Dilip Simeon's blog

In July 2021, in a year which presented few reasons to be happy, the garment workers of Sindh province in Pakistan had cause to celebrate. The provincial government had just announced a 40% increase to the minimum wage, raising it from 17,000 to 25,000 rupees (from €84 to €124 at the current exchange rate) per month. Although still well below living wage levels, the hike was an urgently needed step up from the poverty pay that left workers struggling to survive during the pandemic. A government-ordered increase should have been water-tight, immovable. It should have guaranteed workers enough money to feed their families and pay their rent. However, progress in the garment industry is fragile. Now, half a year later, the promised wage increase has still not materialised…. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/pakistans-wage-struggle-shows-the-fragility-of-progress-in-the-global-garment-industry/ Alessandra Mezzadri: Informal labour, the majority world and the...

KARACHI, April 26 (Reuters) - A suspected female suicide bomber killed three Chinese teachers in Karachi on Tuesday, police and officials said, drawing strong condemnation from Beijing, in the first major attack this year against nationals of long-time ally China working in Pakistan. The three were among passengers on a minibus returning to Karachi university after a lunch break when the bomb exploded at the entrance to the university's Confucius Institute, killing the Chinese teachers and a Pakistani national, police and officials said. A separatist group, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) based in southwestern Balochistan province bordering Afghanistan and Iran, claimed responsibility for the blast, adding in an email to Reuters the attack was carried out by a woman suicide bomber. It shared in the email a photo of her clad in a long shawl sitting with two children. The photo could not be verified independently by police or other officials... The bombing was the first major atta...

Not too long ago, Pakistan and  Afghanistan  were called Af-Pak: two countries joined at the hip, doomed to live and die together. You didn’t get to choose your neighbours, we were told. Geography, we were taught, was our destiny. There was a lot of talk about geostrategic significance – which was the  Pakistan  military’s way of saying there were great advantages to be derived from our unfortunate neighbours. More than four decades ago, our leaders insisted we had to help the Afghan mujahideen fight the Soviets because that would help us ward off communism in our own country. Having lived most of my life in Pakistan, I have probably come across half a dozen communists – and even they never agreed with each other. That first jihad made generations of Afghans homeless but it also made some people in Pakistan very rich. The Soviet-Afghan war also sustained our brutal military dictatorship, brought us abundant supplies of cheap and high-quality heroin, and introduce...

I t was only a question of time before Kabul fell, says A.S. Dulat, a former head of India’s top spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, speaking from Delhi. The only surprise was the speed of the Taliban’s advance, concurs the ex-boss of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence, or isi, Asad Durrani, speaking from Islamabad. The two old warriors nod in unison. Despite lifetimes spent jousting in the shadow war between India and Pakistan, the former foes seem happy to agree on the inevitability of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan. What they do not tell their Indian interviewer is how sharply different the implications of the change are for each of the South Asian rivals. Besides losing all its investment in a secular, democratic Afghanistan, India has also lost strategic leverage. There were never Indian troops in Afghanistan, but its aid projects and four consulates certainly spooked the generals running the show in Pakistan. India’s close ties with the Afghan government ...

In 2008, when Pakistan transitioned from nine years of military rule under Pervez Musharraf to an elected civilian government led by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), many believed that Pakistan’s ‘culture of military coups’ was headed in a decisively more democratic direction. The transition came about as a result of the ‘Lawyers’ Movement’, a mass protest initiated by lawyers from March 2007 to 2009, following the unconstitutional suspension of Pakistan’s Supreme Court justice. These hopes for democracy were strengthened when the 18th constitutional amendment was unanimously passed by the Parliament in April 2010.  The amendment not only constitutionally blocked military coups by strengthening Article 6 of the 1973 Constitution – which barred any person from abrogating, suspending or holding the constitution in abeyance, and stripped Pakistan’s higher courts of their powers to legitimise military coups – but also added a number of other provisions to strengthen the hold of the ci...

