Asia

NOVANEWS A child is fiddling with a poster of a mustachioed man, a missing political worker who may be his father or his uncle, and who is in all likelihood, dead. He draws my immediate attention, this child, because out of the thousands seated around him in row upon neat row inside the open-air tent, he is the only one not focused on the stage, the blazing lights, the young man holding forth in angry punctuated bellows. “I am not a friend of Pakistan!” Zahid Baloch bangs the podium to emphasise his point, his countenance flushed, severe. “I am not a friend of the People’s Party!” He bangs the podium again, and the evening air swells with the ferocious stillness of his audience, tense and alert like a taut muscle. Two days earlier, on January 15, the Pakistan army’s Frontier Corps had open...

NOVANEWS By Sohail Parwaz The puppets are puppets and the human beings are human beings. No puppet can replace a man and so is it in the case of any ruler, may that be the president of Afghanistan. Almost 168 years back, during the first Anglo-Afghan war, the British after contriving the over throw of Amir Dost Mohammad Khan who surrendered to the British after some resistance, and was deported to India; Shah Shuja was installed as a “puppet king” by them. Ironically the puppet was killed by the Afghans within months and they continued their struggle for freedom under the leadership of Akbar Khan who later emerged as a hero, whom they remember and respect even today. The interesting thing is that the dare devil Afghans made the British lick the dust in a way that in January 1842, out of 16...