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PM Sharif’s party wants stakeholders to decide ‘rules of the game’ before elections

An election official seals ballot boxes before people vote during Pakistan's general election at a polling station in Islamabad on July 25, 2018. (AFP/File)
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Updated 13 January 2023
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PM Sharif’s party wants stakeholders to decide ‘rules of the game’ before elections

  • The development comes a day after Punjab CM Pervaiz Elahi moves summary to dissolve provincial assembly
  • PML-N's Tallal Chaudry says his party is ready for elections, but a national consensus needs to be evolved
Updated 13 January 2023
Aamir Saeed

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party said on Friday that a national consensus should be evolved among all political parties before any elections to ensure their fairness and transparency, ruling out the possibility of snap polls across the South Asian country.  

The development comes a day after Punjab Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, an ally of ousted premier Imran Khan, sent a summary to Governor Baligh-ur-Rehman for the dissolution of the provincial legislature. As per the constitution, if the governor fails to dissolve the assembly, it will automatically stand dissolved on Sunday, 48 hours since the circulation of the summary.  

Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) opposition party has also announced dissolving the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assembly in a couple of days to force PM Sharif's government into announcing snap polls. Khan’s PTI party and allies have been in power in both Punjab and KP provinces. 

But Tallal Chaudry, a senior member of Sharif’s party, stresses the need for a national consensus before the conduct of nationwide polls in the South Asian country, which is already facing an economic crisis compounded by months of political instability. 

“We want the rules of the game to be decided before the elections, otherwise nobody would accept results of the polls,” Chaudry told Arab News.  

“Our party is ready for the elections in Punjab and other provinces as well, but first we need to develop a national consensus to hold fair and free polls.”  

He said elections in parts of Pakistan would further “ruin our economy and prolong the political instability” as Khan had repeatedly expressed his lack of trust in the current election commission. “So will he be accepting the results if his party loses the elections,” the PML-N leader questioned. 

Chaudry revealed that backdoor negotiations with the PTI, through President Arif Alvi, "for a consensus over elections" had failed to yield desired results and “as of now, no talks were underway with the PTI.”  

About the possibility of countrywide elections, he said PM Sharif could not call the snap polls without the consensus of coalition partners.  

“We are a coalition government in the centre and cannot take decisions without consultation and consent of our coalition partners,” Chaudry explained.  

He pointed out that even if Sharif dissolved the National Assembly — the lower house of Pakistan parliament — there was no guarantee that the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP) would agree to dissolve the provincial assemblies in Sindh and Balochistan, which are ruled by the coalition partners.  

Pakistan's constitution says when the National Assembly or a provincial assembly is dissolved, a general election for the assembly “shall be held within a period of ninety days after the dissolution.”  

Kanwar Dilshad, former secretary of the Election Commission of Pakistan, doubted that elections would be held in parts as this would raise questions over transparency and fairness of the polls.  

“The ECP enjoys unrestricted powers in terms of holding elections, so it will either delay the Punjab and KP polls till October or the National Assembly will have to be dissolved in the next 15 to 20 days to conduct the national elections,” he told Arab News.  

Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, president of the Islamabad-based PILDAT think-tank, said there were no solid grounds with the election commission or the federal government to delay the polls, after the dissolution of the two provincial assemblies.  

“The caretaker governments will have to be installed in the provinces where assemblies are dissolved to ensure free and fair elections,” he told Arab News.  

Mehboob, however, agreed that elections in parts of the country would lead to multiple questions over their transparency.  

“In case the elections are held only in Punjab and KP, then there will be no caretaker government in the centre, and it can try to influence the results,” he said.  

“And when elections for the National Assembly would be held at a later stage, the [new] provincial administrations would try to influence the results in their favour.”  

Mehboob doubted the Sharif-led coalition government would be willing to dissolve the National Assembly to pave the way for the national elections.  

“The PML-N and its coalition partners' assessment is that this is not a favourable time for them to go into the elections,” he added.  

Khan, who was ousted from power in a parliamentary no-trust vote, has since been demanding snap elections in the country.  

The former premier says he was ousted as part of a United States-backed "foreign conspiracy." Washington and Khan's opponents deny the allegation. 

PM Sharif's government says countrywide elections will be held in the latter half of this year as per the schedule. 

Topics: Pakistan General Elections

From Narnaul to Hyderabad: Pakistani recounts perilous journey from India in 1947

Updated 14 August 2025
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From Narnaul to Hyderabad: Pakistani recounts perilous journey from India in 1947

  • 88-year-old Muhammad Saleem Pirzada remembers bloodshed of 1947 and peaceful coexistence that came before it
  • Pirzada says at least 80 members of his extended family were killed in violence that followed Partition of India
Updated 14 August 2025
NAIMAT KHAN

HYDERABAD, Pakistan: On a rain-soaked September night in 1947, ten-year-old Muhammad Saleem Pirzada was woken by his father and told to gather whatever valuables the family could carry. 