The family of a 27-year-old woman who was allegedly tortured and beheaded by the son of a business tycoon have spoken of their devastation in a case that has pushed  Pakistan  to examine what has been called a “gender terrorism epidemic”. Zahir Zakir Jaffer was arrested on suspicion of the pre-meditated murder of Noor Mukadam, the youngest daughter of a former Pakistani diplomat, after allegedly holding her captive for three days at his apartment in an upmarket area of Islamabad. Noor Mukadam murder: 'new details, characters' emerge Noor’s case will be a test for the authorities and for Pakistani society in more ways than one The case, involving two of the capital’s richest families, has shone a light on Islamabad’s elite, the offspring of landowners, politicians and business tycoons. In a country where so-called “honour” killings are common practice, the brutality of the killing has forced Pakistan to confront its poor record on gender-based violence. In the  World Eco...

The film,  1978,  has been nominated for two awards at the Palm Springs Film Festival 2021, a qualifier for the Oscars, and is about a Christian-Goan rockstar who must decide if he can change with the times, as Pakistan transforms under a revolutionary fervour. It has been nominated for the Best of the Festival Award and Best Live Action Film Over 15 Minutes Award. The 17-minute film stars Rubya Chaudhry, Zeeshan Muhammad, Sherwyn Anthony and Naveed Kamal. The director and writer Hamza Bangash, told  Images  the film is loosely inspired by the real life experiences of Norman D'Souza, Karachi's own rockstar. "After my experiences of creating the film with him and other members of the Christian-Goan community, we have decided to launch a  Kickstarter  campaign to help Norman's band record and shoot a music video! I am very excited to help bring back a glimmer of Karachi's glorious disco era," he said.  And bring back the era they did. The recently re...

Farah, a 12-year-old Christian girl, says she was taken from her home in Pakistan last summer, shackled, forced to convert to Islam and made to marry her kidnapper. It's a fate estimated to befall hundreds of young Christian, Hindu and Sikh women and children in the country each year.  On 25 June, Farah was at home in Faisalabad, Pakistan's third most populous city, with her grandfather, three brothers and two sisters when they heard knocking on their front door. She remembers her grandfather going to open it. Then three men burst in, grabbed Farah and forced her into a van outside. They warned the family that if they tried to get her back "they'd make us regret it", says Farah's father, Asif, who was at work at the time.  Asif went to the nearest police station to report the crime - even providing the name of one of the abductors, whom Farah's grandfather had recognised - but he says the officers showed little interest in helping.  "They were very ...

The family of a 12-year-old girl in  Pakistan  who was chained up in a cattle pen for more than six months, after allegedly being kidnapped and forced to marry her abductor, have attacked the authorities for refusing to act.  The case is among those now being examined by a government inquiry into the forced conversions of religious minority women and girls, after police released the man, saying they believed the girl had married him of her own free will. The child was taken from her home in Faisalabad last June and had been held at the home of 29-year-old Khizer Hayat, where she was made to work clearing animal dung. Her family are angry that no further action has been taken against the man.  Police investigators initially held Hayat but then released him, saying there was no evidence the girl had not consented to the marriage and that a medical report said she was 16…. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/10/family-of-girl-12-forced-to-marry-abd...

SOMETIME around the first week of December, the residents of Gwadar woke up to find work taking place to build a large metal fence that would stretch from just north of the old airport and extend westward along a road known as the Balochistan Broadway Avenue. The total length of the fence would be 24 kilometres, and according to what the locals were able to gather, it is planned to extend in a straight line along the central divider of Broadway Avenue and then cut straight south to the sea. Along the way, it will cut two habitations of 30 to 40 houses into two parts, one part inside the fence and one outside. The master plan for Gwadar includes three special zones, known as the Gwadar Port Free Zone (2,280 acres), GIEDA Industrial Zone (3,000 acres) and EPZA export processing zone (1,000 acres). As part of the infrastructure development programme for these three zones, a series of projects are envisioned, including construction of roads, utilities, warehouses and security. In the pro...

