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Once upon a constitution

By S.A. Qureshi

AFTER every martial law in Pakistan comes a constitutional vacuum. This is because constitutions are essentially living frameworks that should continually recognise changing political realities. On the other hand, when suspended in a dictatorship, they are unable to do so.

If one examines our country’s three prolonged dictatorial periods of rule, the end of each has resulted in jockeying to translate the changed political realities into a viable power structure. This is very much happening again today.

The Rich Get Hungrier

By AMARTYA SEN

WILL the food crisis that is menacing the lives of millions ease up — or grow worse over time? The answer may be both. The recent rise in food prices has largely been caused by temporary problems like drought in Australia, Ukraine and elsewhere. Though the need for huge rescue operations is urgent, the present acute crisis will eventually end. But underlying it is a basic problem that will only intensify unless we recognize it and try to remedy it.

Scrap the 2p fuel duty increase now

No 10 must not give in to the protesters - but its handing of green taxes has been poor

Alice Miles

Oh Gord. Can we take another two years of this? Anything - anything - would be better than the plan confected by the coalition of cowards and egotists that the Labour Party, MPs and ministers alike, has become.

They didn't allow a contest to choose their next leader; now they want a contest, maybe, but not for a bit in case the result turns out even more scary than things are now.

Politics of knowledge

By Javed Hasan Aly

IT is not strange that specialist academics consider themselves to be the ultimate repositories of scholarship and knowledge. Thus fortified, and with a self-righteous disdain, they lament the audacity of lesser mortals, untrained in political economy, to waste precious space in 21st century op-ed pages by exercising literary licence to give symbolic and metaphorical meaning to terms like feudalism.

Food aid must go local to do good

Aid groups have a responsibility to consider the impact of their programs on local culture

By Andrew J. Curiel

Durban, South Africa - Nestled amid the lush hills and sugar cane fields north of Durban, South Africa, Lindiwe, a local community worker, assists in preparing food parcels for delivery. Nearby, more than 100 women and a sprinkling of men, most diagnosed as HIV positive, are packed in a community center learning how to properly prepare vlugkokend (macaroni), sperziebonen gebroken (green beans), and hollandse bruine bonen (brown beans).

Ayub Khan and the politics of script

By Dr Tariq Rahman

THE script of a language is not only a linguistic issue, it is also a political one. Scripts are associated with the identity of a group and, therefore, function as icons, or symbols, of a certain cultural traditions.

During the British days in north India, the Perso-Arabic script was associated with a Muslim identity; the Gurmukhi script with the Sikh identity and the Devanagari one with the Hindu identity. In Bengal, however, the Bengali script — belonging to the Brahmi family of scripts like Devanagari — was a part of Bengali cultural identity.

The Obama Connection

By ROGER COHEN

It’s the networks, stupid.

More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama’s grasp of the central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination into a seemingly unassailable lead over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been so 20th-century. His has been of the century we’re in.

No end to colonial governance

By Rubina Saigol

THE Defence of India Act of 1915 was an emergency criminal law enacted by the British Raj to curtail revolutionary and nationalist activities in India during the First World War.

The apparent intent was to prevent ‘terrorists’ from calling public meetings, publishing material inciting the people to revolt, disseminating revolutionary literature, and so forth. The act was designed to curtail actions by armed revolutionaries characterised as ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists’ with links abroad.

Agenda

John Waples, Business Editor

Pay is back as a big issue and will remain so for some time. In a challenging market, like the one we are entering, boardroom compensation will be an emotive issue.

In the past week we have seen Royal Dutch Shell, the oil giant, face down a barrage of investor criticism over the award to three executives of one-off bonuses worth ¤1m (£797,000) to ensure they remain with the company. Glaxo Smith Kline, the drugs group, faced a similar investor revolt last Wednesday over a £2.5m payment to Chris Viehbacher.

Nehru: an out of fashion icon

By Haider Nizamani

JAWAHARLAL Nehru’s record of remaining elected prime minister for 17 consecutive years is yet to be matched by any other leader of South Asia. As prime minister and leader of the Congress party, Nehru left his indelible mark on India’s political system and economic and foreign policies.

He died while serving as India’s prime minister 44 years ago on May 28. But Nehru is politically a little out of fashion these days in India.

Is Fortress Europe a reality?