Outside, the streets of Narnaul — then part of the princely state of Patiala in present-day India — were dark, slick, and dangerous.

The order was clear: leave, or risk certain death at the hands of armed Hindu and Sikh mobs that had already begun attacking Muslim neighborhoods.

“Walk barefoot and put a cloth in the children’s mouths so they may not talk,” Pirzada recalls his father telling his mother as the family prepared to slip away in silence. 

That night, Sept. 8, Pirzada, his father, grandfather, four siblings and three other relatives walked more than two kilometers to the railway station. His mother would join them in Pakistan months later.

“It’s natural, when a person is ill, near death, and then Allah grants them health, that moment of near-death comes back to mind. It was just like that, only Allah saved us.”

Britain’s hurried partition of the Subcontinent into India and Pakistan had triggered one of the largest migrations in human history. Around 15 million people were displaced along religious lines, and more than a million were killed in massacres and reprisals, according to independent estimates.

In Narnaul, the violence began on Sept. 6, when mobs attacked Muslim homes. The next day brought more killings and looting. By the third day, the Pirzada family decided to leave, joining a crowd of terrified Muslims at the railway station. Sikh state police initially tried to stop them, but relented after the intervention of the British Railways’ Watch and Ward force.

“We boarded from there and set off,” Pirzada says. 

Along the journey, the train stopped at stations where bodies lay scattered. 

“We saw bodies, wounded people, some without limbs,” he remembers. 

The family eventually reached Hyderabad, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, traveling via Munabao in the Indian state of Rajasthan. 

“May Allah never let anyone see such a time.”

Pirzada estimates that at least 80 members of his extended family were killed in those weeks.

It was not always this way.

Before 1947, he says, Narnaul was a place of deep communal trust. Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims attended each other’s weddings, and summer nights saw neighbors gathered together on charpoys.

“The Hindus would come and sit there [in the Muslim neighborhoods] at night in the summer… That’s how relations were with the Hindus. They would attend our weddings,” he recalls. 

Sometimes Hindu fathers would even entrust Muslim traders to escort their daughters to their in-laws’ homes. 

“The Hindus would say, ‘Mian ji, you are going there, take my daughter along.’ I have seen those days of affection.”

He still remembers the names of his Hindu schoolteachers, even as he acknowledges that the violence in Eastern Punjab was part of a larger cycle of retaliations. 

“In Eastern Punjab, the atrocities were greater… the Muslims there were martyred,” he says, accusing the Maharaja of Patiala, Yadavindra Singh, of providing arms to Hindu and Sikh mobs. 
“The riots took place at the instigation of the Maharaja of Patiala.”

When asked whether his family would have migrated if peace had held, Pirzada is clear: “There would be no question of coming [to Pakistan]. We had land, the crops were good, and life went on. Had we stayed there, we would have used new technology and increased production.”

In Pakistan, Pirzada briefly worked as a clerk before his family received a land allotment in rural Hyderabad. Farming became his life’s work, and today, at 88, he lives surrounded by his two sons, one daughter, and ten grandchildren.

But more than seven decades later, Narnaul remains etched in his memory. 

“One’s homeland, the place of one’s birth, is always remembered. The desire is still there. May Allah grant the opportunity so I can visit it once,” the said. 

“We even saw some people who died in Pakistan insisting, ‘No, no, we will go back! We will go back’!”

Topics: 79th Independence Day

Mother arrested after allegedly killing her two children in case that stuns Pakistan

Updated 14 August 2025
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Mother arrested after allegedly killing her two children in case that stuns Pakistan

  • Police say woman slaughtered eight-year-old son and four-year-old daughter with a knife at Karachi home
  • Mother in custody after sending footage of the killings to former husband who alerted authorities
Updated 14 August 2025
NAIMAT KHAN

KARACHI: A Pakistani mother has been arrested in Karachi after allegedly killing her two young children amid a dispute with her ex-husband, in a case that has shocked the country, police said on Thursday.

Child killings by mothers are rare in Pakistan. Experts say such incidents are often linked to mental health crises, family breakdowns, or domestic stress, underscoring the limited psychiatric and social support available for women facing marital disputes in the conservative South Asian nation.

According to a police report, the victims were identified as Zarar, 8, and Samia, 4, who died at their home in Karachi’s Defense Phase 6 area early on Thursday morning. Police said the mother was taken into custody at the scene and was being interrogated.

The woman’s former husband, Ghufran Khalid, told police she was “mentally ill,” according to the statement.

“A lady namely Adeeba Ghufran w/o Ghufran has killed her two kids ... cut the necks with sharp knife of her kids due to divorce issue with her husband,” Deputy Inspector General (DIG) South Karachi Syed Asad Raza said in a text message to Arab News. 