Hailing from the restive province of Balochistan and being a vocal critic of the Pakistani State on the issue of forced disappearances, Karima Mehrab had for long received threats and intimidation in Pakistan. She was forced to leave Pakistan but continued to receive threats on her life in Canada. Her uncle was  killed , her home was raided more than twice, and her family in Pakistan was repeatedly threatened to persuade her to give up activism...   Karima Mehrab Baloch was a known crusader of justice, relentless in her demand for equality for persecuted residents of Balochistan in Western Pakistan. Her  death  in Canada this week caused an uproar, even as the Toronto police said the incident appeared to be a “non-criminal” matter without any foul play. For Karima’s supporters in Balochistan and elsewhere, though, that is hardly reassuring. Karima Mehrab, who had been living in exile in Canada, is not the first Pakistani human rights activist who faced death t...

Before India’s “love jihad”, Pakistan found its way to getting rid of its Christians. Blasphemy was pinned on them with the confidence that no judge would let them off the hook, with pious crowds demanding death outside his court. Pakistan’s most humiliating moment is reached every time someone is accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death. Proof is not needed; the court is just too scared to let the accused go, as happened in the case of Junaid Hafeez , a “visiting” faculty member at the English department of Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan, who was sentenced to death by a court in Multan in 2019 after being arrested in 2013. He was a Fulbright scholar with a Master’s from Jackson State University. It is easy to convict people for blasphemy because the law says an insult to the Prophet PBUH can take place even by innuendo. Asia Bibi’s plight retrains the spotlight on Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law Then, there are the clerics who can scare any judge if they think he is getting s...

Stalin fought against fascism but then created an ideological state, which was not much different from Hitler’s Germany. Pakistan is like Caliban. It sees its face in the mirror and doesn’t like what it sees. Pratap Bhanu Mehta recently  (Simply Vishwas)  wrote: “Politics of belief (vishwas) is different from one based on fact and interest. It has an underlying cultural nihilism.” In Pakistan, it has an association with “ideology” serving as the foundation of the Islamic State. The word “ideologie” came into use during the French Revolution and postulated a sure and encyclopaedic form of knowledge upon which social engineering could be based.  Ideology came on the scene as a champion of Enlightenment and rival of religion, but it soon acquired the status of a dogma. The principal voice of the ideologues and author of Elements d’Ideologie, Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), spoke frankly of “regulating society”. Most ideologues possess a kind of certitude, not just that...

Pakistan’s most well-known dacoit, Uzair Jan Baloch, is once again in the news, having confessed to murdering 198 people during his career as the “boss” of the Lyari Gang in Karachi. He was arrested from the UAE on December 28, 2015, and everyone thought he would be summarily gotten rid of. But he is still around, presenting himself before the courts trying him for murder and billions in extractions (bhatta) shared with the politicians in power. Uzair is also alleged to have provided Iranian intelligence agencies information about the Pakistan Army, and orchestrated hundreds of targeted killings and politically-motivated murders. Uzair is hopefully the last of the Baloch dacoits of Lyari, Karachi’s largest district. If he gets his comeuppance, it will be the end of a classic Sindhi interface with the Baloch legend that linked Karachi to Balochistan on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border. Most of the “wadero” (feudal) aristocracy of Sindh traces its ancestry to Baloch warriors. ...

Since Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan fondly remembers the founder of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, as  a “martyr” of the faith , it is only relevant to talk about this “sacred” relationship. Osama bin Laden’s Syrian mother was one of the many wives of his millionaire Yemeni father. While his brothers went to the West for higher education, Osama preferred going to Jeddah’s Abdel Aziz University where his fondness for Islamic studies was spurred by two charismatic teachers, Muhammad Qutb and Abdallah Azzam — the first an Egyptian, a brother of the great Ikhwan leader, Syed Qutb and the second, a Palestinian who merged the Qutb doctrine of jahiliyya (ignorance) with modern jihad against the West. Osama came to Peshawar in 1980 to conduct jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. By 1984, Osama got used to spending a lot of time in Peshawar, renting a number of guest houses in the city, and frequenting the office of Al Jihad, the Arabic newspaper that his mentor ...

