticulous in their research on the referencing of primary resources.

Where Pakistan's laws came from

 

Advocate Ismaeel Qureshi, the architect of the blasphemy law, apparently did not get the memo.
In his best-selling book on blasphemy and his petition, Qureshi apparently built his case of an irrevocable death penalty, with no scope for pardon on the works of leading Hanafi authorities, and ironically, Imam Ibn Abidin himself.

In an a case of history repeating itself, he followed in Al-Bazzazzi’s footsteps in erroneously subverting the position of Imam Ibn Abidin.

At one point, in Fatawa e Shami, Ibn Abidin takes Bazzazzi’s claim – ‘the punishment for blasphemy is death, it is unpardonable and anyone who disagrees is also guilty of blasphemy’ – dissects it and goes on to criticise it for the next six pages.

Advocate Ismaeel Qureshi, grasping the first thing he saw, slaps Imam Ibn Abidin’s name on to the very position that Abidin so passionately refuted right after quoting the original problematic claim.

Excerpt showing Advocate Ismaeel Qureshi incorrectly attributed Bazzazzi's position to Ibn Abidin.

Advocate Ismaeel Qureshi incorrectly attributed Bazzazzi's position to Ibn Abidin.

 When I learnt of this, I approached Advocate Ismaeel Qureshi with the primary text and showed him the counter-evidence to his assertions.

Qureshi acknowledged that mistakes had been made in the research upon which the judicial interpretation of Pakistan's blasphemy law now rests. The history and process of how the events transpired to produce the law in its current form therefore, reads like a series of unfortunate errors.

The repercussions for those caught in the crossfire, are however, far more deadly than just 'unfortunate'.

Why does no credible source from the mainstream religious leadership then step forward and set the record straight?
 
It seems to be of greater importance to withhold the facts of the case, as a more open dialogue may also incidentally amount to collusion with the secular position – surely, the worst of crimes.
In the midst of all this chaos and misinformation, there is still hope for the likes of Asia Bibi and Junaid Jamshed.

There is no need to change the letter of the blasphemy law for Junaid Jamshed and Asia Bibi to get their pardon. All that is required is to revisit the judicial interpretation, and rectify the erroneous conclusion of the Federal Sharia Court that was reached on the basis of dubious research.

The blasphemy law, according to the Hanafi position, allows for pardon.

That is all that Imam Ibn Abidin pointed out.

India Wants To Engage Pakistan In ‘Low-Intensity War’: Asif

Pakistan's Defence Minister Khawaja Asif speaks during an interview at his office in Islamabad March 6, 2014.— Reuters/file

ISLAMABAD: Defence Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif has said that India wants to engage Pakistan in a “low-intensity war”, expressing confidence that Pakistan is capable of replying to any aggression.

 

“It seems that India does not understand the language of love and peace,” the defence minister told reporters outside the Parliament House after conclusion of the National Assembly session on Saturday.

Mr Asif said the premier had expressed the desire for having peace with India and all other neighbouring countries with sincerity, but India had not reciprocated Islamabad’s goodwill gesture.

“India wants to keep us busy in a low-intensity war or low-intensity engagement on our eastern border. They are pursuing the same tactics of keeping our forces busy on all fronts and the anti-Pakistan mentality of the Indian leadership is now fully exposed,” he added.

Commenting on relentless shelling by India troops along the Working Boundary for the past few days, the defence minister said it seemed that India did not want to see Pakistan’s success in its fight against terrorism. In fact, he added, the Indian aggression at this time proved that it was supporting terrorists.

Mr Asif said India had started cross-border shelling to engage Pakistan’s armed forces on the eastern front at a time when it was busy in the fight against terrorists inside the country and on the western border. “It seems that India does not want to see a durable peace in Pakistan, Afghanistan and in the region,” he said.

 The defence minister said Islamabad had raised the issue of the killing of two personnel of Chenab Rangers and civilians with India at all appropriate forums.

