Right now, Imran Khan is Pakistan’s moral sovereign. This status is more powerful and influential than any other position or institution and not held by any political leader in the country’s 75-year history. Here is how I think it has happened and what it means for PK’s future: The Pakistani political system’s default setting is One Unit-ism sustained through rule by fear supervised by the military as an overdeveloped institution.

Ilyas Chattha and I have co-authored a research paper about a largely unknown revolutionary group: The Society of Red Assassins. Their message: "If you can stab one bourgeois a day or set fire to his home or other property you have done a lot. Begin doing from to-day." Between July and November 1936, this little-known group carried out an extended campaign of incendiarism in the affluent areas of colonial Lahore, burning cars and property and leaving messages protesting unemployment and poverty in the city.

Some thoughts on the term Riyasat-i-Madina (the State of Madina), its historical genesis in the twentieth century Muslim political thought, and how Imran Khan has brought it to the center of political discourse in contemporary Pakistan. Imran frequently used this term after he became Pakistan's PM to describe his vision for Pakistan as an Islamic welfare state. The term refers to an idealized form of ethical polity and welfare state that Prophet Muhammad is supposed to have established in the 7th century.

My two cents on Islamic content in Urdu textbooks:
One must question the inclusion of material on Islamic faith/history in textbooks not because it is 'religious content' but because it has been added as part of an agenda for ideological indoctrination, at least since the 1970s. No Urdu textbook can be complete without Mir Anis and his Marsiyas. But this is for the literary merit of Marsiya and its rootedness in the broader cultural milieu and not because it is about 'Islamic' faith/history. There is nothing inherently Islamic about Urdu.

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences,LUMS, in collaboration with the National Institute of Pakistan Studies (NIPS),Quaid-i-Azam University, is organizing an online conference to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bangladesh War of Liberation. Here's the schedule: Tuesday 23 March, 17:00-19:00 (Lahore time)
Keynote address by Professor Bina D' Costa
Discussant: Profesor Kamran Asdar Ali

Join using Zoom:
lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/94204385580

I am delighted to share the remaining two projects from our course on Lahore's cultural and social history.

(1) Reimagining Lahore as a Hindu City

#WalkingInTheCity The project takes us back to the time when the Hindus of Lahore were a vibrant part of city's social, religious, and political landscape. The city was central to various intra-Hindu polemics, religious reform movements, and nationalist politics.

India is doing what a nation state does- erasure of difference, enforcing majoritarian ethos,asserting authority in the name of establishing sovereign control over territory. For what? a singular idea of nationhood,a homogenized political authority? and as part of larger clear communal agenda in the name of undoing 'injustices' of both recent and distant past. What Nehruvian democracy conceded as symbolic gesture of accommodation is replaced by oppressive social reality of lynching/RSS dictated logic of national integration