by Editor | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Islamabad : Pakistan is in talks with a Chinese financial institution to obtain $1 billion as a foreign commercial loan, a media report said on Tuesday.
The report in the Express Tribune said that amid declining foreign exchange reserves, the Pakistan government was in the process of scrutinising the loan term sheets and the agreement between the two nations was expected to be reached in March.
Pakistan has already obtained $1 billion as foreign commercial loan from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) in the past three months.
During the last fiscal year, the Pakistan government had borrowed $2.3 billion from three Chinese financial institutions, according to the Finance Ministry publication.
In addition to the borrowing, Pakistan was also expecting to receive $200 million from a Chinese bank immediately to support foreign currency reserves, the daily reported citing sources.
The report said that the Pakistan government had shifted its focus towards easy but relatively expensive sources of financing.
The decision to get $1 billion was taken after the government in February called off the $1-billion Eurobond. The government was ready to float the bond but reversed the decision after financial advisers informed it that the 10-year bond may cost it 7.3 per cent, the sources told the daily.
—IANS
by Editor | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Krishna Kumari Kohli
Islamabad : Rights activist Krishna Kumari Kohli has became the first-ever Hindu Dalit woman to be elected to Pakistan’s Senate, media reports said on Sunday.
The 39-year-old Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader from a village in Tharparkar is also the first-ever senator from a scheduled caste, according to Geo TV.
Kumari’s rise, however, wasn’t easy. Born to a poor family in February 1979, she belongs to the Kohli community.
Kumari hails from Nagarparkar where women are still deprived of basic facilities. She battled hunger and poverty as a child and was also a victim of bonded labour, reports Geo TV.
“We didn’t have electricity so I used to study under the light of an oil lantern,” she told Geo TV.
According to Dawn news, when Kumari was a grade 3 student, she and her family were confined to a private jail for nearly three years. The jail was allegedly owned by the landlord of Kunri of Umerkot district.
At 16, Kumari got married to Lalchand who supported her education and she got her masters degree in 2013 from Sindh University.
As an activist, she worked against bonded labour, sexual harassment at workplaces, and for the rights of women and the people of her village.
After being elected to the Senate, Krishna told Geo News: “I will not only represent women of Thar but act as a representative for women across the country and speak for their rights.
“Many laws have been drafted for the rights of women but none of them has been implemented — something I wish to change.”
Stressing that the major issues faced by the people of Tharparkar are child marriages and forced conversions, she said these needed “to be addressed urgently”.
She thanked the PPP leadership for nominating her, and clarified she has won on the women’s seat and not the minority seat.
—IANS
by Editor | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
Salman Khurshid
By Prashant Sood,
New Delhi : Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not told the “truth” to the opposition about the conversations he has had with the Pakistani leadership and the government’s policy vis-a-vis the neighbouring country had reached a “dead end”, says former External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid.
He also feels India is losing its grip on the world in foreign policy and has gone into the US camp with very little returns.
“Our policy on Pakistan is at a dead end. We are losing people every day. We keep saying we are giving it back to them. Years of losing civilians and soldiers and years of saying we are giving it back to them isn’t really my idea of a good foreign policy,” Khurshid told IANS in an interview.
“Pakistan is a slippery, difficult creature and (dealing with) that is what diplomacy is about,” he added.
Khurshid, a senior Congress leader, said it was more than clear that “we do not have a war option with Pakistan”.
“So our failure is writ large. We have to find a solution. It is not our job in the opposition to give him a solution unless he consults with us. Unless he asks us what can be done. But this is not something that can be allowed to go on indefinitely,” he said.
Asked if the Congress party had any suggestions for the government, he said, “We have no suggestions except that he should first tell us to the truth”.
“He has never told us the truth about Pakistan; what he has said to them, what does he do (in) meetings with them, what does he share, what do they promise. He must share with us something before we can tell him what to do,” Khurshid said.
The former minister said India has been unable to go “beyond a certain point with our agenda as far as the US is concerned”.
“Yes, I certainly think we have gone into the US camp. We have got very little in return. We used to get concrete results from being with the (erstwhile) Soviet Union — not just with it, but with the rest of the world that was aligned towards socialism. So I think there are major issues there. And we have gone in blind, we haven’t calculated properly.”
