Najam Sethi on a Liberal Pakistan

Sounds too good to be true!

Now, thankfully, positive change is in the air. Nawaz Sharif was handpicked and nurtured by the military three decades ago to do its bidding. He duly became the nemesis of the PPP, in the bargain getting into bed with the religious parties, passing Islamic laws and promoting jihad against India. Now he is all for peace with India, wants to stop all jihad across borders, is waking up to action against sectarian parties and religious terrorists and is embarrassed and hampered by the Islamic laws passed on his watch. The military, no less, sees the primary and immediate national security threat as emanating from internal religious extremism and not externally from archenemy India. Unfortunately, however, Imran Khan’s PTI is still muddying the waters by continuing to resist the development of a new national narrative of state and society based on modern notions of liberal and secular democracy.

C. Christine Fair: Pakistan, the Taliban and Regional Security

Prof. C. Christine Fair, among other things, says that a possible evolution to democracy with civilian supremacy in Pakistan requires that America tear up its check-book, both in bilateral aid and via the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Court's powers

The Pakistani judiciary granted the Governor-General the power to dissolve the Constituent Assembly.

Pakistan and Section 93 of the Government of India Act 1935

Yasser Latif Hamdani has articles (1, 2, 3) in the Daily Times of Pakistan, on the vexed question of how democratic in spirit Jinnah was around 1947. These articles were provoked by a journalist (probably Najam Sethi, Aapas Ki Baat, December 14, 2011, 1, 2) who wrote:

A leading journalist, who is one of the finest journalists in my opinion, recently levelled four accusations at Jinnah, which he described as the reason Pakistani democracy has not flourished. First, that Jinnah chose to be the Governor-General instead of prime minister; second, that he concentrated power in his own hands; third, that he dismissed the NWFP [now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa] Assembly; and fourth, that Jinnah chose Urdu as the ‘national’ language.

The purpose of this note is to examine one of the claims made in the Hamdani article and show it to be likely to be wrong.

Pakistan Bhagya Vidhata?

A sentence from Raza Rumi's blog caught my eye:

Leaving aside the political debate on the results of the recent Transparency International (TI) survey, the results are pretty damning for the masters of our destiny.

No matter how badly things are messed up, the bhagya vidhata, the dispenser of destiny, to me, is the people.

Budget making

Raza Rumi decries the lack of public in the very public policy represented by the Budget.  Even the availability of the budget documents is a problem.

For that matter, even though India's 2010-11 budget documents are available online,  I wonder how many individuals, public interest groups or news organizations have looked at them closely?