Professor Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, who teaches physics and math at Lahore’s Forman Christian University, has been told that his contract will not be renewed in 2021. In the  same week, the Punjab governor announced that all universities of the province would be required to teach the Holy Quran as a compulsory subject. Hoodbhoy holds a PhD in nuclear physics and he objects to acts of state and society against reason. His book, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, explains the source of his trouble with the ideological state of Pakistan. It is not that he  hates religion — he objects to acts of irrationality in the name of religion. The two scientists he most admires, S Ramanujan and Abdus Salam, were deeply religious. He protested, however, when the Governor of Punjab Salmaan Taseer was murdered by his police guard when he defended a Christian woman accused of insulting the Holy Prophet under Pakistan’s Anti-Blasphemy law. Living un...

"She absolutely had his ear, it was terrible!” ~ General Yakub Khan, former Pakistan foreign minister, writing about Joanne Herring and Gen Zia-ul-Haq Joanne Herring was an American woman who came over to help Pakistan and became so close to the powers that be that she influenced policy, jihad and Pakistan’s internal politics. She is credited with introducing Charlie Wilson to Pakistani dictator Gen Zia-ul-Haq and thus began CIA’s “Largest Covert Operation in History”. Joanne Herring had no problem with the execution of the elected leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto by the military regime led by Gen Zia. She endorsed it. She was from Texas. That was the 1970s. Nearly a half century later, Bhutto’s legacy faces ruin and the charge is led by another white woman from Texas who absolutely has the establishment’s ear. Unlike Joanne, she knows a lot about Pakistan’s grassroots truths and surreal realities. While Joanne had Gen Zia’s ears, she has everyone eating out of her hands. Po...

The PTM describes itself as a non-violent movement that demands to be treated equally with other citizens within the framework of Pakistan’s constitution.  The PTM anthem Da Sanga Azadi Da   zawana mo katal kegi   (of what use is this freedom) has resonated among the Pashtun. The party wants accountability from the most powerful institution in Pakistan for putting FATA in the eye of a storm that continues to rage in Afghanistan, for disappearances and the killings of civilians in targeted operations or as collateral, and other violation of rights On May 1, Sardar Muhammed Arif Wazir, a Pashtun political leader in Pakistan, was fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting by unidentified men as he stood outside his house in South Waziristan.  With gunshot wounds in the head and neck, Wazir was moved to a hospital in Islamabad, where he succumbed to his injuries. Hhis death triggered an outpouring of grief and anger among the Pashtun in the North-West Frontier areas of Pa...

On April 23, Prime Minister Imran Khan staged a four-hour “telethon” to collect funds for the coronavirus crisis and ended up netting nearly three billion rupees before asking his favourite cleric, Tariq Jameel, to pray. The mountebank priest first rejected the word “fight” against the coronavirus because it was “a curse of Allah” and needed repentance from a nation he thought was corrupt and lascivious. Khan and the nation took it as the old normal and bowed their head. More articles by  Khaled Ahmed Unsurprisingly, the clergy in Pakistan has the upper hand and has defeated the doctors in deciding the state policy against COVID-19, which had struck 10,500 victims and had claimed 280 lives at the end of April. The doctors raised the alarm after Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) reached an “accord” with the “top” priests of the country to let people throng the mosques five times a day, plus special prayers during the month of Ramadan falling in the last week of April, depending on ...

Doctors in  Pakistan  have warned of “deplorable” conditions on the frontlines of the country’s coronavirus outbreak, describing the pandemic as untreatable in one region and accusing police of brutally suppressing protests over working conditions.One doctor who took part in a sit-in on Monday to protest against a lack of personal protective equipment said he had been “beaten and humiliated” by police. “In the beginning, I thought, ‘How could police use violence against the frontline fighters of Covid-19 when some days ago the same officers had saluted us for leading during the pandemic?’” said Amanullah, speaking from the police station where he was being held in Quetta, in the Balochistan region.  “But we were wrong. Sticks and butts of AK-47 rifles rained down on us. We were dragged through the street and thrown into trucks.” He and about 60 other doctors were held in police detention overnight and only released at midnight on Tuesday. In the hospital wher...