situationer
Changing face of politics
The PPP’s reaction to the gauntlet thrown by Nawaz Sharif
will determine the future course of politics
By Adnan Adil
The grand opposition alliance, as conceived by the PML-N chief Mian Nawaz Sharif, poses no immediate threat to the PPP-led coalition governments at the Centre and the three provinces of Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan as the opposition parties lack the numbers to overthrow any government. It seems the PML-N, the JUI-F and the MQM are only resorting to rhetoric to turn the public opinion in their favour prior to the 2013 general election and to reduce the PPP’s strength at the time of the 2012 senate elections.

Yeh Woh
Give me condom or give me death
Imagine bacteria growing in a container. They double in number every minute. You put a single bacterium in the container at 1100 hours and it fills up at 1200. At what time was the container half full?
The example is used by Dr Albert A. Bartlett, a professor of Physics at University of Colorado, in a live session on ‘Arithmetic, population and energy’. This session was recorded more than a decade ago and has been on Youtube for more than four years, clocking nearly three million views. Three million people interested in an old man trying to scare the world with numbers? Maybe the popularity has something to do with the promise in the title: The Most Important Video You’ll Ever See. Or maybe mathematics is after all the language of God.

Castaways
Ordeal of the Pakistani Ahmadi families who have fled Pakistan to seek shelter in Bangkok’s confinement centre
By Aoun Sahi
Standing on the second floor of a confinement centre on the outskirts of Bangkok city, Rana Haroon Siddiq, 40, clad in a grey kameez and traditional Punjabi tehband, starts crying while talking about his village thousands of miles away in Sahiwal district, Pakistan. He belongs to the Ahmadi community and was forced to leave his village when he was in class five. “I have been on the run since then. I had to change my residence or city after every couple of years,” he recalls.

prospects
TTP splits
Though Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan has lost its Kurram Agency wing,
it is still a force to reckon with
By Rahimullah Yusufzai
It isn’t often that someone breaks ranks in the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and is then able to survive for long. One would, therefore, have to look out for the fate of Fazal Saeed Haqqani, the Pakistani Taliban commander for Kurram Agency who recently revolted against his leader Hakimullah Mahsud and set up his own organisation, Tehrik-i-Taliban Islami Pakistan.

Talk Balochistan out
HRCP report on Pakistan’s largest and poorest province calls for sincere efforts to find a political solution to the crisis
By Waqar Mustafa
Mindset counts. It determines the way you act and the result your actions yield. Or say it casts the dice. Forty years ago, a nine-month-long military action launched on March 25, 1971 to quell the agitation, which the media then had dubbed as treason, in East Pakistan ended up with the troubled part of the country winning its independence as Bangladesh. Other violence like rape aside, it was claimed as many as three million people could have died in the short but brutal civil war “dominated by the narrative of the victorious side [the Bangladeshi nationalists],” to quote Sarmila Bose, the author of Dead Reckoning, who does not exonerate Pakistani troops either from committing atrocities.

A visionary
Prof Waris Mir debated through his writings
the need for progressive thinking
By Sana Mir
“Life has vivid connotations of evolution and those nations which comprehend progression indeed have a futuristic vision while those negating the Divine law of motion, are fundamentally immobile,” wrote Prof Waris Mir in one of his Daily Jang columns way back in 1987 — one of his last — as he advocated the need for intellectual advancement. “Let that be very clear that progressive thought, enlightenment and intellectualism are very closely linked. Only an enlightened mind can churn out progressive thoughts and ignite the flame of intellect.”

situationer
Changing face of politics
The PPP’s reaction to the gauntlet thrown by Nawaz Sharif
will determine the future course of politics
By Adnan Adil

The grand opposition alliance, as conceived by the PML-N chief Mian Nawaz Sharif, poses no immediate threat to the PPP-led coalition governments at the Centre and the three provinces of Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan as the opposition parties lack the numbers to overthrow any government. It seems the PML-N, the JUI-F and the MQM are only resorting to rhetoric to turn the public opinion in their favour prior to the 2013 general election and to reduce the PPP’s strength at the time of the 2012 senate elections.

However, street agitation by the opposition can alter the rules of the game, signs of which are already visible in Karachi.

