Nawaz Sharif's Heart Surgery; India Racism; India-Iran Chabahar Deal; Pak IIC on Women

[Riaz Haq]

How serious is Prime Ministry Nawaz Sharif's heart condition? What kind of surgery is he undergoing? Is it to fix a hole in his heart caused by prior atrial fibrillation ablation complications he developed during surgery in 2011? What are the risks? How soon can he recover?

Why did the United States kill Taliban Chief Mullah Akhtar Mansoor in a drone strike in Pakistan's Balochistan province? Is the US trying to promote dissensions among the Talibs? What was Mansoor doing in Iran just prior to his killing after crossing the Iran-Pakistan border into Balochistan? Did Pakistan's intelligence service ISI help orchestrate Mullah Mansoor's assassination by the United States Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)? Will weakened Afghan Taliban make room for the rise of ISIS in South Asia?  What are the driving motivations of United States, Iran and Pakistan in their dealings with the Taliban? These are some of the questions that come to mind when attempting to analyze the current situation in Afghanistan.

Why was a Congolese young black man murdered in Delhi? Why are Africans being targeted in India? Why are African diplomats in Delhi so angry about it? What do Indians think of Black Africans? Is it blatant racism as reported in World's Values Survey that termed India most racist nation in the world? How will it impact India's plans for close ties in African continent? What kind of damage control must Modi and Swaraj do?

What is India-Iran deal to build Iran's Chabahar port close to Gwadar in Pakistan? Is it aimed by India to bypass Pakistan to reach Afghanistan and Central Asia? Will India-Iran compete with China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)? Will India use it as base to launch covert ops in Baluchistan to sabotage CPEC? How will it impact Iran-Pakistan ties?

What are the recommendations of Pakistan Islamic Ideology Council (IIC) on "women's protection"? Is it meant to legalize wife-beating? Is it to enforce absolute gender segregation
in all walks of national life? Is Pakistan society changing in profound ways to resist it? Will such proposals be taken seriously by Pakistan's national and provincial legislators? Or will these proposals make IIC totally irrelevant?

Viewpoint From Overseas host Faraz Darvesh discusses these questions with panelists Misbah Azam and Riaz Haq (www.riazhaq.com)


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World Values Survey: Indian Most Racist Nation

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VPOS Dailymotion Channel

[Riaz Haq]

#US on the eve of #Modi's visit: #India's 12m slaves, rights abuses, gender violence. civil society under attack

http://scroll.in/article/808967/what-explains-india-getting-such-a-...

Days ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s fourth visit to the United States, its senators painted a dismal picture of India as a land of 12 million “slaves”, human rights abuses, gender violence and a country where civil society is under constant attack.

They said India was deliberately targeting Christian organisations and their “researchers” by harassing them, denying them visas and revoking their licenses. Religious intolerance and sectarian tensions in the country are increasing.

In equally harsh terms they dismissed Modi government’s economic reforms as inadequate and not truly “free market”. They complained about red tape, high tariffs, lack of market access for American companies, and inadequate protection for intellectual property.

Even India’s membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group came in for criticism as Senator Ed Markey claimed an exemption for India would further “infuriate” Pakistan into making more nuclear weapons. There were also probing questions on India getting too close to Iran since Modi was just in Tehran.

Timed for maximum impact

It was not the kind of build-up New Delhi had anticipated for Modi’s visit but American lawmakers seemed determined to deliver a hard blow. Senator after senator rained down on Modi’s record just as the prime minister was marking his two years in government.

The questions were directed at Nisha Biswal, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, who was testifying at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Indo-US relations. Biswal defended the relationship and tried to push back but it seemed the senators were determined to embarrass both the State Department and the Indian government.

Not for the last 15 years has India taken such a bashing on Capitol Hill, the home of the US Congress. It was reminiscent of the early 90s when the US Congress regularly attacked India for alleged human rights abuses in Jammu and Kashmir, largely at the behest of Pakistan’s lobbying.

To say the negative tone and content of the hearing were a surprise would be an understatement given the largely positive narrative of Indo-US relations. Officially, the two countries have a mature, strategic and full relationship covering just about every aspect of human endeavour.

But clearly not all is well. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its powerful Republican chairman, Bob Corker, sent a very public message: India’s domestic climate stinks with all the reported incidents against women, Dalits, Christians and Muslims.

The hearing was timed for maximum impact – exactly two weeks before Modi’s arrival in the American capital and on Capitol Hill.

Bubbling anger

According to a Congressional source, anger has been bubbling over the past year as reports kept surfacing about incidents of communal tension, lynchings, hangings and sedition charges being filed against students in India.

“Is this 2016 and a democracy with which we share values? Ford Foundation is in trouble. Greenpeace has been kicked out,” the Congressional aide continued. “If the State Department wants to hide things, it doesn’t mean the Congress will too,” he said, adding that pressure had come from constituents and the human rights community to raise questions on India’s record.

New Delhi’s recent decision to deny visas to members of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, a quasi government body, to visit India also shaped senators’ thinking. It bolsters the feeling that the Indian government is uncooperative on a range of human rights issues, the aide said.

New Delhi doesn’t help even in “child abduction” cases. These cases mostly affect Indian American couples where a spouse flies off to India with the child and disappears to escape American courts and custody battles.

[Riaz Haq]

#Pakistan PM #NawazSharif’s Heart Surgery Successful, Daughter Says. Out of surgery, into ICU at #London hospital

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-31/pakistan-pm-shari...


Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s open heart surgery operation in London on Tuesday was successful, according to his daughter Maryam.
Sharif “is off the pump now” after the surgery started at 8 a.m. London time and will be shifted to an intensive care unit in the next hour “or so,” she said on Twitter at 12:20 p.m.
Sharif, the 66-year-old three-time prime minister who helped Pakistan become the only Muslim-majority country with a nuclear weapon, underwent surgery after a previous procedure in 2011 had led to complications. Sharif’s party won a majority in the lower house of parliament in 2013, the first democratic transition of power in Pakistan’s history.
Sharif has faced calls to resign in recent weeks after leaked files from a Panama law firm showed his children used offshore companies to make investments. The uproar was emblematic of persistent challenges to his authority throughout his latest term that undermined his efforts to make Pakistan’s economy more market friendly.

[Riaz Haq]

In another shooting tragedy on a #US campus, lessons for #India. #UCLAShooting http://scroll.in/article/809270/in-another-shooting-tragedy-on-a-us... … via @scroll_in

Indians are used to telling themselves that India and the US are “the world’s two largest democracies”, as the cliché goes. The two societies, however, resemble each other most closely in extremely unsavory ways. First, both societies are deeply marked by violence.

Scratch the surface of Indian life, Urvashi Butalia has argued, and the “façade of peacefulness very quickly disappears”.

The violence is also celebrated in popular culture, for example, in Bollywood and Hollywood, as a mechanism for legitimate justice in the wake of a failure of the law. Routinised to the point of being banal, such violence is masked by the rhetoric of Indian and American exceptionalism, in which violence is defined simply as an unfortunate aspect of an otherwise gloriously multifaceted society.