He said the woman sent photographs of the children after the killing to her former husband, who then called the police helpline.

SSP South Mahzor Ali told Arab News the couple divorced last September, followed by a custody battle in which the court granted custody to the father. The children lived with him but visited their mother several days a week.

“Last night [Aug. 13], the children came from their father’s home to stay with their mother,” Ali said, adding that she allegedly killed them the next morning and then sent a video of the incident to her ex-husband, who immediately alerted police. 

A rescue team found the children dead with their throats slit, and the mother was taken into custody. He said the father would file a police complaint after burying the children.

Research on cases where mothers kill their children, often described in criminology and psychology as filicide, points to multiple underlying causes. 

Studies suggest that such acts are most commonly linked to severe mental illness, including postpartum depression, psychosis, or untreated psychiatric conditions; extreme domestic stress such as custody battles or marital breakdowns; or situations of social and economic isolation. In some instances, mothers report distorted beliefs that killing their children is an act of protection from perceived future suffering. 

Experts caution that while these cases are rare, they often reveal gaps in mental health care and social support systems, particularly in societies where family breakdown carries stigma and couples have limited access to counselling or psychiatric treatment.
 

Topics: Mother murder

‘This is Pakistan Broadcasting Service’: Transmitter that announced nation’s birth lives on in Islamabad museum

Updated 46 min 34 sec ago
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‘This is Pakistan Broadcasting Service’: Transmitter that announced nation’s birth lives on in Islamabad museum

  • Marconi transmitter aired Pakistan’s birth on night of Aug. 13, 1947 through voices of Zahur Azar, Mustafa Ali Hamdani 
  • Museum’s archive displays original scripts, microphones and recordings from Pakistan’s broadcast history
Updated 46 min 34 sec ago
Muhammad Ibrahim

ISLAMABAD: Encased in glass at the center of a softly lit hall in Islamabad’s Radio Pakistan museum stands a towering relic of the country’s birth — a Marconi transmitter that once carried the solemn words:

“This is Pakistan Broadcasting Service, Lahore. We now bring to you a special program on ‘The Dawn of Independence.’”

It was the night of August 13, 1947. As the world tuned in, the voices of broadcasters Zahur Azar and Mustafa Ali Hamdani broke the silence, one in English, the other in Urdu, to announce the creation of a new nation on Radio Pakistan, the national broadcaster which came into being simultaneously with Pakistan.  

The photo taken on August 1, 2025, shows the Mics used by Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. (AN Photo)

Installed in Lahore in 1937 as part of British India’s early radio infrastructure, the transmitter was repurposed a decade later to deliver the defining broadcast of Pakistan’s emergence as an independent state.

Today, nearly eight decades on, it has found a second life in the capital, restored, preserved, and displayed as a monument to the country’s broadcast and political history at the Radio Pakistan museum. 

“This transmitter was stored away in our engineering store for years,” Saeed Ahmed Shaikh, director-general of Radio Pakistan, told Arab News.

“It was vacuum tube technology, obsolete. But because vibrant nations preserve and document their history, we brought it here, restored it, and put it on display.”

BROADCAST THAT ECHOED THROUGH TIME

Back in 1947, radio was the most immediate and far-reaching medium available. Newsprint was slow, television still rare. The airwaves were how people learned of revolution, war — and freedom. And this Marconi machine was how Pakistan was introduced to itself and the world.

The photo taken on August 1, 2025, shows an old photograph displayed at the Radio Pakistan Museum of a rehearsal session by Pakistani legendry singer Bilquis Khanum. (AN Photo)

“It wasn’t just a broadcast,” Shaikh said. “It was the dawn of a new era.”

Restored in 2020, the transmitter is now the centerpiece of a museum that charts nearly a century of Pakistani broadcasting. The collection includes microphones, vinyl records, antique radios, classical music recordings, and the original Urdu and English scripts of landmark news bulletins.

Among the artifacts is the very microphone Hamdani used during his independence night announcement.

“We’re not just witnesses to history,” Shaikh added. “We’re its custodians. And we want our young generation to connect with that legacy.”

CRADLE OF MUSIC AND MEMORY

Founded in 1947, Radio Pakistan, also known as Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, was not only the country’s first public broadcaster but also a formative platform for the country’s musical and cultural identity.

“If you ask the late Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, he would tell you his first public performance was aired by Radio Pakistan. Same with Attaullah Khan Esakhelvi. These were voices we introduced to the world,” Shaikh said, naming giants of Pakistani music. 

The photo taken on August 1, 2025, shows equipment desplayed at the Radio Pakistan Museum. (AN Photo)

Over the decades, Radio Pakistan aired everything from Sufi qawwalis to political speeches, public service announcements, and dramatic radio plays that reached millions. For many households, it was the soundtrack of a nation coming into its own.