Hafiz Gul Bahadur Group Targeted In North Waziristan Drone Strike

An Unmanned Aerial System vehicle stands inside a hangar at Bagram Air Field in the Parwan province of Afghanistan January 3, 2015.— Reuters

 

 

 

 

PESHAWAR: A drone strike in North Waziristan tribal region's Shawal valley area killed eight people and wounded two others on Sunday. This is the first drone attack of the new year in Pakistan.

Sources says that the drone targeted a compound belonging to an Uzbek commander of the Taliban's Hafiz Gul Bahadur group. The area which was hit is the Wacha Basti village near Alwara Mandi in Datakhel.
Sources added that a high-value target may have been killed in the strike but his identity could not be ascertained yet.

Fear and panic gripped the area as drones were seen flying above in the skies after the attack.
Shawal valley lies on the border of Pakistan's North Waziristan and South Waziristan tribal areaa.

North Waziristan is among Pakistan’s seven tribal districts near the Afghan border which are rife with insurgents and are alleged to be strongholds of Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, among others.

Drone attacks are widely unpopular across Pakistan and according to survey conducted in June 2013, 66 per cent of the country's citizens oppose these strikes.

LHC Halts Execution Of Death Row Convict

AFP FILE --

LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) on Friday halted the execution of a death row convict named Faiz Ahmad.

A two-member member bench of the LHC headed by Justice Abdus Sami Khan and including Justice Sardar Tariq Masood stopped the execution in response to a petition filed by Ahmad's counsel Abdul Khaliq.

Khaliq had submitted an application in the LHC, saying his client's appeal against the death sentence was pending in the Supreme Court since 2009 and therefore his death warrant must be set aside by the court.

Earlier on Dec 24, an anti-terrorism court (ATC) had issued Ahmad's death warrant on an application filed by a superintendent of Faisalabad jail. The date for Ahmad's hanging was set for January 14.

The superintendent had stated that condemned prisoner Ahmad was awarded the death penalty in 2006 for killing Lance Naik Tariq Mahmood in Nankana Sahib.

The court halted the execution today and said the ATC must submit an application in the LHC clarifying as to why a death warrant was issued for his execution on Dec 24 when his appeal has been pending with the apex court since 2009.

So far seven convicts have been hanged since the lifting of a moratorium on death penalty by the government after the Peshawar school carnage.

On Dec 17, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had lifted the moratorium on death penalty after the attack on Peshawar's Army Public School that killed more than 140 people — including 134 school children.

The moratorium was imposed by former president Asif Ali Zardari during the tenure of the Pakistan Peoples Party government.

Say hello to iJihad - Mujahid Online

In the not so distant future, the fight to win over Muslims will move from battle and oil fields to digital domains. —AP

Not to be outdone by the rest in the Internet age, the Jihadists have readily embraced modern communication technologies. From their recruitment videos on YouTube to timely tweets of their vicious attacks on civilians, the Jihadists are out and about preaching online to whoever is willing to listen to their diatribe.

It started earlier with the video recorders, when the militants recorded their attacks and sent the videos to the news media. Hezbollah of Lebanon was among the first to use videos of their attacks as a propaganda tool. The advent of YouTube made the task even simpler: kill, record, and upload. is it sound funny ??

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has transformed the way individuals, corporations, and governments communicate, using social media. The jihadists of today are unlike those of yester years who shunned all things western.

To the older generations, TV was an evil box. To the modern-day Jihadists, Facebook and Twitter are godsend. Even IS has launched an Arabic language Twitter app (The Dawn of Glad Tidings) to recruit and raise funds.

The Jihadists do share common traits with others in the way they use the Internet to recruit. They use social media to communicate with like-minded individuals and keep them abreast of their activities. Tweeting about their latest exploits or Facebook status updates about attacks in the semi-rural hinterlands of hard-to-reach places, which are yet to be profiled by Google street maps, keep the propaganda engine churning.
However, that’s where the similarities end.

