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The Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE), Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), and Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) have signed a tripartite memorandum of understanding (MoU) to enhance cooperation among the three bourses.
The agreement, signed on Thursday in Colombo, aims to facilitate technology development and sharing, human resource collaboration, product development, regulatory coordination, investor protection, and knowledge exchange across the markets, according to a press release issued by the DSE yesterday.
The signing ceremony was attended by DSE Chairman Mominul Islam, CSE Chairman Dilshan Wirasekara, and Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) Chairman Akif Saeed, along with directors and senior officials from the respective institutions.
“Through mutual experience-sharing and joint investments in technology, our stock exchanges can play an effective role in developing strong and efficient capital markets in their respective countries,” he added.
As part of the event, the DSE chairman participated in a panel discussion titled “Navigating Frontier Capital Markets: How Evolving Market Regulation and Exchanges Foster Efficient Capital Market Development.”
DSE representatives also held separate meetings with the chairman and commissioners of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, senior executives of PSX, and officials from CSE.
DSE Chairman Mominul Islam said, “South Asian stock exchanges — except for India — face technological and operational constraints due to their relatively small size. These limitations prevent markets with immense potential from reaching their full capacity.”
Originally published on The Daily Star, an ANN partner of Dawn.
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DAWN EDITORIAL: 01 April 2025
PAKISTAN’S legal system has issued some important rulings in recent days concerning women, which deserve more discussion and debate on mainstream media. For example, in what can be seen as a strong affirmation of gender equality, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court held last week that a woman’s legal rights cannot be tied to her marital status. The court’s observations — that a woman’s legal rights, personhood and autonomy are neither erased by marriage nor should they depend on it, and to assume that a married woman is financially dependent on her husband “is legally untenable, religiously unfounded and contrary to the egalitarian spirit of the Islamic law” — may seem like common sense, but they challenge patriarchal attitudes that are not often discussed and which passively undermine women’s autonomy in everyday life. In particular, the court’s observation that excluding married daughters from entitlement to job quotas usually reserved for compassionate causes “reveals a deeper structural flaw grounded in patriarchal assumptions about a woman’s identity and her role within the legal and economic order” cuts right to the heart of this problem.
The ruling has followed on the heels of another verdict issued some days earlier by the Federal Shariat Court, in which the FSC condemned customs that deprive women of their inheritance as ‘unlawful’ and directed provincial authorities to initiate criminal proceedings against those who perpetuate such practices ‘as a moral obligation’. But though both courts have reaffirmed that women’s rights are non-negotiable, has society at large also received this important message?
Patriarchal attitudes are often so entrenched that they colour individuals’ judgement about what is right and wrong without them realising it. It would be quite helpful, therefore, if judgements such as these, and others which directly impact women’s rights, were to be given more airtime in the media. Doing so could help empower more women to identify situations in which they are being wronged and encourage them to seek their rights through the law if necessary. The courts alone cannot change society, but if the message they are sending is heard by all, it could trigger positive change.
Published in Dawn, March 31st, 2025
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Umair Javed Published March 31, 2025
CONVENTIONAL coverage of politics in Pakistan tends to focus on personality clashes and day-to-day occurrences that fill up our news channels. This is expected given the pressures that come with running a 24/7 news cycle, replete with 10 different breaking stories a day. What remains missing though is good materialist analysis, ie, analysis that makes an assessment of deeper trends shaping politics. In other words, the personality clashes and egos that we focus on are merely playing out on a terrain shaped by broader social and economic transformations.
Principally, there are three such transformations that are currently at play in Pakistan. Demographic change, economic stagnation, and technological disruption. Each of these three has impacted the political sphere through a different array of influence vectors.
Let’s start with demography. The 2023 census recorded a population of 241.49 million, growing at 2.55 per cent annually. The fertility rate having decreased from 4.88 to 3.41 births per woman, is still considerably higher than regional neighbours India and Bangladesh. Resultantly, the country hosts a population that is predominantly young, with nearly two-thirds under 30 years old and 30pc between 15 and 29. More tellingly, the youth population grew at 2.7pc annually, slightly faster than the national growth rate.
