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TIMING is everything, especially in politics. Mistiming can be fatal, as three recent leaders, now out of power, have learned. In October 1999, PM Mian Nawaz Sharif decided to remove COAS Gen Musharraf, even while Musharraf was returning home from Sri Lanka. In June 2019, PM Imran Khan transferred the then head of ISI, Gen […]

U.S. President Donald Trump has bent diplomacy full circle. He has reversed inter-state relations to a pre-Westphalian age. The conduct of international political relations between states were enshrined in the 1648 treaty of Westphalia. It introduced the concept of territorial integrity, that ‘states, regardless of size, have the right to self-governance.’ Sovereignty shifted from a

So another Sisyphus has surfaced on our corporate horizon, putting his shoulder to the boulder of “nation building”. The Chairman of L+T (Larsen and Toubro), a one lakh crore multi-national behemoth, not satiated with the Rs. 51 crore he brings home every year (which is 540 times what his average employee subsists on), wants his

ANYONE who attended the ThinkFest on Jan 11-12 in Lahore hoping to walk away with a panacea to Pakistan’s ailments, must have been disappointed. The ThinkFest was a master class in dissection of a living corpse. The discussants — scholars, politicians, a former prime and finance minister, serving and retired government officials, artistes, cricketers, financiers

Himachal is gradually slipping into a financial sink-hole, with a debt of Rs.85000 crore and almost 60% of its annual budget going to pay just employees’ salaries/pensions and debt servicing. The Union government, for vindictive political reasons, is further nudging it into the hole by denying it almost Rs.9000 crores of PDNA (Post Disaster National

[DAWN, 9 Jan., 2025] To reassemble the origins of Pakistan, one needs time, money and luck. Collectors of deltiology (the study and collection of postcards) need all three to make sense of Pakistan’s jigsaw chronology. Our country’s visual history is a scattered puzzle, with pieces that are 5,000 years old with an undeciphered alphabet, a

I have little or no sympathy for those doubting Thomases who continue to question the stupendous growth of our economy-such people should be packed off to one of the coral reefs around the Great Nicobar, which shall soon be ground to dust once the mega-crony project there takes off; it will serve them right. For

THE  PERPETUAL  OUTSIDER I first heard of Mani Shankar Aiyar sometime in 1990 when I was serving with Mr. I.K. Gujral, the Minister of External Affairs in V.P. Singh’s government. The Pakistan Foreign Minster had called on Mr. Gujral at South Block and they were reminiscing over old times when the conversation turned to Indian