Some things to Reconsider

The job of a Prime Minister is never an easy one. Some inherit a storm; others inherit calm seas with a steady wind. Jawaharlal Nehru got the raw end of the deal: a traumatised, partitioned land, millions uprooted, and the Cold War beginning to freeze the world in two hostile blocs. Lal Bahadur Shastri died a war time Prime Minister, and Indira Gandhi presided over a war-ravaged economy, staring across hostile borders at Pakistan and China while the superpowers treated India as a pawn. Morarji Desai stumbled into South Block after the Emergency, the West reeling from stagflation and his own coalition too weak to command authority. Rajiv Gandhi, with a brute majority in Parliament, was besieged by multiple insurgencies at home and a belligerent Zia-ul-Haq across the border. P.V. Narasimha Rao had to deal with the mother of all crises—the 1991 balance of payments collapse —just as the Soviet Union, India’s security blanket, disintegrated into history. Even Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who loo...

  So, Javed Akhtar is a “selective atheist”? Really? That’s like accusing someone of being a “part-time vegetarian” because they eat paneer on weekdays and butter chicken at weddings. It’s a joke—except in our poor excuse for a public debate, people are deadly serious when they say such things. Let us begin with first principles. As Benedict Anderson reminded us, nations are “imagined communities.” They are held together not by dogma or theology but by stories, symbols, songs, and rituals. In India, this imagination was never purely Hindu, never purely Muslim, never purely secular either. It has always been a messy, colourful patchwork woven from Tagore’s verse, Gandhi’s politics, Ambedkar’s law, and yes, Bollywood’s lyrics. Now, in this fabric, why must you prove your secularism by mocking every religion equally? Who came up with that idiotic standard? Religion in India is lived in fragments, in uneven doses. Salman Rushdie once joked that being Muslim in Bombay simply meant n...

https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/asim-munir-tightens-grip-but-fifth-star-won-t-alter-ground-realities-125053001946_1.html  By all means, Shekhar Gupta’s column “The Weight of the Fifth Star” could have been a sober, strategic analysis of civil-military tensions in Pakistan. Instead, it reads like a warning flare fired in the dark—noisy, dramatic, but ultimately directionless. While the piece accurately captures Pakistan’s descent into hybrid authoritarianism, it ultimately leans too far into speculative geopolitics, bordering on the theatrical. Let us begin with what is beyond dispute. Pakistan remains a garrison state, where the military tail wags the civilian dog. The Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, is not a national leader but a ceremonial compère reading scripts drafted in Rawalpindi. The President, Asif Ali Zardari, continues to weave his intrigues—but these days mostly in the salons of Karachi rather than the corridors of power. The institutions that should...