Top diplomat and moderator of a discussion at the launch of Khurshid Kasuri’s book in Mumbai said on Monday, that members of the Hindu right-wing Shiv Sena smeared black paint on his face to protest the book launch. Sudheendra Kulkarni, who is scheduled to moderate a discussion at the launch of Pakistan’s former foreign minister’s book Neither a Hawk, nor a Dove, said the incident took place in his car when he was en route to his office. The Shiv Sena had previously warned that officials at the Nehru Planetarium, the venue of the book launch, to cancel the function, otherwise the event would be disrupted. Despite the threats, Maharashtra Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis, has assured ‘total security’ for the event. “For all foreigners, diplomats or foreign dignitaries who are allowed on a proper visa in our country, it’s the responsibility of our government to provide them security. Hence Mr Kasuri and the programme will be provided total security,” he said. “But this does not mean that we endorse all his views. No anti-India propaganda will be tolerated through any such programme, and if found so (sic), the organisers would be held responsible,” he added. However, just last week, in spite of assurances from Fadnavis, a concert by Pakistani singer Ghulam Ali was cancelled by the organisers following threats by the Shiv Sena. Maharashtra’s BJP spokesperson, Madhav Bhandari, said, “The party will look into the incident and take appropriate action against those involved.” Further, Kulkarni, in a press conference accompanied by Khurshid Kasuri, extended welcome to Kasuri and vowed that the book launch would go on as scheduled. This article originally appeared on The Times of India  

ISLAMABAD: Some 588 people were killed and another 1,007 sustained injuries in 821 incidents of terrorism in the country during the first eight months of the year. This was revealed in a month-wise break-up issued by the interior division for the period between January and September 2015. January and May proved to be the deadliest months with 121 and 137 fatalities respectively. February turned out to be the safest month with only nine dead in acts of terrorism. According to the Interior Division figures, 122 people were killed and 174 injured in 124 incidents of terrorism during the month of January. Similarly, in 10 terrorism-related incidents during February, nine people were killed and 49 injured, in March 86 acts of terrorism occurred in which 45 persons were killed and 141 injured and in 113 incidents during month of April, 59 lost their lives and 110 got injured. The data further revealed that the month of May witnessed 121 incidents of terrorism with 137 fatalities and injuries to 162 people. In June, there were 70 such incidents in which there were 50 dead and 55 injured, July saw 116 terror acts that left 65 people dead and 131 injured while in August, 61 people were killed and 77 injured in 82 incidents of terrorism. Published in The Express Tribune, October 12th, 2015. http://tribune.com.pk/story/971392/sad-statistics-588-dead-1007-injured-in-821-acts-of-terrorism/

Lynch mobs and assassins are on a rampage across South Asia. Days after a Muslim man was murdered in India, for allegedly eating beef, a Baptist pastor was stabbed in Bangladesh. It isn’t just religious minorities that are under assault. In recent months, bloggers, atheists, and rationalist intellectuals have been assassinated. In India, three activists and scholars have been shot dead amid a Hindu supremacist campaign against “Hindu-baiters”. In their homicidal quest for blasphemers and dissenters, fanatics balk at no ethical limits. In Pakistan last December, the Taliban shot schoolchildren in the face at close range. As always, the temptation to blame religious fundamentalists is strong. And it seems well founded: self-proclaimed Hindu and Muslim chauvinists, after all, lead and cheerlead the violence. (In Myanmar, even Buddhist monks have fallen victim to the contagion of hate and violence.) But religious extremism, in South Asia and indeed elsewhere in Asia and Africa, is symptomatic of a larger and more complex phenomenon: the shattering of the postcolonial order under the stresses of a massive economic and demographic transition. In South Asia, the earliest consensus of nation-building, and the social contract built upon promises of general welfare, has broken down. It was first undone in fragile Pakistan, where a crisis of governability lured elites into a cynical programme of “Islamisation”. It’s now rapidly unravelling in India and Bangladesh, where the promise of collective uplift has given way to the ideology of private self-interest. Hundreds of millions of South Asians have finally entered the modern world that for two centuries has been defined by the interplay of what Tocqueville called “refined and intelligent egotism” — “the pivot on which the whole machine turns.” Tocqueville was of course writing about the first country to be modern: the US, where a weak state wasn’t the “reliever of misery” and where compassion for the “sufferings of others”...