The Jihadists rely on the word-of-mouth approach by placing their content in cyberspace. They have not been able to take out online Ads to target their message at the intended. It is highly unlikely that Google Ads will carry messages for IS or Boko Haram. Instead, the reverse is true. Jihadists social media accounts are routinely suspended by the companies and ISP providers refuse to host their online content. The Jihadists then have learned to operate within the limits to avoid a clampdown on their recognised Internet outlets.

From Alim online to Mujahid online

TV evangelism morphed earlier into digital evangelism. The Jihadists have taken this a step further. They use the social media to field questions from wannabe jihadists.

A European Jihadi wannabe asked an Internet-savvy Jihadist about the quality of dental care in Syria. The aspiring Jihadi was concerned about his braces. Another inquired about the general quality of healthcare. Yet another westerner was concerned about the availability of central heating in Syria and Iraq.

While the Jihadist’s use of social media often provides comic relief, it is also successful in converting young westerners to extremist ideologies. The Great Recession of 2007/08 had a devastating impact on European economies. The youth unemployment rate spiked as a result.

Unemployed rebels without a cause think they can find a purpose in the battlefields of Syria and Iraq. Even young western women are lured by the Jihadist videos some of whom have left for the Middle East to become Jihadi wives.

Better online than offline

Many view the Jihadists use of the Internet to communicate and propagate as a blatant abuse of the public good, the Internet.

Some call for strict restrictions on the Jihadists’ online activities. The Jihadist propaganda invokes centuries-old imagery and reminisces about establishing a caliphate, returning to a barter economy with gold reserves, and uses swords and knives for beheadings.

Given their nostalgic outlook on life and values, many find it odd that the Jihadists have so eagerly adopted the modern ways of communication and warfare. The Internet, automatic weapons, dual cabin vehicles are all products of modern society, which the Jihadists violently oppose and yet, willingly adopt its products at the same time.

The call to push Jihadists off the information highway is understandable, but not useful. The fact that the Jihadists use mobile phones and Internet technologies is extremely helpful in tracking and monitoring their activities.

Given that only a handful of super highways exist through which all digital communications passes, it is quite possible to put in place surveillance systems to monitor chatter and apply filters to the noisy data to determine what is being said or planned.

Most breakthroughs in capturing or terminating violent militants happened either by sheer luck or by effective monitoring of digital communications.

While sophisticated algorithms and access to main Internet switches, through which the digital communications pass through, will be highly useful, still anyone with an Internet connection can peek into what is happening in the Jihadi blogosphere.

The recent rise of  IS and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who fancies expensive watches, can be tracked over time by monitoring the Google searches using Google trends. While Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi surfaced only recently, the Google-based searches for ‘caliphate’ peaked earlier in February 2011.

Globally, Nigeria and Pakistan are the two places where the search for ‘caliphate’ represents the highest share of the Google searches.

Pakistan ranks at the top for searches for ‘abu bakr’. Within Pakistan, Faisalabad reported the highest concentration of searches for “abu bakr.”

Imagine the kind of intelligence one can collect if the same searches are conducted by individual IP addresses and then aggregated over time and space to determine the contexts in which various dialogues and exchanges take place on social media.

The academics specialising in privacy will be mortified to read these arguments. The challenge, in fact is to balance the need for intelligence against the individual’s right to privacy. It is easier said than done, especially when the militant Jihadists do not play by any rulebook.

In the not so distant future, the fight to win over Muslims will move from battle and oil fields to digital domains.

Those with aspirations for becoming a global caliph will be busy amassing Facebook friends and Twitter followers. A self-professed caliph near the border of Syria and Iraq and a self-proclaimed Ameer-ul-Momineen in the Pashtun dominated areas of Afghanistan will be the first to compete for a larger number of online followers.

It does not matter how unsocial one may be, social media, at least for now, is serving the communication needs of Jihadists and other extremists.

As the technology continues to evolve, one hopes that the Web 3.0 tools will arrive with automated filters to expose bigots and to make it harder to exploit the naivety of the youth.