South Asia Citizens Web

All Afghan elections to date have been bankrolled - and largely organized - by international donors. In advance of 2014, Afghans and donors alike need to decide what to do to stage a credible presidential election and what can realistically be done given the timetable and costs.

In the battle for Pakistan’s soul, Sir Syed’s rational approach ultimately lost out and the Allama’s call on emotive reasoning won. Iqbal said what people wanted to hear — and his genius lay in crafting it with beautifully chosen words. Unfortunately, his prescriptions for reconstructing society cannot help us in digging ourselves out of a hole.

The two pillars of the DAE’s power, Ramana argues, are the promise or future projection of limitless energy, and the deadly attraction of the power to annihilate contained in nuclear weapons. The state seeks legitimacy through these two intimately connected parts of the nuclear programme. An elaborate charade rationalises its economic and political investment in nuclear power. Ramana shows how the DAE was crafted and run as an institution unanswerable to Parliament and the public. It abuses its power to mess up everything from uranium mining to spent-fuel reprocessing, violates its own safety norms, makes extravagant claims about developing technologies indigenously while importing/borrowing them, and hides major elements of generation costs through cheap accounting tricks.

People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) condemns the arrest of Sri Dandapani Mohanty, who acted as one of the interlocutors on behalf of the Maoists, both in the abduction of Malkangiri Collector and that of the two Italian tourists. The way the Odisha police arrested Sri Mohanty, violating all rules pertaining to arrest and detention, shows its highhandedness and utter disregard for the law of the land. Moreover, Sri Mohanty’s arrest at this juncture raises several questions which the Odisha government must answer.

Some readers, whose intelligence I respect, took my last op-ed to be dismissive of corruption as a cause of Pakistan’s social decay. I apologise for having failed to express myself adequately: I certainly do not dispute that Pakistan is reaping the terrible consequences of wholesale corruption. Corruption, by definition, expropriates that which rightfully belongs to others. By doing so, it hurts the poor more than the rich, lowers productivity, creates mistrust of authority, breaks down the social contract and leads towards ungovernability. We all know that the average Pakistani is frustrated and that he encounters corruption while reporting a crime, seeking justice in a traffic accident, getting an electricity or gas connection, securing admission to school for children, or getting a business contract signed. We have kunda mafias, tanker mafias, and mafias of all shapes and forms that raise the collective blood pressure.