249 Quotes About Pakistan

  • Author Husain Haqqani
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    The traditional ulema and Islamists used the environment of jihad to advance their own agenda, and one agenda item was that they should be accepted as custodians of Pakistan’s ideology and identity. After the war, several state-sponsored publications were devoted to building the case that one Muslim soldier had the fighting prowess to subdue five Hindus.

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  • Author Ayesha Jalal
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    Pakistan’s first crop of leaders at the center consisted mainly of migrants from India with limited or no real bases of support in the provinces. Suspicious of their provincial counterparts, émigré politicians at the center focused on consolidating state authority rather than building the Muslim League into a popularly based national party.

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  • Author Ayesha Jalal
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    With the potentially disruptive issue of the role of Islam in the state temporarily out of the way, the praetorian guard and its mandarin friends sanguinely accepted the constituent assembly’s stance on fundamental rights. As they knew only too well, the proof of the pudding lay in the eating.

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  • Author Ayesha Jalal
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    Tarring regional demands with the Indian brush became such an entrenched part of the official discourse of nationalism in Pakistan that the managers of the centralized state regarded legitimate demands for provincial autonomy with deep suspicion.

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  • Author Ayesha Jalal
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    What came in the wake of 1971 promised to be an endless trial by fire for the constituent units of a Pakistani federation that the military in league with the central bureaucracy insisted on governing as a quasi- unitary state.

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  • Author Sanam Maher
  • Quote

    At 11.25 a.m. on 16 July 2016, Adil Nizami, a twenty-five-year-old rookie reporter from Multan, broke the biggest story of his career. ‘Famous model Qandeel Baloch has been killed,’ he blurted out in a live call that interrupted 24 News’ regular morning bulletin.

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  • Author Sanam Maher
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    A journalist, will tell you about a place not too far from here, where the tribal belt of Balochistan province starts, where the women are not given any shoes. When you don’t understand what he means, he will impatiently explain, ‘If you’re not wearing shoes and you walk outside, where will your eyes remain? You’ll never look up—never look at any man—if you’re scared of where your naked foot might fall when you leave your home.

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  • Author Sanam Maher
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    My childhood crush once gave me a name.‘Qandeel?’It’s the name everyone knows me by.Q—QueenA—AppealingN—NaughtyD—DazzlingE—ElegantE—ExquisiteL—LovelyWell, that’s Qandeel.But Qandeel who?Qandeel from Shah Sadar Din, a girl who belongs to the Baloch Ma’arahtribe.Qandeel Baloch.Yes. That worked. Qandeel. It was a beautiful name. What did it mean?Qandeel ka matlab hai roshni. The light.

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  • Author Husain Haqqani
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    Pakistan, she observed, had a policy of “profiting from the disputes of others,” and she cited Pakistan’s desire to benefit from tension between the great powers and Pakistan’s early focus on the Palestine dispute as examples of this tendency. “Pakistan was occupied with her own grave internal problem, but she still found time to talk fervently of sending ‘a liberation army to Palestine to help the Arabs free the Holy Land from the Jews

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