The united opposition was not expected until recently, given Mian Nawaz Sharif’s adverse attitude towards other opposition parties, especially the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). Until a few weeks ago, Sharif’s party was at odds with Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman’s Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) on the issue of the opposition leader’s slot in Senate. Soon after the PML-N’s defeat in the Azad Kashmir elections, Sharif seems to have taken a U-turn and is trying to reach out to other opposition parties. Now he wants a ‘grand alliance’ of the opposition to oust the rulers.

The other concurrent development is the MQM’s decision to part ways with the PPP both at the Centre and in Sindh and leave the office of the Governor in Sindh as well. In the past, the party took many somersaults over its coalition with the PPP, but this time it seems serious.

Apparently, the MQM’s differences with the PPP over the Kashmir elections on Karachi’s refugee seats broke the partnership, but there were other irritants too. In Karachi, the PPP has hobnobbed with the MQM’s arch rival Afaq Ahmed who has been assured of the government’s support if he mobilises his workers. The PPP also plans to revive the old district magistracy system in place of the 2002 local government system in the Sindh province — a move that the MQM strongly opposes as it hurts the party’s interests in urban Sindh.

The synchronised timing — of the MQM’s leaving the coalition government and Nawaz Sharif’s decision to unite the opposition — is significant. More important is Sharif’s soft posture towards the MQM. During the Kashmir election campaign, Sharif had pointed fingers at the MQM for the May 12, 2007 killings in Karachi. It will be difficult for Nawaz Sharif to defend his sudden change of heart vis-à-vis the MQM, at least in the media. So far as electoral politics is concerned, both the MQM and the PML-N have no direct clash of interests as their areas of influence are different — the PML-N controlling urban Punjab and the MQM with roots in urban Sindh. Both the parties largely represent urban middle classes and thus share the same worries over issues of governance and economy.

JUI-F chief Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman has decided to remain ambivalent about Nawaz Sharif’s move for unity; his party has not opposed it though. Rather, a senior JUI-F leader Abdul Ghafoor Haideri has hinted that the party is willing to relinquish opposition leader’s position in the Senate for the sake of a united front with the PML-N. The JUI-F has its constituency in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan’s Pakhtun-dominated areas, and is thus getting ready to face the PPP-ANP alliance in the next general elections. During the elections, joining hands with Nawaz Sharif suits the JUI-F more than sitting with Asif Zardari.

Nawaz Sharif’s aggressive posture against the government may be seen in the context of his preparations for the next general elections, especially his stronghold in Punjab. He is positioning himself to counter the PPP-PML-Q alliance in the Punjab on the one hand and Imran Khan’s increasing popularity in urban Punjab on the other. The possibility of a no-trust move against the Shahbaz Sharif’s government is also there as Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi has set up his office at the State Guest House in Lahore to win back his defected members of the Punjab Assembly and run a media campaign against the Punjab government.

Nawaz Sharif says he wants to unite the opposition parties to mount pressure on the government for good governance and his objective is not forcing the government to hold mid-term elections. However, in the recent past, Sharif has talked of mid-term elections on several occasions. He has also talked of ousting the present rulers and expressed his fear that no election could be free and fair in the presence of Asif Zardari as President.

The combined opposition of the PML-N, the JUI-F and the MQM, if it materialises, does not have a simple majority let alone the two-thirds majority in the parliament required to impeach and unseat the president. If Zardari’s removal is the ultimate goal, the opposition parties cannot accomplish this task through parliamentary means and would have to resort to either street agitation or some other supra-constitutional method. Altaf Hussain has already warned the government of paralysing Karachi through strike till its ouster. Sharif is still weighing his options and keeping his cards close to his chest.

The PPP’s reaction to the gauntlet thrown by Nawaz Sharif will determine the future course of politics. A crackdown on the MQM workers in Karachi will only worsen the situation, taking the initiative away from the political forces and placing the security establishment in the driving seat. Most governments in Pakistan’s political history dug their graves when they became over-confident about their stability. Nawaz Sharif, too, was proud of his two-thirds majority in 1999 when he was shown the door. Musharraf seemed invincible in 2007 when he triggered his own downfall.

An alliance with the PML-Q can provide the PPP a stable majority in the parliament and good prospects in next elections in Punjab, but it cannot be a substitute for MQM’s support in Sindh. Similarly, efforts to dislodge the Sharifs from power in Punjab would force them to take to streets — a scenario that hardly suits Asif Zardari and his party.