Khurshid, whose latest book “Triple Talaq: Examining Faith” has hit the stands, said India was getting global attention not because of its foreign policy but because of its economic potential.
“Our markets are forcing people to show interest and the Indian diaspora is playing an increasingly important role in the world. These things give us stature.
“This is not the kind of stature we had when India provided leadership to the Third World under (Prime Minister Jawaharlal) Nehru and the comfort India had when the Soviet Union stood strongly with India and India was an exponent of non-alignment,” he said.
He said Modi has shown an “enormous amount of energy of salesmanship” and has done a reasonably effective job in this respect because of his oratory.
“I don’t think in foreign policy, if you look around the neighbourhood, if you look around West Asia, if you look around Europe, if you look at Africa, I don’t think we have a consistently coordinated foreign policy posture that will be appreciated in the world. The way we are jumping from leg to leg on Israel and Palestine, the way we are dealing with China vis-a-vis Japan and China itself, the way we are keeping a very low relationship with Russia,” he said.
Khurshid, who was External Affairs Minister in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, said India was consulted on major international flashpoints in the past — but that was no longer the case.
“In the past, nothing moved without India being consulted. Today, in Syria nobody wants to know what India thinks, in Iraq nobody wants to know what India thinks. I think we are losing our grip on the world as far as foreign policy is concerned,” he said.
(Prashant Sood can be reached at prashant.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by Editor | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Asma Jahangir
Lahore : Doughty Pakistani human rights activist Asma Jahangir, who fought her battle on the streets as well in courts, opposed military strongmen and steadfastly championed the rights of women, minorities and LGBTs, passed away here on Sunday. She was 66.
According to Geo TV, Jahangir, the first woman President of the Pakistan Supreme Court Bar Association, was shifted to a hospital on Saturday night after suffering cardiac arrest. She died while undergoing treatment.
While condolences poured in from all sections, there was a section on people who condemned her even after she passed away.
Born on January 27, 1952 to a progressive family in Lahore, Jahangir’s path seemed set out with her father Malik Ghulam Jilani, a bureaucrat-turned-politician, opposing corruption at the fag end of Ayub Khan’s rule and the brutal crackdown in then East Pakistan under Yahya Khan following the 1970 election.
After her graduation from the prestigious Kinnaird College and LLB from the Punjab University in 1978, she hit the headlines when she enthusiastically jumped into the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD) against the Zia ul-Haq dictatorship and was jailed.
In 1987, she co-founded the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and became its Secretary General until 1993 when she was elevated as its chairperson. She represented several clients who were denied their fundamental rights and defended cases of minorities, women and children in prisons.
A mother of one son and two daughters, Jahangir was also the co-chair of South Asians for Human Rights. She was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary or Summary Executions and later as the UN Rapporteur of Freedom of Religion or Belief.
She often had a tempestuous relation with the Pakistani state. While she received several national awards, including the Sitara-I-Imtiaz in 1995, Jahangir was again put under house arrest in November 2007 after President Pervez Musharraf imposed Emergency.
She penned two books — “Divine Sanction? The Hadood Ordinance” (1988) and “Children of a Lesser God: Child Prisoners of Pakistan” (1992).
In recognition of her services in the field of human rights, Jahangir was awarded the American Bar Association International Human Rights Award in 1992, the Martin Ennals Award and the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1995.
Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi led the nation in paying tributes, terming her demise a great loss for the legal fraternity while President Mamnoon Hussain, Chief Justice of Pakistan Saqib Nisar along with other politicians, lawyers and journalists also expressed grief.
Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif tweeted: “Pakistan has lost a passionate champion of human rights and a staunch supporter of democracy…”
Daily Times Editor Raza Ahmad Rumi called her a “hero”.
“‘Speaking truth to power’ a phrase, we often use. Asma Jahangir lived, practiced till her last breath. Questioned mullahs, military, judges, politicians… defended downtrodden. Faced threats and attacks. Was never afraid. What a hero,” he tweeted.
Journalist Naila Inayat, termed her death “the end to an era” while Mehreen Zahra-Malik, another journalist, tweeted: “A male friend once asked: why is Asma Jahangir always so angry? What disturbed him perhaps was why she always spoke up and appeared utterly unafraid in this world dominated by masculinity’s apoplectic id. For me, this is what Asma Jahangir was: she was brave enough to be angry.”
