Unite Pakistan

THE existential threat to Pakistan starts with the letter ‘T’ — but it’s not the Taliban. It’s ‘Taxes’. More precisely, it’s the lack of a fair and equitable taxation system, and the unwillingness and inability of successive governments to fix it. This was the gist of the first part of my column two weeks ago. This part will outline what can be done about it. But first, it will be useful to review the recently presented federal budget for 2013-14 from the perspective of fairness of ‘burden sharing’. While the budget does make a welcome — albeit somewhat modest — attempt to widen the tax base, it falls short of the standards of equity and fairness by placing an unduly large burden on existing and honest taxpayers. Take the case of the higher tax incidence on salaried persons — a group of around 900,000. While this group of captive taxpayers will be coughing up substantially more tax revenue, the group of professional service providers (doctors, lawyers, architects,...

IT is our war. It is America’s war. Thousands of Pakistanis have perished in this war. And all we do is take part in this debate. We do nothing to end it. If one could put it down to a simple lack of will or spine it would have been bad enough. That a fair bit of the discourse on terrorism represents ideologically motivated obfuscation is unforgivable, particularly given how many compatriots have had to sacrifice so much. The dominant argument is that Pakistan’s support to the US-led war in Afghanistan and the CIA’s drone attacks are the only drivers of terrorism in the country. Ergo, this support to the US is not just blamed for terrorism but also advanced as a justification for the mass murder of our people. Refusal to accept this view in its entirety is immediately pounced upon as being tantamount to condoning or worse still supporting the drone attacks that mostly kill our civilians, women and children, and occasionally the militant in the tribal areas. God ...

AN excellent Asian Media Barometer tool has been developed by the Friedrich Ebert Siftung Foundation, a German political organisation that seeks to educate ordinary citizens about democracy and pluralism. The 2012 AMB was launched recently with a roundtable discussion about media and ethics, which made it clear that Pakistan’s media, especially our television channels, has been going down the wrong path for such a long time that getting back to the right one is going to take a lot of hard work, vision, and commitment from all players. The AMB, originally developed for use in Africa, was first used by FES-Pakistan in 2009 to analyse the state of Pakistan’s media. Last year, a panel of five media experts and five members of civil society rated the national media environment on a scale of one to five in 45 predetermined indicators, which make up four main sectors where goals need to be met: freedom of expression in the media should be protected; the media lands...

A ccording to WHO, only three countries remain polio-endemic in 2012, out of which Pakistan is the only country which somehow has showed an increase in its polio cases of 2011-2012 than were recorded in the previous years. India got cleared from the list just recently whereby Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan remain the only three in the world where polio virus still fights back. Unfortunately the number of cases in Pakistan has increased to what it was back in 2010. With this worsening condition in Pakistan the greatest blow has just hit recently where series of attacks have been carried out on anti-polio workers. A three day country wide anti-polio rally was organized this week by UNICEF which took the lives of eight anti polio health workers! The three-day drive sprained with blood is now over. What has come as a serious shock is that major part of the killings took place on Tuesday in the capital city of Karachi, where four female vaccination workers were killed...

Many believe and rightly so that the upcoming elections would be the crucial milestone in Pakistan’s democratic history. It would be the first time that a democratic government (without a general sitting in its driving seat) will complete its five years tenure and will held elections to transfer powers to another democratically elected government. This democratic transfer, if hopefully is made rightly would mark Pakistan’s first ever democratic transition and it could bring Pakistan to new horizons of democracy where the chances of military rule are minimized by transfer of power to sovereign parliament and not otherwise. Although elections held in 2008 were considered pretty fair and democratic as well yet there were few big hiccups which can defame the claim altogether, like the elections were actually held under the rule of a military dictator and not under a democratic regime. And there was the fact that leaders of two biggest political parties PPP and PML (N) we...

S omething peculiar! Yes. For all purposes and intentions everything that has been going on the current political stage especially with this “turning Islamabad into a seized city and World’s largest Tahrir Square” is not regular of course. But what is more disturbing is that there erupted a sudden need to disrupt a democratic structure and to hamper the to-be-first ever democratic transition where one elected government (not under a military dictator) would be seen handing over power to another. The question is why Pakistan’s steps towards democracy are being hurdled now? For Tehreek-e-Minhajul Quran leader Tahir-ul-Qadri the answer lies in revolution! One in the footsteps of Arab spring to “save the nation”, bring reforms and to “give rights back to the poor”. And all these revolutionary ideas came to his mind right before the election time. Qadri, a Canadian citizen recently returned to Pakistan after a five-year-stay in Britain. He came back with an agenda that...

R evolution - is what many like to call it, but I would go with a more seasoned term - realization ! People are now taking up streets to voice their needs and demands. This is the image of a more realized nation who has finally shown that yes they can stand united for a cause, no matter what it is. They have shown that they are capable of protesting peacefully and can face adverse conditions (weather and terrorist threats) and could still stand firm as a rock. Over the two weeks Pakistan has seen quite a drama going on in its political wing where sudden serious changes have taken place. With Qadri’s long march in full swing, no one expected a little that PM Raja Pervaiz Ashraf would be lashed out like this. On Tuesday, Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered the arrest of Prime Minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf and 18 others on account of massive corruption pulled out of the Rental Power Plant case. Qadri congratulated the whole nation on this verdict of SC and considered his l...

B eing A Khan – An article written by India’s megastar Shahrukh Khan (for a magazine) became a topic of debate across borders and a medium of hypocritical hysteria, which forced Shahrukh Khan to clarify his stance in a media statement to hush away all the controversy cooked up through that article, by those who do not actually care much about what he actually said but spent days debating on how insecure and utterly miserable a life Khan is leading in India and how intolerant a society India is, where a megastar of unprecedented success has to bear such unequal treatment for being a minority and implying that directly with a macro-level analysis they came up with the question of what would then be the fate of regular Muslim citizens in a not-so-secular-India? Let’s face it critics, Muslims all over the world are not safe utterly and that is partially not entirely of course, a repercussion of the acts executed by and traceable back to some of the extremist Muslim grou...