Author Archives: Editors

Some interesting info about Pakistan?

Posted on by
Reply
NOTE:  If you disagree with any part of this post, please enter your comments.
Dear Yemeen Zuberi Sahib,
Jinnah never wanted Pakistan. He had accepted the three wing con-federation offered by the British after the Congress had accepted it. The Center would have Defense, Foreign Affairs and Communications. The rest would be in the hands of the Confederees.
Nehru and others in the Congress felt that with Jinnah in the government, they would not have their way, as in the Interim government, Liaquat as the Finance Minister had imposed heavy taxes on business and industry, the essential financiers of the Congress.
Nehru addressing a press conference in Bombay said that the Constituent Assembly of India will not be bound by these agreements.
Jinnah, fell into the trap, took the bait or whatever, withdrew from the agreement saying that the Congress when it does not have real power, acts in such a way, how could it be trusted after it had actual power.
Only Bengal had a Muslim League government in 1945-46; The Punjab had a coalition of Congress and Muslim opponents of Jinnah, the Frontier had a Congress government, Sind had a coalition and Baluchistan was governed by the Governor General.
Civil services, business, education and industry in all the provinces which became Pakistan were controlled by non-Muslims. They, nearly all, left for India and incoming Muslim immigrants took over. In 1947, there were 83 Muslim I.C.S officers, one from Bengal, 51 immigrants and 31 from the Punjab-none from Sind, NWFP or Baluchistan.
These I.C.S officers looked down upon all others.
Every one in Pakistan bowed down to Jinnah, but he made a critical mistake of declaring Urdu the national-official language of the country, a language spoken by less than 5% of the population.
After his death Liaquat had to make deals with everyone, he had only Karachi as his constituency in the country.
Liaquat was empowered by the ‘Pindi’ conspiracy. He planned elections etc, so they killed him.
Nazimuddin took over but was soon overthrown by the bureaucrats.
When the bureaucrats felt that in the Jan 1959 elections, Bengalis would take over, they handed the government to the army.
After Ayub-Yahya Martial Law, the elections gave a majority to Sheikh Mujib who could, with the help of NAP and other such West Pakistan parties, get a Constitution passed with full provincial autonomy. The army would lose the loot.
Bhutto came to their rescue.  He refused to attend the scheduled meeting of the Assembly and supported a military takeover.
The military perpetrated a reign of terror. Millions were killed, ran away to India, hundreds of thousands of women raped-Lt Gen Tikka Khan boasted on arrival at the Dacca airport that ‘we will change your race’. India intervened. The Pakistan army surrendered.
Bangladesh was formed.
Bhutto took over in the West and spurred by self-aggrandizement, did not curb the army.
When the army had ‘recovered’ from the humiliation, they supported by the civil service, the Mullahs and landowners (I call them The Evil Quad) overthrew Bhutto and eventually hung him to death.
Zia introduced Wahhabism, a culture of intolerance and cruelty.
He was obsessed by the Afghan ‘Jihad’ but when the U.S.A and the U.S.S.R made a deal, he rejected it and the U.S. sent him in a fiery plane to his Jannat Houris.
After Zia, there was the BB-Sharif musical chairs-they danced to the military tune, (A Lt General publicly snubbed BB, the PM).
N.S won big in 1998, and tried to get the army under control. He even appointed Pervez Musharraf as the army chief thinking that as a Mohajir, he would remain obedient (did not know that in the army there are no Mohajirs, Punjabis; they  are all one ethnicity-Army).
In any case he fired the Navy Chief, forced the army chief to retire.
He planned to retire Musharraf who heard of the plan and confronted him. N.S told him he would not do that and added the office of the Joint chief of armed forces to Musharraf portfolio.
Musharraf was due to make an official visit to Sri Lanka. N.S decided to depose him while he was out of the country.
Musharraf heard of the plan and placed his loyal Lt Generals in key places.
Announcement of Musharraf’s replacement was made while he in an airplane on the way back. It was announced on the TV again and again.
When his replacement went to G.H.Q to take charge, the deputy told him that only the Chief (Musharraf) could hand over charge of the office.
The replacement returned to the Prime Minister House.
The deputy Chief of the staff had the TV station shut down, sent soldiers to the Prime Minister House; N.S was slapped around and arrested.
The government had asked Musharraf to land his plane at a small airport in Sind (not in Karachi) or go to India. Musharraf said, “Over my dead body”
The Corp Commander of Karachi went to Karachi airport, had the trucks parked on the runways removed and Musharraf’s plane landed.
Musharraf made the usual speech that it was his duty to save the country.
Musharraf became the international pariah. 9/11 rescued him; he agreed to help the U.S.A in every way he could.
Musharraf was toppled because BB had made a deal with U.S.A.
B.B was shot dead; since then the old Musical Chairs have been played, the latest dancer is Imran aka Taliban Khan.
So you can see that Pakistan’s very genesis was defective.
It ceased to exist in 1971 and what is left is an army colony.
Dr. S. Akhtar Ehtisham