By Shadaba Islam

EUROPEAN Union governments have become entangled in a fierce debate on immigration policy, with Spain and Italy — the two EU member states which were once well-established worldwide exporters of labour — exchanging heated words over how best to deal with migrants and foreigners.

The quarrel pits the government of newly-elected conservative Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi against Spain’s socialist Premier José Luis Zapatero, with Rome demanding that officials in Madrid stop criticising Italy’s hard-line immigration policies.

The heart of Lebanon's strife

Violence is rooted in the flawed 1943 power-sharing pact

By Mohamad Bazzi

Beirut, Lebanon - Huddled at home in front of their TVs during last week's fighting, the Lebanese relived one of their worst memories: masked gunmen setting up makeshift checkpoints and demanding people's identity cards. The image of gunmen stopping civilians at checkpoints to sort and often murder them on the basis of religion is perhaps the most enduring symbol of Lebanon's 15-year civil war.

Voters just don't trust Hillary

There's no Vast Misogynist Conspiracy against Senator Clinton, she's simply not suitable

Gerard Baker

Is Hillary Clinton the victim of a Vast Misogynist Conspiracy? Have her efforts to breach the ultimate glass ceiling in the world's labour market been destroyed - as in the end we're told all women's efforts inevitably are destroyed - by a lethal combination of sneering chauvinism and locker-room clubbiness?

To the cynics this US presidential election was always going to be a race to the bottom between racism and sexism. As the Democratic party continues to writhe through the final agonies of Senator Clinton's collapsing ambitions, her people think they know the real winner.

The last chance

By Javed Hussain

UNLIKE most countries, Pakistan is fortunate to have human and natural resources in abundance. However, unlike most countries that have forged ahead at stunning speed, Pakistan has been unfortunate in not getting the kind of leadership that could exploit its resources.

The leadership of Malaysia, South Korea and China, to name a few, have turned their countries into economic giants, where their people are enjoying a standard of living that is high and rising by the day.

An expat's view of the falling dollar

Even Europeans are worried about this trend

By John K. Cooley

Athens - A mere seven years ago, you could order an orange juice or milkshake at a cafe in the leafy Athens suburb where I live – and pay, at most, two bucks. No more. Like the three or more million Americans living abroad, many European and Middle Eastern users of Uncle Sam's greenbacks have watched the cost of a single euro rise from 82 cents at the euro's inception a decade ago to around $1.60, before easing a bit to around $1.55.

The US dollar seems to have timidly begun its recovery from its drastic, five-year-long slump against the muscular euro. But what's needed now is strong support to sustain and speed up the dollar's recovery.

Earthquake and Hope

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

In the aftermath of the great Sichuan earthquake, we’ve seen a hopeful glimpse of China’s future: a more open and self-confident nation, and maybe — just maybe — the birth of grass-roots politics here.

In traveling around China in the days after the quake, I was struck by how the public and the news media initially seized the initiative from the government. Ordinary Chinese are traveling to the quake zone to help move rubble, and tycoons, peasants and even children are reaching into their pockets to donate to the victims.

Pakistan and global food prices

By Shahid Kardar

THE Sensitive Price Index has now crossed the frightening rate of 20 per cent (the latest being 24 per cent), largely on account of the recent revisions in the domestic prices of petroleum products and food inflation.

Excessive liquidity in the banking sector owing to robust capital inflows and a loose monetary policy fuelled by government spending have contributed to the swelling of food prices. However, this price surge has principally been driven by changes in global markets and long unaddressed domestic structural factors.

Imbalances of Power

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

There has been much debate in this campaign about which of our enemies the next U.S. president should deign to talk to. The real story, the next president may discover, though, is how few countries are waiting around for us to call. It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once — with so few in America’s favor
Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy.

Talking Versus Doing

By DAVID BROOKS

In 1965, Mancur Olson wrote a classic book called “The Logic of Collective Action,” which pointed out that large, amorphous groups are often less powerful politically than small, organized ones. He followed it up with “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” In that book, Olson observed that as the number of small, organized factions in a society grows, the political culture becomes more divisive, the economy becomes more rigid and the nation loses vitality.

The blame game

By Shahid Javed Burki

IN the several TV programmes to which I was invited during my current visit to Pakistan, I was repeatedly asked the same set of questions. What was behind the depressing and seemingly worsening economic situation in Pakistan?

Who was to blame for the plunging value of the rupee and for the precipitous fall in the stock market? Why did the government not anticipate the severe shortage of electricity that is taking such a heavy toll on the economy?