₨ 2,495
In stock
| Weight | 0.5 kg |
|---|---|
| ISBN | 9789694026763 |
| Format | |
| Publication Date | 2025 |
| Pages | 160 |
| Author | |
| Publisher | |
| Language |
SOME TIME in 2016, a series of dialogues took place which set out to find a meeting ground, even if only an illusion, between A.S. Dulat and Asad Durrani. One was a former chief of RAW, India s external intelligence agency, the other of ISI, its Pakistani counterpart. As they could not meet in their home countries, the conversations, guided by journalist Aditya Sinha, took place in cities like Istanbul, Bangkok and Kathmandu. On the table were subjects that have long haunted South Asia, flashpoints that take lives regularly. It was in all ways a deep dive into the politics of the subcontinent, as seen through the eyes of two spymasters.
Among the subjects: Kashmir, and a missed opportunity for peace; Hafiz Saeed and 26/11; Kulbhushan Jadhav; surgical strikes; the deal for Osama bin Laden; how the US and Russia feature in the India-Pakistan relationship; and how terror undermines the two countries attempts at talks.
When the project was first mooted, General Durrani laughed and said nobody would believe it even if it was written as fiction. At a time of fraught relations, this unlikely dialogue between two former spy chiefs from opposite sides a project that is the first of its kind may well provide some answers.
This book offers an insider’s view of people and events that directly affected Pakistan’s political history. The author gradually widens the scope of his recollections from his boyhood and school days as a child in a peripatetic military family, to events of Partition, his cadetship at Sandhurst, and the huge affairs of state he experienced as the son of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, former Commander-in-Chief and President and Pakistan’s first military ruler, as also in his capacity as Ayub Khan’s ADC, and eventually as a politician in his own right.
These memoirs also include details of important military campaigns before and during which Gohar Ayub rejoined service in the army, as well as pen portraits of members of his immediate family and leading contemporary personalities.
Glimpses into the Corridors of Power will appeal to all readers interested in an informed personal perspective of significant events in Pakistan’s history from a leading political personality who had access to the inner sanctums of power.
In The Promise of Piety, Arsalan Khan examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. This group says that Muslims have abandoned their religious duties for worldly pursuits, creating a state of moral chaos apparent in the breakdown of relationships in the family, nation, and global Islamic community. Tablighis insist that this dire situation can only be remedied by drawing Muslims back to Islam through dawat, which they regard as the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue. In a country founded in the name of Muslim identity and where Islam is ubiquitous in public life, the Tablighi claim that Pakistani Muslims have abandoned Islam is particularly striking.
The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of dawat and how pious relationality serves as a basis for transforming domestic and public life. Khan explores both the promise and limits of the Tablighi project of creating an Islamic moral order that can transcend the political fragmentation and violence of life in postcolonial Pakistan.
Salman Rushdie once described Pakistan as a ‘poorly imagined country’. Indeed, Pakistan has meant different things to different people since its birth seventy years ago. Armed with nuclear weapons and dominated by the military and militants, it is variously described around the world as ‘dangerous’, ‘unstable’, ‘a terrorist incubator’, and ‘the land of the intolerant’.
Much of Pakistan’s dysfunction is attributable to an ideology tied to religion and to hostility with the country out of which it was carved’ India. But 95 percent of Pakistan’s 210 million people were born after Partition, as Pakistanis, and cannot easily give up on their homes. In his new book, Husain Haqqani, one of the most important commentators on Pakistan in the world today, calls for a bold re-conceptualization of the country. Reimagining Pakistan offers a candid discussion of Pakistan’s origins and its current failings, with suggestions for reconsidering its ideology, and identifies a national purpose greater than the rivalry with India.
The creation of Bangladesh is the most tragic episode of Pakistan?s history, invoking the feelings of loss of not a geographical territory but of family, integrity, trust, honour and identity. It is an unhealed wound which bleeds tears not only of loss and remorse, but of frustration and grief on the undeserved accusations. This book breaks new grounds in revealing the real facts behind the loss of East Pakistan and creation of Bangladesh. It sheds chronological light on the actors, their conspiracies, their misadventures and their failings, whose actions culminated into the calamity of the demise of East Pakistan. It is Pakistan?s misfortune that untrue, baseless propaganda of the friendly and antagonistic stakeholders in the creation of Bangladesh tarnishes Pakistan?s international image and stains its history with untrue allegations of fomenting genocide. This book is a unique endeavor to lift the veil of misunderstandings and cover-ups that mislead history into the unjustified labelling of Pakistan as the perpetrator of the horrifying atrocities committed against the Bengalis during the course of events that led to the creation of Bangladesh. Armed with facts and accounts of the victims and eye witnesses, it dispels the notion that non-Bengalis were unscathed by the bloodbath that had ensued in the appalling events of the dismemberment of Pakistan.
In what remains one of his most seminal papers, Freud considers the incompatibility of civilisation and individual happiness, and the tensions between the claims of society and the individual. We all know that living in civilised groups means sacrificing a degree of personal interest, but couldn’t you argue that it in fact creates the conditions for our happiness? Freud explores the arguments and counter-arguments surrounding this proposition, focusing on what he perceives to be one of society’s greatest dangers; ‘civilised’ sexual morality. After all, doesn’t repression of sexuality deeply affect people and compromise their chances of happiness?