As one Twitter user called her the only “man” in Pakistan, author Bina Shah contested it, saying: “The only man? She was fully a woman in her courage and steadfastedness. A lioness. You don’t get to claim her for your own gender.”
Ziauddin Yousafzai — the father of Malala, Pakistani activist and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate — said Jahangir deserves a state funeral while Indian poet Javed Akhtar called it the loss of the whole subcontinent.
However, there were some who termed her a hypocrite, a traitor – posting a picture of her receiving an award from Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina – and even an “Indian agent”.
—IANS
by Editor | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Do We Not Bleed?: Reflections of a 21-st Century Pakistani; Author: Mehr Tarar; Publisher: Aleph Book Company; Pages: 240; Price: Rs 599
What do a paraplegic artist seeking to inspire others to rise above their disabilities, a social media star who sought to flaunt her sexuality as a form of protest, and a policeman trying to solve a horrific crime with no complainants or witnesses, have in common? They are facets of a country that rarely make headlines (or do so distorted), but are equally relevant to its representation.
More so when the country in question is Pakistan, widely perceived as an unstable nation, wracked by terrorism, stifled by its military’s heavy hand and beset by a plethora of challenges. While images of bearded, unconscionably vicious terrorists moving out of the badlands to cities to massacre innocent bystanders, or defence top brass trying to augment their own power and wealth make for compelling stories, they are just a part of a reality — unfortunately a major part, but a part nevertheless.
There are stories of a country beyond this — of uncommonly common people, or nameless victims of regressive and violent patriarchy or social and religious pressure, but also of hopes, aspirations and love, of crimes, oppression and betrayal, and more. And then there is the curious love-hate relationship with its bigger, eastern neighbour.
This is what Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar depicts in this book, contending that “no country is bigger than its reality, or merely the sum total of its flaws”.
But admitting Pakistan happens to be more known for its “dark side” and “stereotyped in hues of extremism, militancy and terrorism”, the freelance columnist and Daily Times former op-ed editor notes it is struggling to “rebrand itself”.
“What I have tried to portray in this book is what I, an ordinary Pakistani, see of my country: A flawed yet dynamic state, faltering yet hopeful, stumbling yet focussed on a future in which people will be able to live decent lives, and trying to make the best of what they can to provide a stable today and a stronger tomorrow to its next generation,” she says.
But, for all that, Tarar does not seek to whitewash any aspect of Pakistan.
Divided into five thematic sections, the first, “Religious Persecution and Other Discontents”, begins with the issue of blasphemy whose victims span Punjab Governor Salman Taseer to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa varsity student Mashal Khan, and provides considerable insights into the religious mindset that fosters it and the colonial-era laws that facilitate it.
Tarar then takes up a shocking murder of a young girl in a village in Abbottabad district and the dogged police work that solved what was essentially a “blind case”, and then deals with the phenomenon and tragedy of Fauzia Azeem aka Qandeel Baloch, who is proved to be much more that the social media phenomenon she is remembered as.
“The Pakistan You Do Not Know” starts with an equally unsettling story of a Pakistani girl in Canada, but hits a lighter patch with a discourse on friends, fashion and food and other high society matters, and deals with the travails of a single mother the author is. It also showcases a heartbreaking tale of a love story gone wrong — for the woman, of course — and also looks at women’s depiction in popular TV shows.
“Remarkable Pakistanis” showcases a remarkable artist, a redoubtable educationist and a high-profile kidnapping victim, who provides a nuanced difference between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, while “Family and Friends” has more personal accounts about her mother, her relationship with her teenaged son and so on.
Finally, “The Indian Connection” covers a visit to Delhi’s most famous Sufi shrine, a “love” affair with Amitabh Bachchan and a fairly even-handed account of troubled bilateral ties and what can, and should, be done.
A personal but perceptive look at the other Pakistan beyond the “mullah-jihadi-army” focus which effectively dehumanises the great mass of its people, Tarar goes to show them at their best and worst, as good and evil, but as people. Replete with references to and comparisons with India, it also contains an eloquent warning for Indians against the dangerous paths their country and society could find themselves on if they continue following a misguided and outmoded concept of tradition, customs and honour.
As Tarar shows, these are morasses it is difficult to extricate ourselves for generations altogether, if at all.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in )
—IANS