Yeh Woh
Give me condom or give me death

Imagine bacteria growing in a container. They double in number every minute. You put a single bacterium in the container at 1100 hours and it fills up at 1200. At what time was the container half full?

The example is used by Dr Albert A. Bartlett, a professor of Physics at University of Colorado, in a live session on ‘Arithmetic, population and energy’. This session was recorded more than a decade ago and has been on Youtube for more than four years, clocking nearly three million views. Three million people interested in an old man trying to scare the world with numbers? Maybe the popularity has something to do with the promise in the title: The Most Important Video You’ll Ever See. Or maybe mathematics is after all the language of God.

The question Dr. Bartlett poses is a no-brainer: The container will be half full at 1159 hours. But the implication is rather alarming if you replace bacteria with human beings and the container with our planet. There are people among us who have the faith of a mountain and brains of a bacterium, telling us that we’ve been living and multiplying in this container for 25 long minutes, and see, the container is not even half full. So go on, procreate some more. And here’s this professor informing us that when the container IS half full, you’ll only have a minute of existence left. After that you’ll all die, but not before crushing each other most passively and painfully.

Tomorrow is World Population Day. It will be observed in a more meaningful way in parts of world that have lowest population densities. For a country like ours, teeming with human-like creatures, it’ll be the usual media circus with half-cooked and little-researched features and the platitudes and clichés of politicians presented as words of wisdom. On the receiving end, those of us who are not puking at their TV screens will be pulsating in their sofas for a chance to make more babies.

Tomorrow we’ll be celebrating our planet’s population touching the seven billion mark, and Pakistan may be touching 200 million. Maybe, because every census of ours is a political stunt rather than an empirical exercise. Some expert may even give us a precise number of humans that can fit on earth with one square metre allotted to each, and also give us a timeframe in which we’ll find us in that square. But if someone cares to ask our so-called religious leaders if it is time we started taking population planning seriously, they’ll look skywards and say with conviction that God only requires us to copulate and leave the consequences to Him.

In a way they are right, although we’d be much better off if their parents had used contraceptives. We are the only living beings who have the faculty to think, analyse, and produce condoms. But these ‘men of god’ would rather have us reproduce like rabbits, chickens and pigs. They are right in the sense, if you leave it to nature, nature WILL restore the balance: by killing us in ever increasing numbers. It’ll use disaster, epidemic, hunger, strife, and above all our own choice to be ignorant. The earthquake kills us Pakistanis in scores of thousands while much bigger quakes in Japan manage to kill only a few dozens, or at worst, hundreds. Go figure if it’s God’s will to punish Pakistanis for not being good Muslims or to reward others for not being Muslim at all.

Try Google. Compare a country’s Human Development Index with its population growth. They are always in inverse proportion. The more educated and aware a society is, the more regressive its population. The more ignorant a population, the more rapidly they multiply … and die. That is the law of nature. For examples, read your newspaper regularly.

Those who are fewer in number are lording over the world. Those who are reproducing like insects in order to take over the world are living like pests and dying in hordes. Is that what our God requires of us? If number alone could rule, ants or cockroaches would be ruling the world.

In all likelihood we’ll not run out of space in the lifetime of Fazl-ur-Rehman and Munawwar Hasan et al. But we are constantly squeezing the living space for our next generations. When our great grandchildren end up in their allotted square metre, they will be forced to adopt negative growth — that is not having children at all. We can avoid that today by going for zero growth — two children per couple. For us it’s a choice. For them it’ll be a compulsion.

masudalam@yahoo.com

Castaways
Ordeal of the Pakistani Ahmadi families who have fled Pakistan to seek shelter in Bangkok’s confinement centre
By Aoun Sahi

prospects
 TTP splits
Though Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan has lost its Kurram Agency wing,
it is still a force to reckon with
By Rahimullah Yusufzai

It isn’t often that someone breaks ranks in the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and is then able to survive for long. One would, therefore, have to look out for the fate of Fazal Saeed Haqqani, the Pakistani Taliban commander for Kurram Agency who recently revolted against his leader Hakimullah Mahsud and set up his own organisation, Tehrik-i-Taliban Islami Pakistan.