This youth bulge is frequently talked about, but its scale and possible impact remains under-analysed. A direct outcome that we see is the rise in the working-age population: Approximately 1.3m young Pakistanis enter the labour market each year.
Additionally, this working age population is now increasingly better educated. Educational attainment generally shows substantial progress. The 2023 census indicates that the 20-29 age group has a degree attainment of nearly 14pc, more than double the national adult average. Of considerable note is that women’s higher education rates now exceed men’s by two percentage points, suggesting significant changes in educational access and gender dynamics.
Political participation among youth has also transformed. Given the overall demographic shape of the country, young voters now constitute almost 50pc of the total electorate. While 18- to 29-year-olds historically voted at lower rates, the 2024 election saw a dramatic shift. In 2013, only 26pc of this age group voted, compared to 55pc of all adults. By 2024, youth voter turnout increased to 48pc, matching the general electorate’s participation rate.
So the first piece of the puzzle is a young population (and electorate), with growing rates of educational credentials entering the labour force. What are they confronted with?
They enter into adulthood facing an economy with immense structural vulnerabilities. Between 2012 and 2024, the country experienced growth averaging 3.8pc, which is significantly lower than regional economies like India and Bangladesh.
The year 2023 represents the coming together of multiple economic pressures, demonstrating the broken nature of the economic base: record-high inflation reaching nearly 38pc, depleted foreign exchange reserves bringing the country close to default, further exacerbated by economic fallout from catastrophic floods in 2022.
Economic management of this crisis involved implementing import restrictions and raising the central bank discount rate to prevent a balance-of-payments crisis. As a result, economic growth stagnated, reaching only 2.3pc in 2024. While sovereign default was avoided through an IMF programme and inflation has abated this year, fundamental economic weaknesses remained.
This economic condition is the creation of a political economy that operates on rents and misallocation of resources, under the influence of interest groups that are able to exercise considerable influence through policy mechanisms such as amnesty schemes, subsidised energy, and import controls. Consequently, Pakistan’s capacity to compete in export markets and generate foreign exchange remains limited, and balance-of-payments crises remain around the corner.
However, as one economist colleague put it, the economy continues to work reasonably well for some (at the cost of the rest). The aforementioned elites in protected industries and sectors continue to make a killing. Similarly, the security establishment’s own economic footprint appears to have increased. The latest endeavour to appropriate desert land in Cholistan and redirect water through new canals serves as an example.
So a young population and a structurally compromised economy are features one and two. The third and final feature is the rise of an ‘online and tuned-in citizenry’.
In the 2023 census, 71pc of all households (90pc in urban areas) reported receiving information via television, while 96pc of all households reported using their mobile phones to access information. The corresponding figures for print and radio were 7pc and 6pc respectively, signalling a sharp decline since the early 2000s.
This massive transformation in how information is accessed has taken place with the overall rise in mobile connectivity in the country. According to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, there are currently around 200m cellphone connections, of which just over 66pc utilise mobile broadband, largely in urban areas.
Pertinently for those thinking about ‘digital terrorism’, social media usage is expanding at considerable pace — according to a survey conducted in late 2021/ early 2022, 51pc of respondents consumed at least one form of social media (WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok or Facebook). As these figures are from three years earlier, the number is expected to have increased exponentially in the same period.
Given the three features documented here, it is a mystery how anyone can still think that status quo modes of doing politics (through patronage), maintaining control (through censorship), and exercising power (through centralised, executive authority) can provide any sustained stability. When taking this broader view, it becomes clear that political instability is not the outcome of ego clashes or dislikes. Rather it is the result of a yawning divide between how the state operates and what the society it attempts to control actually expects.
The writer teaches sociology at Lums.
X: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, March 31st, 2025
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Huma Yusuf//DAWN: 01 April 2025
AS the BNP’s Sardar Akhtar Mengal marched towards Quetta last week, the idea recirculated: establish a truth and reconciliation commission for Balochistan. Political commentators, journalists and activists alike rightly highlight that at the core of the Balochistan crisis is the state’s lack of acknowledgement that legitimate grievances underpin militancy and anti-state violence. It is a truth easily accepted in other contexts but not entertained closer to home. Not surprisingly, then, a truth and reconciliation process is often cited as a way out of the quagmire. But would it work?
