Fears of a Military Coup in Pakistan

Clinton`s affair with Monica, and the Pakistan coup have taught me that I was wrong to look down upon soap operas as an art form. They can be pretty close to reality.

Imagine the scene In Sri Lanka. The Pakistan, Indian, and Sri Lankan military chiefs are having a nice chat over a chotta peg of something, or tea, when an embassy official seeks permission to enter and informs the Pak Military Chief: ``Sir. it is my unpleasant duty to inform you that you have been dismissed``. The Pak Chief turns to his counterparts and says: `` please excuse me gentlemen, I have to go and supervise a coup...``

Imagine what is likely to happen when Zardari and Nawaz Sharif meet eachother in prison.

And now, the army! From the sublime to the ridiculous! The Chowk front page quickly descends from a discussion on Amartya Sen to consider the relative capabilties of potential Jalld-in-Chiefs for the country. Roles in oppressive and bloody episodes appropriately show up as meritorious qualifications. Such is the tragic situation in which we find ourselves.

Re--Mr. RR`s comments:

The people from NWFP and other places who migrated to Karachi are as authentic Karachiites as Altaf Hussein. They do not need anyone`s permission to be there. Incidently, they have also played as significant a role in the construction of the city`s economic, social and cultural life, as those whose mother tongue happens to be Urdu.

tariq ahsan

A Nobel for Development Studies Wonderful. It is after a very long time that the Nobel for economics has been awarded to a learned social scientist. In recent years it has usually gone to those who work on the narrowly conceived discipline of economics, which is concerned mainly with abstract modelling, having almost no direct explanatory contribution to the understanding of the dominant issues of our time, such as mass poverty. For the dominant neo-liberal ideology, poverty need not even be a subject worthy of consideration. It is also appropriate that as the world financial crisis is making matters worse for the toiling multitudes of our planet, the Nobel has gone to someone who focuses on the solutions of real problems.

Hopefully, people who give importance to the Nobel

as something which makes a person worthy of being read, will now read Amartya Sen, and give attention to some of the interesting insights he has to offer. Sometime ago, he had drawn attention to the crucial role of the state in promoting social justice. He compared the social indicators regarding poverty for India`s richest stae, U.P., and Kerala, the poorest one. But effective land reforms, and education and health care policies of the provincial Governments in Kerala, had succeeded in eliminating mass poverty. U.P., on the other hand, ruled mostly by the Congress, remains mired in poverty.

Incidently, the Nobel for economics is not the real thing. The U.S. had it instituted in ``memory``

of Nobel to give prestige to the discipline. As Keynesianism was discarded, neo-liberal moneterists have mostly received it. For the Prize to go to someone like Sen, it can be safely assumed that the crisis of neo-liberal ideology is now recognised by some of the most pretigeous economists of the world.

tariq ahsan

The Short-Circuiting of Democracy The Clinton sex scandal is contributing towards the erosion of the superstitious awe and the mystique surrounding the U.S. presidency. This is good for the prospect that democracy in the U.S.

will broaden, and more power will seep to local grassroots representative organisations, and away from oppressive and corrupt institutions like the

the Congress and the presidency.

tariq ahsan