The Shattered Dream

Finally, in August 1947, after a lot of campaigning, deliberations and discussions, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah was able to get his Pakistan. By this time, he had exhausted all his energies since he had also been fighting a mortal disease for many years which took its toll a little over a year after the new…

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The One That Got Away

Ikram Sehgal’s memoir reads more like a racy suspense novel instead of a gritty, soldierly chronicle and in his fore-ward to the book, Air Marshal (retd) Asghar Khan is right to comment that this fascinating account would make an excellent film. Sentences such as “I have gone through an odyssey and yet I am no…

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Reckoning with the Past

Despite the symbolic references to the fall of Dhaka and secession of East Pakistan in our everyday politics, the tragedy appears to mean little, at least for the generation that grew up in the post-1971 days. There is a general apathy and lack of understanding towards this dark episode of history in the younger generation-thanks…

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Afghan Coundrum

The 8th Worldwide Security Conference in Brussels organized by the EastWest Institute (EWI), one of the world’s leading think tanks, in cooperation with the World Customs Organization (WCO) and the Financial Times, in Oct 2011 focussed on (1) sharpening appreciation of the existing security dynamics in Southwest Asia with particular emphasis on Afghanistan (2) analysing…

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Plight of Burmese Muslims

Recent upsurge in violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar has highlighted the regime’s complete disregard for basic human rights. While the international conscience awakens slowly, the Muslim minority has already suffered a colossal spell of ethnic cleansing. Accounting for over one-third of the total population of Myanmar, 800,000 Rohingyas are neither recognised as citizens, nor…

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