Truth commissions are established when rampant human rights violations have occurred, typically in a conflict or authoritarian context, and there is a need for a national reckoning. Truth commissions aim to uncover, investigate, document and ultimately establish a consensual version of the ‘truth’ of what has happened.
The findings of truth commissions are usually based on wide-ranging interviews with affected communities, comprehensive data collection, investigations and policy and legal reviews. These are meant to pave the way for reconciliation through a variety of means, including reparations, institutional and structural reforms to address gaps that enabled rights violations or conflict, inclusive policymaking, and legal recourse. The outcomes of truth and reconciliation proceedings seek to be both holistic and healing, and may also involve memorials for those affected and prosecutions of key perpetrators to ensure accountability to reinstate trust in the system.
It is not far-fetched to think that such a process is now needed in Balochistan — after all, the first truth commission over four decades ago was the Argentinian National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, a topic that is a key driver of metastasising Baloch grievance. Between 50 to 70 truth commissions have been established since Argentina’s bold step (depending how you count them) on varying types of issues. In 2022, PPP and PML-N ministers supported the idea of such a commission.
Sadly, the approach is unlikely to succeed. Truth commissions typically function in post-conflict or post-authoritarian contexts. There are calls for a truth commission to be established in Bangladesh to address the corruption and human rights violations perpetrated by Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League.
Unfortunately, Balochistan is far from being post-conflict at present. Post-Jaffar Express, the state has widened the crackdown to encompass anyone perceived to inhabit the same spectrum of grievance as the BLA, including the peaceful protesters of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee. On the other side, as Mengal keeps warning, the brutal crackdown and extractive mentality towards the province threaten to radicalise a broader segment of the Baloch population.
The government could use a truth commission to try and stop this violent spiral, but it would be compromised by its own weakness and complicity. Truth commissions are created through legal instruments that define their mandate, composition, objectives and methodology. Our government today, after the 2024 elections and the inexcusable democratic concessions of the past year, hardly has the public trust to mandate a truth commission.
Then there’s the problem of information gathering. Truth commissions gather ‘truth’ from all affected stakeholders and all available sources with an eye to better documenting what has passed. How can such a process succeed in an age of disinformation and surveillance?
Balochistan has been subject to media blackouts, internet shutdowns and social media surveillance for many years now. The current crisis is unfolding in the wake of the Peca amendment, when any critique of the state and its institutions could result in detentions, jail terms — or worse. No commission, no matter how well-mandated or well-intentioned, could establish truth under these conditions.
Ultimately, truth commissions can only work when all stakeholders genuinely desire an end to violence and rights violations, and confidence that past sins cannot be repeated. This premise does not yet hold true in Pakistan. Key stakeholders in this conflagration are not interested in making amends. The incentives are not yet great enough to warrant a drastic rewriting of history, a privileging of distributive justice, and a holding to account for human rights violations. The pain is not yet equally felt on all sides.
But we should learn from the tragedy of our own history, and from others. Grievances grow, they morph, they consume all else. From Libya to Sudan, we have examples of what a worst-case scenario could look like, and it is not a future any of us would wish upon our country. It’s time to look ahead to meaningful reconciliation.
The writer is a political and integrity risk analyst.
X: @humayusuf
Published in Dawn, March 31st, 2025
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The making of nations: religion or ethnicity
Urdu was not Jinnah's language either
Shahid Javed Burki // TRIBUNE: March 31, 2025
For Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding father, it was clear that the country he was founding would not be an Islamic state. He said so in a speech given on August 11, 1947, three days before being sworn in as the country's first governor general. He had campaigned to create a country in which British India's Muslim population, then numbering about 100 million, could live comfortably and follow their distinct culture. That would not have been possible in an independent India in which those of Hindu religion will be in a large majority.
He seemed not to have given much attention to ethnicity which would – and in Pakistan's case did – stand in the way of nation building. He himself belonged to a small ethnic group called the Khojas which was largely based in Karachi. Small commercial activities were their main occupation.
