Imran Khan’s resilient youth and the middle-class base challenged the influence of the Pakistan military through ballot despite odds, resulting in an election outcome that signals a turning point in the country’s political landscape
Candidates backed by Imran Khan defied all odds to become the largest group in Pakistan’s parliament but an alliance of parties, which has lost the people’s trust making them incapable of delivering and most crucially on the economy, is being cobbled together again
Imran Khan’s party appears set to be kept out of power despite a strong performance against all odds with Army chief General Asim Munir emphasizing the need for stability and unity, signaling support for a coalition government headed by Nawaz Sharif-led king’s party
The military establishment attempted to make Imran Khan irrelevant by jailing him, cracking down on his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and propping up arch-rival Nawaz Sharif
The idea of Pakistan was dismissed as ‘chimerical and impractical’ in the 1930s, but it gathered steam with tacit British support as payback for Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s backing of their war effort before the colonizers quit India, leaving Indians at each other’s throats after India’s Partition
The British divided resource-rich Balochistan to secure access to Afghanistan, where the colonialists fought wars to maintain a buffer zone against Russia, frustrating the ethnolinguistic nationalism of the Baloch people scattered across Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran
Pakistan and northwestern India have many commonalities in terms of languages, food, culture, social norms, history, etc, and one needs to look further—South India—to understand the real difference between the two countries
A chance meeting catapulted General Rani into the highest echelons of power as she emerged as the real power behind the throne when Ayub Khan quit in the face of a Leftist movement and handed over power to Yahya Khan in 1969
Revolutionary poets Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Habib Jalib, and Ahmad Faraz’s anti-establishment resistance in Pakistan influenced progressive voices, which included the Leftist Laal band that revitalized protest poetry during military ruler Pervez Musharraf’s reign in the noughties
What makes The Other Side of the Divide an impressive read is that it combines a literary extraction of experience with years of reading to produce a nonfiction work that has elements of travel, history, conversation, and journalistic observation
