President Mamnoon Hussain’s Speech: PIIA’s South Asia Peace Conference 2017

Mr. Mamnoon Hussain, President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Address to the “Conference on Peace in South Asia” (Karachi: November 15, 2017). “Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Raheem”. Masuma Hasan, Chairperson, Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed, Chairman Senate Standing Committee on Defence and Defence Production, Excellencies, Experts in International Relations—and Respected Ladies and Gentlemen! Assalam-o-Alaikum.

It is a matter of great pleasure for me to participate in this conference on peace in South Asia under the auspices of The Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA). The foundation of this institution was laid by Quaid-e-Millat Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan had a very real and deep understanding of contemporary foreign policy issues, especially about peace, stability and progress in South Asia. I still believe that best results can be achieved by following the principles enunciated by Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan and other founding fathers of Pakistan in our quest for regional peace and security. It is encouraging to see deliberation on such matters in the face of modern day challenges and changes in the regional and global landscape, for which I congratulate PIIA and its team.

The Death of New Labour

Peter Hyman argues in yestderday’s Observer that This is an existential moment in Labour’s history. It may not survive. And it may never win again. As he says: The story starts with a landslide victory, a sense of hope throughout the country, great achievements including the first minimum wage, peace in Northern Ireland, civil partnerships. And ends with the bitter aftermath of the Iraq war, a succession of unelectable leaders and the toxicity of the Blair brand resulting in the Blairite candidate getting just 4% in the most recent leadership election. Some other parts of the article are extracted below: New Labour played into the hands of those who were desperate to call it an aberration. It allowed those, like Neil Kinnock, to say, on the election of Ed Miliband, that “we’ve got our party back”. It paved the way for the most successful Labour leader in history to be written off as an interloper, a cancer in the bloodstream of Labour politics. Looking back, this was perhaps New Labour’s most fundamental weakness. Without roots, without establishing its own traditions, cultivating its own sustainable culture, drawing on the stories and figures of the past, New Labour became unnecessarily fragile, the cult of one person, not a movement of hearts and minds. New Labour may be dead.

Michel Foucault: Society Must Be Defended

This is one of the great books in Foucault’s groundbreaking series of lectures at the Collège de France. The e-book is available here. The main theme of the lectures is the contention that war can be used to analyse power relations. Foucault contends that politics is a continuation of war by other means. Thus, any constitutional theory of sovereignty and right is an attempt to refute the fact that power relations are based upon a relationship of conflict, violence and domination. The book is coloured with historical examples, drawn from the early modern period in both England and France, with wonderful digressions into subjects as diverse as classical French tragedy and the gothic novel. Here, Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern. Praise for “Society Must Be Defended”: [Foucault] must be reckoned with by humanists, social scientists, and political activists. – The New York Times Book Review. Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are. . . [He] is carrying out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture. – The Nation.

Michel Foucault: The Punitive Society

This is one of the great series of books in Foucault’s groundbreaking series of lectures at the Collège de France.“Unfortunately, when we teach morality, when we study the history of morals, we always analyze the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and do not read [Colquhoun], this character who is fundamental for our morality. To understand a society’s system of morality we have to ask the question: Where is the wealth? The history of morality should be organized entirely by this question of the location and movement of wealth,” said Michel Foucault. These thirteen lectures on the ‘punitive society,’ delivered at the Collège de France: in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society. Presumed to be preparation for Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, in fact the lectures unfold quite differently, going beyond the carceral system and encompassing the whole of capitalist society, at the heart of which is the invention of a particular management of the multiplicity of interweaving illegalisms.

Bharatiya Janata Party and the Indian Muslims

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is perceived as a communal party that aims to eliminate the secular character of the Indian state in which Indian-Muslims coexist. The Hindus and Indian-Muslims are often projected as absolute identities. The present study argues that a number of identities-communitarian, caste, and regional-exist in India and compete to preserve their respective traditions. The BJP as the proponent of Hindutva and the Muslims as the advocates of Islam-Urdu are struggling to protect their respective values system and traditions. Both identities have deep historical roots that were formed during the British Raj. The author has studied the BJP-Muslim interaction in three distinct phases: (i) the Raj era (ii) the post-Independence Congress-dominated era and (iii) the post-Congress-dominated BJP era.