Most of the militants who rebelled against the TTP in the past met a violent end. The TTP revenge is swift and brutal. Its leaders are furious when someone in the organisation starts supporting the government and the military by joining the so-called peace committees or the anti-militants lashkars. The Taliban reserve the harshest punishment for disloyal colleagues who betray the group and those dubbed as spies. They are summarily put to death in a manner that is painful and exemplary so that others wanting to revolt are forewarned.

Though many militants who rebelled against the TTP were eliminated in different districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) in recent years, the case of Qari Zainuddin Mahsud assumed importance as it was widely reported in the media. He was cousin of a leading Pakistani Taliban commander Abdullah Mahsud, who was killed on July 24, 2007 in an encounter with Pakistan’s security forces after being besieged in a house in Zhob district of Balochistan. Having lost one leg in a landmine explosion in Afghanistan a few days before the fall of Kabul to the Afghan Taliban in September 1996, he had returned to his native South Waziristan after spending about 25 months in US custody at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and rejoined the militants.

Differences existed between him and the TTP founder Baitullah Mahsud as long as he was alive but these grew after he died because his family and supporters suspected the latter’s hand in his death. Subsequently, Abdullah Mahsud’s brother Masood-ur-Rahman was killed in a bomb explosion and later his cousin Qari Zainuddin Mahsud was assassinated by one of his bodyguards, Gulbaddin Mahsud, in a targetted attack for which Baitullah Mahsud’s men were held responsible. Though Qari Zainuddin Mahsud’s younger brother Misbahuddin Mahsud later took command of the group, it was no match for Baitullah Mahsud’s TTP and his family had to shift to Abbottabad to avoid harm. Most of these men are now dead but the blood-feud between their families is far from over.

The 39-year old Fazal Saeed Haqqani isn’t a pushover and is capable of putting up a fight in his native Kurram Agency. In an interview with TNS, he claimed to have 800 fighters under his command. Even if he is exaggerating, it is generally believed that he should have around 300 armed men loyal to him. It remains to be seen how many of his fighters remain committed to him until the end of the ongoing military operation by the security forces against the militants in Kurram Agency. Though there are no reports yet that the military was targetting Fazal Saeed Haqqani’s men, some of them could be drawn into battle once the troops start clearing the areas close to the main road linking Parachinar in upper Kurram valley to Chapri, the entry-point to Kurram Agency, and beyond to Thall to make the journey safer for Shias passing through Sunni-inhabited villages.

Haqqani may have quit the TTP, but his group is still part of the Sunni militants operating in the area and is critical of the Shias for expelling Sunnis living in Parachinar and violating the Murree peace accord and the subsequent Islamabad agreement between Shia and Sunni elders. The Shias, on the other hand, blame the Sunni Taliban militants of violating the peace accord and attacking Shia passengers using the Parachinar-Thall road.

Though Fazal Saeed Haqqani is now firmly in the anti-TTP camp and is heading his own group, Tehrik-i-Taliban Islami Pakistan (TTIP), it would be wrong to say that the TTP is finished in Kurram Agency. In fact, the TTP has already named one Maulana Zahir as its new commander for Kurram Agency in place of Fazal Saeed Haqqani and is reportedly striving to win over some of the local militants and infiltrate others into this strategically located tribal region.

The military action that began last week in the central tehsil of Kurram Agency is primarily directed against the TTP and its affiliated groups. It means that the TTP still has some adherents in the area, though they aren’t able to put up much resistance against the security forces.

However, the TTP is strong in the adjoining upper parts of Orakzai Agency and its fighters could come to the rescue of their colleagues in Kurram Agency in case of need. Or more probably, the TTP fighters in Kurram Agency would escape to Orakzai Agency and also the adjacent North Waziristan tribal region in a bid to survive the onslaught and fight another day.

Fazal Saeed Haqqani, like all other Haqqanis spread over Afghanistan and Pakistan, is a 1995 graduate of the Darul Uloom Haqqania, Akora Khattak in Nowshera district, one of the biggest madrassas in the country and run by the JUI-S leader Maulana Samiul Haq. He had earlier qualified his matriculation examination from the government school in his village, Uchat Killay, near Sadda in Kurram Agency.