Jinnah, Mountbatten and Congress dealing with partition of India

Posted on by
Reply
Lengthy negotiations ensued again. Mountbatten had to concede the demand for partition of India, but he told Jinnah that if the country could be divided, provinces could be too and if Jinnah would not agree with the idea, he would simply hand over power to the congress and be done with it. Conscious of his fast deteriorating health, and certain that his assistants would not be to able to withstand the combined onslaught of the British and the congress, he agreed to a “moth eaten Pakistan”2 . Now, the small man that he was, having been thwarted in his designs to inaugurate a united independent India, Mountbatten decided to leave a veritable mess. Transfer of power was planned for June 1948. In March 1947 he advised the British government to bring the date forward to August 1947, otherwise, he claimed, the situation would get out of control. Civil war might break out. The loyalties of Indian soldiers would be sorely tried. British soldiers, too few and too tired, would not be able to cope with the situation. The cabinet had no choice but to accept his plan. He chose August 15, 1947, the date he had accepted surrender of the Japanese army two years earlier, as the date of transfer of power into Indian and Pakistani hands. Mountbatten, willful, unmindful, unaware, and not caring much for the consequences, delayed announcement of the boundary commission awards till two days after Independence.3 On Independence Day hundreds of thousands did not know which country their home was in. Officials had no information either. Such intricate business as dividing a country which had been one political entity for centuries would tax the skill of an experienced and seasoned administrator. Mountbatten, devoid of any such attributes, set unrealistic deadlines and proceeded with haphazard, disjointed and disorganized partition of the country, government and assets. He charged a boundary commission, the leader of which was unfamiliar with topography, with demarcating a line of control between 1Ibid. 2 Jinnah, on being shown a map of the future Pakistan, with Hindu majority areas, hived off the Punjab and Bengal, so described the country. 3Please see Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity byAkbar S. Ahmad and The Sole Spokesman byAyesha Jalal. A Medical Doctor Examines Life on Three Continents – A Pakistani View 34 India and Pakistan. The man had at best a rough outline of districts, few maps, and no statistics of the majority–minority areas. And he had only a few weeks. It was truly a scuttle. Mountbatten still harbored ambitions of staying on as the governor general of both countries. Nehru, cognizant of the advantages of keeping on the right side of the British government which still controlled all the levers of authority, readily offered the job to him. Jinnah rejected the feelers, claiming that his people wanted him to be the first Governor General of Pakistan. Mountbatten threatened Jinnah that it would have an adverse effect on Pakistan, but Jinnah would not budge. He sought advice from the British prime minister, who urged him to stay on as Governor General of India alone. Whether Jinnah had spurned the advances of Mountbatten because of vanity and arrogance or, as he told his confidants, because he wanted, right at the beginning, to claim an unquestioned independent status for Pakistan, one will never know for certain. The fact that he was terminally ill may have been the determining factor in his decision. Whatever the reason, it was to have a far reaching and grievous effect on Pakistan’s fortunes. Patel and Nehru (and, I suspect, Gandhi) were confident that Pakistan would collapse soon. There would be no other rational reason for Gandhi to change his stance abruptly and acquiesce to the idea of partition which previously he had vowed would happen only over his dead body. Patel is on record making a public speech that it would be only a matter of days, weeks, or at the most months, before Pakistan would collapse; they would go down on their knees to be taken back into the Indian Union. Only Azad, among the top Congress leaders, remained steadfast in opposing partition. Azad and Nehru were very close. Nehru probably did not take Azad into his confidence. Being acutely conscious of the latter’s sensibilities and lack of guile, he also may have wanted to spare his friend the Machiavellian designs of Patel. Azad had been the president of the Congress from 1940 to 1946. He would have been the automatic choice for the office of the first Prime Minister of India. But that was, under the circumstances, untenable. Muslims had got Pakistan. One of them could not be the PM of India too; such was the overwhelming sentiment. The party machine wanted Patel to succeed to the office. Azad offered to resign, but told Gandhi that he would not, till he was given solemn assurance that Nehru would follow him. To hasten the collapse, Nehru and Patel withheld Pakistan’s share of the joint assets. Mountbatten aided and abetted them. The patently lame excuse they gave was that Pakistan would use the funds to wage more effective aggression in Kashmir. And collapse it would — it did not even have funds to pay salary to government servants — if the Nizam of Hyderabad had not come to the rescue. Reputedly the Bill Gates of his time, he gave Pakistan two hundred million ru- Chapter 3. Negotiations for Transfer of Power and Partition 35 pees (equivalent to about $150 million at today’s value). Once Pakistan became a going concern, Gandhi went on a hunger strike to force India to hand over Pakistan’s share of assets to the country.
Dr. S. Akhtar Ehtisham

Globe Peace and Security: Why Wars on Humanity?

Posted on by
Reply

Globe Peace and Security: Why Wars on Humanity?

 

Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD.