DIGITAL ERA

Since assuming office as director-general in 2023, Shaikh has introduced reforms to bring the legacy broadcaster into the digital era. A major focus has been archiving and digitizing its vast music and speech recordings, some of which date back more than 70 years.

In partnership with a Chinese technology firm, Radio Pakistan is digitizing its full music archive, a collection scheduled to be accessible globally via platforms like Apple Music by September 2025.

“We’re moving fast,” Shaikh said. “Soon you’ll be able to access our music from anywhere, right on your phone.”

Already, the broadcaster boasts over a million followers on X, 2.7 million on Facebook, and a mobile app that streams live content from 53 stations across the country. Its digital reach spans far beyond Pakistan -to Gulf countries, Europe, and North America — connecting expatriates not just to news, but to familiar sounds and languages from home.

“[For us] the question is no longer, ‘How many people in Pakistan are listening?’” Shaikh said, when asked about a decline in radio audiences worldwide.

“The question now is: How many people worldwide are listening to Radio Pakistan?”

Topics: Pakistan Independence Day 2025

Dubai hosts world’s largest Pakistan Independence Day gathering, embassy says

Updated 14 August 2025
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Dubai hosts world’s largest Pakistan Independence Day gathering, embassy says

  • Around 60,000 people attended August 10 celebrations at Expo City in Dubai
  • Envoy highlights $7.9 billion UAE remittances, unveils new digital consular services
Updated 14 August 2025
SAIMA SHABBIR

ISLAMABAD: About 60,000 people attended Pakistan’s Independence Day celebration at the Dubai Expo City, making it the largest such gathering in the world, the embassy of Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates said on Thursday.

Expressing gratitude to the UAE government, envoy Faisal Niaz Tirmizi acknowledged their support in making this year’s Pakistan Independence Day celebrations “unprecedented in scale.”

“The event, held on 10 August in Dubai Expo City attended by around 60,000 people, was the largest Pakistan Independence Day gathering held anywhere in the world,” the embassy said in a statement.

Tirmizi also underscored the contributions of the Pakistani community in the UAE, underscoring their importance to Pakistan’s economy at a time of fiscal reform and external account pressures.

“The Pakistani diaspora has played a vital role in the development of the UAE and has been a backbone of our economy through their remittances,” Tirmizi said, urging expatriates to continue their constructive role in the country’s progress.

As part of the celebrations, the embassy announced the launch of an online tracking system for passports and National Identity Cards for Overseas Pakistanis (NICOP), aimed at improving consular services.

Tirmizi also pointed to improvements in education, saying two community schools had achieved a “Good” ranking for the first time in 20 years, and that more Pakistani private schools had been approached to expand branches in the Emirates.

Topics: Pakistan Independence Day 2025 Dubai Expo Cit

Two LUMS professors become first Pakistanis to join MIT’s J-PAL network

Updated 14 August 2025
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Two LUMS professors become first Pakistanis to join MIT’s J-PAL network

  • Dr. Farah Said and Dr. Ali Cheema are first Pakistani academics invited as J-PAL Affiliated Professors
  • J-PAL, co-founded by Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, is a leading global poverty research network
Updated 14 August 2025
NAIMAT KHAN

KARACHI: Two faculty members from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) have become the first Pakistani academics invited to join the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, LUMS said in a statement.

Dr. Ali Cheema, the vice chancellor, is a professor of economics and politics at LUMS and co-founder of the university’s Mahbub ul Haq Research Center, with research spanning political economy, development and governance. Dr. Farah Said is an associate professor of economics whose work focuses on gender, labor markets, and poverty, and she has led several randomized control trials on empowerment and development interventions.

“LUMS is delighted to announce that faculty members Dr. Farah Said and Dr. Ali Cheema have been invited to join the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT as Affiliated Professors — the first two faculty members from any Pakistani university to receive this honor,” the statement said.

J-PAL, co-founded by Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, is one of the world’s foremost institutions promoting evidence-based policymaking to reduce poverty. Its Affiliated Professors include leading economists from top global universities, among them five Nobel laureates.

The selection of Dr. Said and Dr. Cheema recognizes their “impactful work in economics and political economy, which has been published in top journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, American Political Science Review, Science, Economic Journal, and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics,” LUMS said.

“This milestone marks a significant achievement for LUMS, Pakistan’s economic community, and the nation, as we contribute to shaping global economic research.”

When asked to comment, Drs. Said and Cheema said their research owed much to their co-authors, colleagues, and students.

“This is an exciting time to be part of the Pakistani economist community, with a growing number of Pakistani-origin academics shaping global research on issues that are critical for the country,” the professors said. 

“We are also seeing the emergence of exceptional young Pakistani scholars who are asking deep questions about why economies, polities, and societies are not delivering for their people.”
 

Topics: LUMS Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)

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