It was an unprecedented journey; but caused little surprise. On Sept 4, Prime Minister Narendra Modi went to Nagpur, the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, to present himself before the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. Almost his entire council of ministers and the BJP’s parliamentary board were there to demonstrate their accountability to the RSS. On Oct 2, a dozen or so junior ministers of state got into a huddle with senior RSS functionaries in New Delhi in what was described as a “regular review meeting”. A press release issued thereafter revealed: “The prime minister said he was proud to be a Swayamsevak and he had reached where he had because of the values he had imbibed as a member of the RSS.” Modi is a lifelong RSS activist (pracharak), having left his family to dedicate himself to the organisation. It, in turn, ensured his rise to the post of the highest executive of the country. The entire exercise was a flagrant violation of the fundamentals of the parliamentary system. The prime minister is accountable only to parliament and to no outside body. As a member of the ruling party, he participates in its deliberations but receives no mandate from it. When responsible government was introduced in 1937, under the Government of India Act 1935, Mohammad Ali Jinnah strongly criticised “the Congress high command” for giving directives to the Congress ministries in the provinces. The RSS has riveted its control over the BJP. The BJP general secretary Ram Madhav is an RSS man who was seconded to the BJP along with many others. He wrote recently: “The RSS model is unique. It has a parivar [family] of 40-plus organisations. The RSS is their ideological fountainhead.” It is also the BJP’s muscle; it provides the cadres and foot soldiers who are indispensable at election time. Bhagwat disapproves of the personality cult which Modi and his men have built up ever since he became prime minister. Immediately after his trip to Nagpur, a BJP leader disclosed on Sept...

Summarizes his indictment of US foreign policy ……… Perhaps it is time to climb down off the ideological high horse and start respecting the vital interests of other sovereign nations by Patrick J. Buchanan Patrick J. Buchanan has been a senior advisor to three Presidents. He is the author of Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. "Do you realize now what you have done?" So Vladimir Putin in his U.N. address summarized his indictment of a U.S. foreign policy that has produced a series of disasters in the Middle East that we did not need the Russian leader to describe for us. Fourteen years after we invaded Afghanistan, Afghan troops are once again fighting Taliban forces for control of Kunduz. Only 10,000 U.S. troops still in that ravaged country prevent the Taliban’s triumphal return to power. A dozen years after George W. Bush invaded Iraq, ISIS occupies its second city, Mosul, controls its largest province, Anbar, and holds Anbar’s capital, Ramadi, as Baghdad turns away from us – to Tehran. The cost to Iraqis of their "liberation"? A hundred thousand dead, half a million widows and fatherless children, millions gone from the country and, still, unending war. How has Libya fared since we "liberated" that land? A failed state, it is torn apart by a civil war between an Islamist "Libya Dawn" in Tripoli and a Tobruk regime backed by Egypt’s dictator. Then there is Yemen. Since March, when Houthi rebels chased a Saudi sock puppet from power, Riyadh, backed by U.S. ordinance and intel, has been bombing that poorest of nations in the Arab world. Five thousand are dead and 25,000 wounded since March. And as the 25 million Yemeni depend on imports for food, which have been largely cut off, what is happening is described by one U.N. official as a "humanitarian catastrophe." "Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years," said the international head of the Red Cross on his return. On Monday, the...

NEW DELHI: The Indian Express reported on Thursday the handing over of a secret draft agreement on Jammu and Kashmir by the outgoing Indian prime minister to the current one in May last year. The Hindu flashed the picture of a man who claims to be the representative in Delhi of the Baloch Liberation Organisation. Both stories seem spurred by the memoirs of former foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri released in New Delhi this week. Former prime minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistani military ruler General Pervez Musharraf had hammered out the draft framework agreement on Jammu and Kashmir in secret talks, a senior Indian diplomat familiar with the negotiations has told The Indian Express. Take a look: Kasuri claims India had planned air strikes in Pakistan after Mumbai attacks The report follows Mr Kasuri’s identical claim at his book release function here on Wednesday where Dr Singh was present along with Bharatiya Janata Party stalwarts L.K. Advani and Yashwant Sinha. Paper says India plans to highlight ‘human rights issues in Balochistan’ just as it has begun highlighting alleged excesses in Azad Kashmir The Baloch issue with India has also figured in Mr Kasuri’s book, though not quite as dramatically as The Hindu report states. “I want to say here that Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies have a full measure of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. There’s no gainsaying that it is a futile and self-defeating motive to hurt the other side, because both are capable of destabilising each other or wreaking havoc. There is no substitute to good sense and for talks at every possible level,” he told this correspondent in a conversation. Files recording the unsigned documents, exchanged by both sides, were personally handed over to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by his predecessor at a May 27, 2014 meeting, the Indian diplomat told the Express. The paper confirmed that the Indian official was speaking even as Mr Kasuri was in New Delhi to release the Indian...