Pakistan & Kashmir

NOVANEWS By Usman Khalid Among many stories that come out of Afghanistan I read one which is remarkably similar to the experience of the people of Swat and Waziristan .  In the village of Hiratian in Afghanistan ‘s Helmand province, locals found the body of eight-year-old Dilawar hanging from a tree of a small fruit farm. The Taliban fighters had accused the boy of spying for the American forces; they kidnapped him, strung him up and left his body to sway in the wind for hours for all to see. The murder was horrifying, yet few villagers come to the defence of anyone charged with spying for the hated Americans. But slowly, the details of the story emerged. The Taliban in the area had been collecting donations — money, food or weapons. They demanded money or a weapon from Mullah Qudoos, the ...

    NOVANEWS This is a rejoinder the slain CPI (Maoist) spokesperson had penned in response to B.G. Verghese’s article in Outlook Chemkuri Azad Rajkumar Reading B.G. Verghese’s article Daylight at the Thousand-Star Hotel in Outlook (May 3), one is stunned by the abysmal poverty of thought and colonial mindset of this renowned intellectual. How is it that the illiterate, seemingly uncivilised, backward, half-naked adivasi thinks, analyses and acts a lot better than an established, well-read, highly qualified intellectual like Verghese? The history of freedom in our country presents innumerable such contrasts: of the highly educated white man, with his vast, in-depth knowledge of the world and the natural and social sciences, glorifying the British raj as a regime with a civili...

NOVANEWS A child is fiddling with a poster of a mustachioed man, a missing political worker who may be his father or his uncle, and who is in all likelihood, dead. He draws my immediate attention, this child, because out of the thousands seated around him in row upon neat row inside the open-air tent, he is the only one not focused on the stage, the blazing lights, the young man holding forth in angry punctuated bellows. “I am not a friend of Pakistan!” Zahid Baloch bangs the podium to emphasise his point, his countenance flushed, severe. “I am not a friend of the People’s Party!” He bangs the podium again, and the evening air swells with the ferocious stillness of his audience, tense and alert like a taut muscle. Two days earlier, on January 15, the Pakistan army’s Frontier Corps had open...

NOVANEWS By Sohail Parwaz The puppets are puppets and the human beings are human beings. No puppet can replace a man and so is it in the case of any ruler, may that be the president of Afghanistan. Almost 168 years back, during the first Anglo-Afghan war, the British after contriving the over throw of Amir Dost Mohammad Khan who surrendered to the British after some resistance, and was deported to India; Shah Shuja was installed as a “puppet king” by them. Ironically the puppet was killed by the Afghans within months and they continued their struggle for freedom under the leadership of Akbar Khan who later emerged as a hero, whom they remember and respect even today. The interesting thing is that the dare devil Afghans made the British lick the dust in a way that in January 1842, out of 16...

NOVANEWS Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Pakistan, Robert Fisk, torture, United States, war on terror. Robert Fisk reports from Pakistan on the 8000 “disappeared” citizens during the country’s US-backed “war on terror”: There is evidence that Pakistan’s “disappeared” are moved around, between barracks and interrogation centres and underground torture facilities in different towns and cities. There are also terrible rumours – fostered, some say, by the security authorities – that the army has thrown detainees from helicopters, that the cops dispose of bodies at night by dumping them in swamps or in open countryside so that decay and animal mutilation will cover the marks of torture before the bodies are found. So far, the Supreme Court in Islamabad and the Lahore High Court have squeezed around ...