On World Peace Day, a new song shows friendship transcends Pakistan-India ire

‘Na Rokay Koi,’ sung by Ali Aftab Saeed, gels well with a sweet video directed by him and Aarti Shrivastava

This International Peace Day, singer Ali Aftab Saeed and Indian filmmaker Aarti Shrivastava have worked together to bring to us a new anthem of Pak-India friendship, titled ‘Na Rokay Koi’.

Through this musical medium, Ali and Aarti have told a simple story of two college friends who parted ways to return to their home countries.

But a wedding convinces Zahra, the friend from Pakistan, to reunite with her Indian friend. Leaving a note for her father, she packs up and heads out to the other side of the border.

Indo-Pak peace: Pak orders release of all Indian fishermen

KARACHI – SINDH: Pakistan has ordered the release of all Indian fishermen imprisoned in the country. According to the Interior Ministry, all imprisoned fishermen in Pakistan will be released along with their ships, adding that the process will begin soon. …

Read more » The News
http://www.thenews.com.pk/article-84908-Pak-orders-release-of-all-Indian-fisherm

Beyond Borders, a journey of friendship between India and Pakistan by Shariq Ali

– The village was small and the entire community was tied together like a family, with common cultural values and traditions evolved over hundreds, if not thousands of years. They were farmers and knew very well as to how to work in the fields and love and sing together, but had poor understanding of the political realities of their times.

One day, they saw the sunset as one community but at the dawn, realized that the village is divided by an invisible line created not by Hindus and Muslims, but by few British advisors called Radcliffe commission. And so was the territory of 88 million people of the subcontinent. ….

Read more » ValueVersity

China is not eager to jump in Afpak conflict

– Analysis: China to keep Pakistan embrace at arm’s length

By Sui-Lee Wee

BEIJING: (Reuters) – Pakistan, facing a crisis with the United States, has leaned closely to longtime partner China, offering its “all-weather friendship” with Beijing as an alternative to Washington.

But Pakistan will be disappointed if it hopes to replace American patronage with the same from China.

While China does not welcome the U.S. presence near its border, it wants stability on its western flank and believes an abrupt withdrawal of Washington’s support for Pakistan could imperil that. It also does not want to upset warming relations with India by getting mired in subcontinent security tension.

Maintaining that delicate balance, China will continue supporting economic cooperation with Pakistan but go slow on defense cooperation. While outwardly all smiles and warm pledges of friendship, China will quietly keep things at arms length.

“I think they see what’s going on in the U.S.-Pakistan front at the moment as reason to tread very carefully,” said Andrew Small, a researcher at the German Marshall Fund think-tank in Brussels who studies China-Pakistan ties and often visits both countries.

“They are taking extra care to make sure that what’s going on in the relationship is correctly understood, not reflecting any willingness to rush in or fill the gap or exploit differences.”

Pakistan’s brittle relationship with the United States, its major donor, has turned openly rancorous. Washington accused Pakistan’s powerful ISI spy agency of directly backing the Afghan Taliban-allied Haqqani network and of providing support for a September 13 attack on the U.S. mission in Kabul. ….

Read more → Reuters

Pakistan Preparing to Defend itself?

– Is Pakistan Preparing to Defend Herself?

by Meinhaj Hussain

The global economic downturn appears to be never-ending. Political unrest is acute around the world. The lack of respect for international law has never been greater. Nations are arming despite the downturn and doing so at a rate that does not suggest modernization or replacement. With all said and done, this could still not spell imminent danger. But with China arming Pakistan with such urgency as to forgo its own defense needs, something appears to be happening behind secure doors, walls, guards, wire-fences and surveillance cameras.

The Chinese military-industrial complex has been busy over the last two decades at full throttle, attempting to catch-up to the West. There have been many stumbling points, including a frustrating inability to produce quality turbo-fan engines for her fighters, the loss of top Electronic Warfare (EW) and airborne radar scientists and rivalries between different corporatocracies.

However, in 2011, China has finally reached a position where it can begin to see itself as comparable to the West in key aspects such as technology, expertise and military capability.

At the critical juncture where the successful J-10B is to enter mass production and produce a dazzling plane deploying AESA radars and other advanced military technology, we find a strange occurrence. China has dedicated its J-10B production to meet Pakistan’s pressing needs. Such a level of cooperation and collaboration is unparalleled in modern history. Not even the United States has been willing to act in a similar fashion with Israel.

The Soviet Union and United States have long had allied states but have never sacrificed their own defense needs for its allies in a similar manner. China is not only willing to send J-10Bs, 58 odd planes of which are being produced for Pakistan with special customization as per the requirements of the Pakistan Air Force, but is also handing 50 new JF-17 Block IIs with stealth technology and possibly AESA radars.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Navy (PN) is slated for brand new submarines at financing that is beyond friendship prices and rates. Again, China’s latest submarine the Type 043 Qing Class, yet to be inducted into the Chinese navy and the pride of China’s technological and engineering elite, is being manufactured for Pakistan.