 

The global institutions were aligned to the formative history at the end of the 2nd WW, not to the knowledge-based proactive 21st century of technological innovation, reason and change. The global leadership and systematic working of the international political affairs are managed by wrong thinking, wrong people and wrong priorities. None seem to have the capacity to further the cause of global humanity, peace, conflict resolution and security. The global humanity looks for change but there seems to be no systematic mechanism for integrated change to ensure continuity of encompassed human thoughts, hopes and ideals for tomorrow, the near future or distant future. Despite the sketchy illusions of freedom, democracy, human rights, liberty and justice, we are encroached, stuffed and at terrible risk of annihilation more accidental and by error of judgment than planned scheme of things by Man against Man.

Under George W. Bush administration, America continued the same approach to global affairs. Reasoned politics and safeguard of the global humanity were not the purpose of such a belligerent plan. The USSR was already dismantled as a challenger and the US politicians saw the opportunity to determine the future of the global mankind by militarization and occupation of the poor and vulnerable nations. Its first victim was Afghanistan, then Iraq and Libya and onward to whole of the Arab world. Under NATO, America continued its influential role to destabilize the USSR and former allies of the Eastern Europe. There was no balancing of reason. Where power beyond human capacity is entrusted to the few, the chances are it will be misused against the people.

You wonder if the UNO has lived up to its role and the Charter-based responsibility to safeguard the people of the world from the ‘ scourge of wars’, horrors of planned violence, devastation of human cultures and habitats in good many raging conflicts. All in all, it is the humanity subjected to untold miseries, bloodbath and catastrophic consequences lingering on and unending for the generations to come. These few are the source of evil driving the mankind to unrestrained tyranny. The Statute of the International Criminal Court states “planning and waging a war of aggression is a crime against humanity.”

“Silencing Islamophobes is as futile a response as banning the Qur’an” Kenan Malik

Posted on by
Reply

What drove Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch gunman, to commit his heinous acts? It’s a question that has, understandably, occupied much media space . A key debate has been over the role of anti-Muslim hatred and its entrenchment in mainstream society.

In an open letter, Britain’s counter-terror chief, Neil Basu, called out the mainstream media for the “messaging” that fuels far-right terrorists. It’s a theme echoed by many on the left.

Rightwing commentators such as Melanie Phillips have dismissed such criticism as itself “peddling hatred, lies and incitement”. Spectator columnist Douglas Murray insisted that the only person responsible for the massacre was “the gunman himself”. But, he protested, “that hasn’t stopped all manner of people on social media… seeking to apportion blame” on people such as himself.

This was the same Douglas Murray who, two years ago, after jihadist attacks in Britain, claimed that Jeremy Corbyn was “guilty of facilitating the extremists” and that while there was only a small number of terrorists there was a “far larger number of people who provide the mood music for these people”. Presumably, “mood music” matters and the apportioning of blame is legitimate only when it comes to Islamist terrorists.

Hypocrisy is not confined to the right. Many on the left saw the Christchurch attacks as evidence that free speech had gone too far. Few, though, would have seen the Manchester Arena bombing in May 2017 or the Paris massacres of November 2015 as a “free speech issue”. Fewer still would support the likes of the Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders, who has demanded a ban on the Qur’an, which he damns as “hate speech” that leads jihadists to commit mass murder.

There are, of course, differences between Christchurch and the Manchester bombing or the terror in Paris, differences in context and causation. But double standards are no more acceptable on the left than they are in the writings of figures such as Murray. He is right that “mood music” matters. Creating or contributing to a culture that sees migrants, especially Muslim migrants, as “invaders”, insists that Muslims undermine “western values” and regards the promotion of “white racial self-interest” as a legitimate goal inevitably leads to Muslims being seen as a problem.

There is, though, no straight road from this to the horrors of Christchurch. I have written about the complex social and political roots of western jihadism. The same is true of white nationalist terror too. We need to understand, for instance, the ways in which social and political grievances become refracted through the politics of identity to take the form of hostility towards migrants and Muslims and how this can lead some to acts of terror. To see a direct line between Murray’s writing and the Christchurch killings is no more plausible than the claim that the Qur’an explains jihadism.

Tarrant’s “manifesto”, which he published online to justify his acts, is a grim clutter of anti-Muslim hatred, white identity politics, hostility to globalisation and a defence of environmentalism. The Christchurch attack, he writes, “was not an attack on diversity, but an attack in the name of diversity. To ensure diverse peoples remain diverse, separate, unique, undiluted and unrestrained in cultural or ethnic expression and autonomy.”

It’s a kind of rabid mishmash of left and right that is often found on the white nationalist fringe, as well as among jihadists. It reveals far-right terror to be a more complex phenomenon than many on the left want to believe. Many rightwing commentators, including Murray and Phillips, argue that they are not hostile to Muslims, simply critical of Islam. It’s an important distinction, but also one that’s gravely misused.

I have long argued that the very term Islamophobia is problematic because it conflates criticism of Islam and hatred of Muslims. As I wrote in a report by the anti-racist Runnymede Trust, this conflation enables both Muslims “to attack criticism of Islam as illegitimate because it is judged to be ‘Islamophobic’ ” and “permits those who promote hatred to dismiss condemnation of that hatred as stemming from an illegitimate desire to avoid criticism of Islam”.

Full Article

posted by f.sheikh