He fought in Afghanistan alongside the Afghan Taliban linked to the Haqqani Network, which recently clarified that he was no longer affiliated to it as it didn’t want to become involved in Pakistan’s affairs. Increasingly, his activities were restricted to Pakistan as he joined the TTP when Baitullah Mahsud brought all disparate militant groups on one platform in December 2007. He and his men were accused of kidnapping people for ransom, attacking members of the rival Shia sect, fighting the security forces and targetting passengers using the Parachinar-Thall road.

However, Fazal Saeed Haqqani denied that he was involved in such activities. Rather, he said he quit the TTP because its leadership was ordering kidnappings for ransom, blow up mosques and other public places and organising suicide bombings. He pledged to put an end to all such un-Islamic acts and support the peace accord between the Shias and Sunnis to bring back Kurram Agency to normalcy. In fact, his backing for the peace accord in Kurram Agency is also stated to be one of the reasons for his parting of ways with the TTP, which allegedly didn’t want the agreement to succeed.

Like all other militant groups in Pakistan, Fazal Saeed Haqqani’s TTIP has also proclaimed its loyalty to the Afghan Taliban leader Mulla Mohammad Omar and announced support for the ‘jehad’ in Afghanistan against the US-led Nato forces. This would bring him into direct conflict with the Americans, who could launch more drone strikes in Kurram Agency after having carried out only a few missile strikes there in the past. In such a scenario, Fazal Saeed Haqqani’s group would be paired with the pro-Pakistan militant groups led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur in North Waziristan and Maulvi Nazeer in the Wana and Shakai areas in South Waziristan.

Unlike the TTP headed by Hakimullah Mahsud, all these groups refrain from fighting the Pakistani military and would prefer to fight alongside the Afghan Taliban against the US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Talk Balochistan out
HRCP report on Pakistan’s largest and poorest province calls for sincere efforts to find a political solution to the crisis
By Waqar Mustafa

Mindset counts. It determines the way you act and the result your actions yield. Or say it casts the dice. Forty years ago, a nine-month-long military action launched on March 25, 1971 to quell the agitation, which the media then had dubbed as treason, in East Pakistan ended up with the troubled part of the country winning its independence as Bangladesh. Other violence like rape aside, it was claimed as many as three million people could have died in the short but brutal civil war “dominated by the narrative of the victorious side [the Bangladeshi nationalists],” to quote Sarmila Bose, the author of Dead Reckoning, who does not exonerate Pakistani troops either from committing atrocities.

Leave out details of the country’s breakup or who-did-what, just take a peek at the mindset with which the atrocities were committed. Brigadier Abdul Rehman Siddiqi, who headed the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) and was press advisor to army chief General Yahya Khan, in his book ‘East Pakistan: The Endgame — An Onlooker’s Journal 1969-1971’, quotes General AK Niazi, in charge of eastern contingent of the Pakistan army in 1971 who later surrendered to the Indian army, shamelessly defending the rapists by declaring that: “You cannot expect a man to live, fight and die in East Pakistan and go to Jhelum for sex, would you?” And hence the suicidal course the military had set itself.

The unsavoury events in the erstwhile East Pakistan had not met any firm protest from the West Pakistani public and political leadership. But it is heartening that Pakistan’s southwest province of Balochistan, facing a low-level insurgency by nationalists for decades, is not going unheard. And the civil society and politicians are raising voices against whatever is happening in the province.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), an independent non-governmental organisation, has come out with a report titled ‘Balochistan: Blinkered Slide into Chaos’ based on the findings of its teams which visited the violence-prone province in May. It says human rights violations in Balochistan are getting worse while authorities seem unwilling to rein in the growing numbers of targeted killings, kidnappings, forced disappearances and attacks on religious minorities. It says that agents of the state as well as the insurgents and extremists operating in the province share a common disregard for rights of the citizens.

The report accuses the security forces of being behind forced disappearances in the province, and says that the bodies of 140 missing persons had been found, while 71 people are still missing in the province since July 2010 to May this year. “There was material on record to substantiate claims of the families that the victims were picked up by the Frontier Constabulary or had been killed while in custody,” says the report. And “the insurgents have murdered ‘settlers’ in target killings with impunity, while the extremists have treated the members of religious minorities as fair game,” the commission says.

