Monthly Archives: June 2021

Security

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

          IS PAKISTAN secure? Yes we have a nuclear deterrent; but we would have to be pushed to the very edge to employ it. This means outsiders seeking to push and control Pakistan’s direction for diverse purposes, can, to a sufficiently large extent, afford to ignore it: Except that Pakistan’s nuclear actualities make it a factor in the global power calculus. So how vulnerable is Pakistan to sundry pushes in any ‘preferred’ political direction?

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Quest for truth

By Zubeida Mustafa

IN media parlance what would the Bahria Town Karachi incident that took place on Sunday, June 6 be called? It was not fake news, considering that a large number of protesters and the police were involved and some violence also occurred that day on Super Highway. But the way the facts were twisted by a section of the media, both social and mainstream, one would certainly call it a case of misreporting.

The impression was sought to be created that the protesters — including various civil society groups and people who have been struggling to save their ancestral lands from the avarice of the land grabbers — resorted to violence and arson. But from the accounts of those present on the scene (I spoke to Sheema Kermani of Tehreek-i-Niswan and Khuda Dino Shah from the Indigenous Peoples) an altogether different picture emerges: it was clearly a false flag operation to vilify the protesters and spread dissension among the diverse ethnic groups that constitute Sindh’s population.

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To open or not?

By Zubeida Mustafa

WHEN schools in many parts of the world have resumed education in varying degrees, why are our schools still shuttered? The irony is that this is the fate of institutions that cater to the needs of the poor who are already deprived. I feel the matter has not been given serious thought. Even in pre-Covid times public-sector education in Pakistan was rotting. Now it is about to hit rock-bottom.

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Systematically done?

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

           Plaudits are due the revolving pageant of official Information bigwigs whose fatuity conceals the adroit competence of their ministry of information, no matter which of them is managing it. That institution has the varied segments of public opinion exactly as it would have them be: numbed and distracted with statements both highly-charged and conflicting; repetitive and inconsistent; contradictory and confirmative; denying and reaffirming; so that no one quite knows what the government and its minions and bogeymen are about. Reportage and news is a turbid flood of speculative analyses and patchy investigations of what could be reality or should be reality or may or may not have happened. 

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