Six odd submarines, which are among the largest conventional vessels manufactured by humanity thus far and closer to the displacement of nuclear submarines, capable of firing nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and possibly a single ballistic missile are also part of a rapid program to transform the Pakistan Navy. The submarines are technological on par with anything the West can or has built with regard to conventional submarines. These behemoths and technological marvels are built on technologies that has taken over 20 years for China to develop including Air-Independent Propulsion (AIP) that allows submarines to stay submerged for weeks and (possibly) pump jet propulsion, a propulsion system yet to be implemented even in Western conventional submarines. …

Read more → grandestrategy

Pakistan and China: Two Friends Hit a Bump

By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — This is officially the Year of Pakistan-China Friendship, and in a four-day visit to Beijing last week — the third in just 17 months — Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, proclaimed that the two best friends “are like one nation and two countries.” Chinese officials were reported to have presented Mr. Gilani with 50 fighter jets as a welcome gift.

So it raised eyebrows when this week the two nations politely disagreed over whether Mr. Gilani had given the Chinese a gift that would be hard to mislay: an entire naval base, right at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

Pakistan’s defense minister, Ahmad Mukhtar, who accompanied Mr. Gilani on the state visit, announced the deal after Mr. Gilani returned home on Saturday.

“We have asked our Chinese brothers to please build a naval base at Gwadar,” a deepwater port on Pakistan’s southwest coast, he told journalists.

Moreover, he said, Pakistan had invited China to assume management of the port’s commercial operations, now run by a Singapore firm under a multidecade contract.

On Tuesday, however, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, disagreed, saying the port had neither been offered nor accepted.

“China and Pakistan are friendly neighbors,” she said at the ministry’s twice-weekly news conference. “Regarding the specific China-Pakistan cooperative project that you raised, I have not heard of it. It’s my understanding that during the visit last week this issue was not touched upon.”

Some analysts were at a loss to explain the discrepancy.

“Maybe there were some discussions between the two sides when Gilani was up in China last week, bearing on some kind of future Chinese stewardship of the port,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, in a telephone interview. “Maybe there was some speculative discussion. Perhaps the Defense Ministry simply got its signals wrong.”

“We’re seeing a lot of incompetence in the Pakistani government these days,” he added. ….

Read more : The New York Times

via BrownPundits

Interview with Pratap Mehta on Pakistan

– Pratap Mehta: Pakistan’s Perpetual Identity Crisis

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political theorist and intellectual historian based in New Delhi, is leading us through another reflection on the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan.

The reconsideration of partition is a critical, current existential question not only for South Asians, but also for Americans who watch the continuous outrages from Taliban and CIA sanctuaries inside Pakistan. It’s a question on many levels — terrorism, geopolitics, ethnicity and religion — but, Pratap Mehta says, “it’s fundamentally the question of the identity of a country.”

In his telling of the partition story, the contemporary reality of Pakistan grew out of a failure to answer a core challenge of creating a nation-state: how do you protect a minority? It’s Mehta’s view that the framers of the modern subcontinent — notably Gandhi, Jinnah & Nehru — never imagined a stable solution to this question. He blames two shortcomings of the political discourse at the time of India’s independence:

The first is that it was always assumed that the pull of religious identities in India is so deep that any conception of citizenship that fully detaches the idea of citizenship from religious identity is not going to be a tenable one.

The second is that Gandhi in particular, and the Congress Party in general, had a conception of India which was really a kind of federation of communities. So the Congress Party saw [the creation of India] as about friendship among a federation of communities, not as a project of liberating individuals from the burden of community identity to be whatever it is that they wished to be.

The other way of thinking about this, which is to think about a conception of citizenship where identities matter less to what political rights you have, that was never considered seriously as a political project. Perhaps that would have provided a much more ideologically coherent way of dealing with the challenges of creating a modern nation-state. – – Pratap Bhanu Mehta with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, April 12, 2011.

Unlike many other Open Source talkers on Pakistan, Pratap Mehta does not immediately link its Islamization to the United States and its1980s jihad against the Soviets. Reagan and his CIA-Mujahideen military complex were indeed powerful players in the rise of Islamic extremism in Pakistan, he agrees, but the turn began first during a national identity crisis precipitated by another partition, the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.

Suddenly, Mehta is telling us, Pakistan could no longer define itself as the unique homeland for Muslims in the subcontinent. In search of identity, and distinction from its new neighbor to the east, Pakistan turned towards a West Asian brand of Islam, the hardline Saudi Wahhabism that has become a definitive ideology in today’s Islamic extremism.

Mehta is hopeful, though, that in open democratic elections Islamic parties would remain relatively marginalized, that despite the push to convert Pakistan into a West Asian style Islamic state since 1971, “the cultural weight of it being a South Asian country” with a tradition of secular Islam “remains strong enough to be an antidote.”

Click here to listen Radio Open Source interview with Pratap Mehta, it is much more in depth than the text summary

Courtesy: http://www.radioopensource.org/pratap-mehta-pakistans-perpetual-identity-crisis/

SOUTH ASIA = THE UNITED NATIONS OF CRICKET

India vs Pakistan : People’s views in Pakistan about Cricket semi final 2011.

Courtesy: Dunya TV (Cross fire with Meher Bokhari, 29 March, 2011)

via ZemTv – You Tube

 

The Only Way Towards World Peace is Friendship

What is a friend? A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words. Friendship is what binds the world together in peace, may we all become friends. IF OUR EYES ARE POSITIVE, WE WOULD LIKE ALL THE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. BUT IF OUR TONGUE IS POSITIVE, ALL THE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WILL LIKE US.

Help one another

“Respect your fellow human being, treat them fairly, disagree with them honestly, enjoy their friendships, explore your thoughts about one another candidly, work together for a common goal and help one another achieve it.” – Bill Bradly