At least 78 organised gangs were reported to be involved in abduction for ransom in the province and there was a widespread perception that criminal gangs and individuals involved in heinous crime enjoyed support of politicians and security forces.

“The Balochistan government seems non-existent. It has surrendered its authority to security forces and they (forces) are calling the shots,” the HRCP says.

The HRCP sees an imbalance between civil-military relations in the province, adding that there is no political space. It also observes a sense of alienation among the people of Balochistan. But, according to the HRCP, use of force rather than political engagement remained the preferred approach in Balochistan and the promises made in the Balochistan Package remained little more than promises. The commission recommends that the illegal practice of forced disappearances stop and all security forces in the province be brought under civilian control. It recommends that the powers of decision-making and governance must be restored to civilian political authorities in the province.

Balochistan is fast sliding into chaos. As advised by the HRCP, instead of creating the narrative of external forces being responsible for the violence in the resource-rich but under-developed province, a sincere effort should be made to find a political solution.

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest and poorest province. It has large mineral reserves, including oil, gas, copper and gold. Control over these resources and the extent of provincial autonomy have long remained contentious. But a larger issue has remained the exclusion of the Baloch people from the decision-making regarding how their affairs are governed and persistence of the state with the use of force to address questions that are essentially political in nature. The province is home to 7800,000 human resources who need to be nurtured ending the continued violence and insecurity. Please talk Balochistan out. Urgently needed is the change in mindset.

A visionary
Prof Waris Mir debated through his writings
the need for progressive thinking
By Sana Mir

“Life has vivid connotations of evolution and those nations which comprehend progression indeed have a futuristic vision while those negating the Divine law of motion, are fundamentally immobile,” wrote Prof Waris Mir in one of his Daily Jang columns way back in 1987 — one of his last — as he advocated the need for intellectual advancement. “Let that be very clear that progressive thought, enlightenment and intellectualism are very closely linked. Only an enlightened mind can churn out progressive thoughts and ignite the flame of intellect.”

Prof Waris Mir belonged to that era when speaking one’s mind was a punishable offence. This age was of the appalling martial law regime of General Ziaul Haq who used to treat progressive minds, scholastic writers and philosophic thinkers as blasphemers. Speaking out, that too at the behest of the people of Pakistan, with a mission in mind was a task not many could take up in those oppressive days.

The surest sign of intellectualism is to have an open and inviting mind that welcomes patterns of thought coming from various sources.

“We have seen our crescendo as a nation when scientifically, philosophically, academically and potentially, the Muslims had rid themselves of political orthodoxy and their thought pattern ran wild on the lines of creativity instead of conservatism. A nation like ours whose only concerns are limited to economy and poor polity experiences a strain on its intellectual graph as well. Such people can never look ahead, they rather regress into the past,” words that were written by Prof Waris Mir decades ago seem to resound a picture of today. Tragically, however, we haven’t inched forward from the political and intellectual situation he had described in the aforementioned passage.

The definition of journalism has broadly transformed over the decades since the written word has been challenged with television journalism. However, that hardly makes a difference to the qualitative aspect of opinion building, guidance and chiselling of minds — the true essence of journalism. 

Unfortunately, most of the readers are passive audiences to media material and intellectually they have limited choice. Reading Waris Mir’s collection of columns in the three-volume book Waris Mir ka Fikri Asasa eliminates this unnecessary jargon from a reader’s mind. Mir’s journalistic existence to the present day proves, though, the hard work pays off.

Extreme thought that was made the law of the land merely to give unparalleled powers to a military dictator of that time is shooting off its sparks even in today’s Pakistan where it has become impossible to erase extremism from daily life. Right from killing ‘unveiled’ women in marketplaces, whipping them in front of a crowd, blowing up a market to discourage women from shopping to bombing funerals, hotels, schools and universities, the Pakistani society has let seep in itself the worst of all forms of thought — extremist.

However, years after Waris Mir’s demise, his words keep rattling the audibility of those who can make a comparison of the past and present of Pakistan and sadly come to a conclusion that situations have not changed. Journalists still lose their jobs and at times their lives as a price for writing out their minds. A similar fate followed Waris Mir’s journalistic career when he breathed his last at the mere age of 48.

Prof. Waris Mir passed away on July 9, 1987.

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