Once Pakistan came into being, he thought that its creation would bring together and become a nation using the same language. That would be Urdu spoken by a minority of British India's Muslim population. About 3 to 4 million of this group, left their homes in what was now independent India and went to Karachi, chosen by Jinnah to be the new country's capital. Another 4 million went to the province of Punjab, occupying the land tilled by Sikh farmers who had migrated to India.
On his first and only visit to Dhaka, the capital of what was then called Pakistan's eastern wing, he suggested that Urdu would be Pakistan's national language. That was not acceptable to the Bengalis who lived in that part of Pakistan. They believed that Bengali, their language, was richer than Urdu. Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his Bengali and poetry and prose.
Urdu was not Jinnah's language either. It was the language of some 4 to 5 million Muslims who left their homes in what was now independent India and headed for Pakistan. The decision was taken after Hindu-Muslim riots in their neighbourhoods had taken tens of thousands of lives. Most of the people belonging to this ethnic group went to Karachi and easily dominated the native Sindhis of the city.
The refugees had the skills that the new government and economy needed. Another 4 million Muslims left India and went to the Pakistani part of the province of Punjab, taking the land that had been tilled by the Sikh farmers ever since the British tapped the system of Indus rivers to irrigate the virgin land of the area. The Sikhs had lived in these areas even since the founding of their religion.
The Bengalis refused to accept domination by the people of the country's western wing. They first campaigned for autonomy and when that was denied to them, they bitterly fought a civil war to win independence which they won aided by India. The Pakistani general in charge of his country's forces in East Pakistan laid down his arms and was arrested along with 90,000 of its soldiers and taken to India as prisoners of war. The POWs were released when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, on taking over as Pakistan's prime minister, signed with Indira Gandhi, his Indian counterpart, what came to be known as the Shimla agreement, named after the hill city where the two leaders met.
The question I explore in this article is whether religion can overcome ethnic differences. To find an answer, I will briefly discuss the developing situation in two Muslim countries in the Middle East and South Asia – Syria and Afghanistan. Both are divided into several small groups, each jealously guarding their separate ways.
Talban now rule Afghanistan from Kabul, after taking over the government when the twice democratically elected President Ashraf Ghani escaped from the country's capital and finally landed in the UAE. That was on August 13, 2022. Ghani's departure allowed the Taliban to enter the presidential palace and establish an Islamic state.
Taliban's interpretation of Islam follows the one practised in Saudi Arabia. The world 'Taliban' in Arabic means 'students'. It now refers to the young men who were educated in the madrassas set up by Pakistan with the help of the Saudis. This was done to educate hundreds of thousands of Afghans who settled in neighbouring Pakistan, having escaped the fighting in Afghanistan between the Soviet troops and a group of Islamic fighters called the mujahidin. Moscow had sent in its troops in 1979 to keep the Communist regime they had established in Kabul from falling.
I met with then President of Pakistan Ziaul Haq after his prime minister Muhammad Khan Junejo had negotiated the Geneva accord which called for the exit of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan. "The reason I dismissed Junejo was not because of some trivial differences about the manning of the President's House as was generally rumored. He didn't accept my advice that Moscow should not to be pushed out of Afghanistan before a governing set-up had been set up.
In the absence of such a plan, the mujahidin groups would fall on each other and result would be chaos." That is exactly what happened. The infighting led to the rise of the Taliban who are now using their interpretation of Islamic modes of governance to put in a place a system of governance that has limited personal freedoms, especially for women. Taliban are also not tolerant of the communities that are different from them in terms of ethnicity and the way they practise Islam.
Syria is the other Muslim nation that is attempting to set up a system of governance that would cater to the needs of its diverse people. But it is faced with a different problem. We are likely to see the Sunni-Shia conflict reemerge in Syria as that country defines the way it would like to serve its very diverse people.
King Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Moscow on December 5, 2024, was expelled as the rebels representing different, mostly religious groups, advanced towards Damascus, the country's capital. Ahmed el-Sharaa, who is now the interim president in the government that took office on March 1, had made a name for himself by espousing Islamic extremism aligned with Sunni beliefs.
His followers are now hitting the Alawites, a Shia community who supported President Bashar al-Assad. The recent attack was on the residents in the coastal village of Fahil, reflecting the often-fatal undercurrents roiling Syria. As one newspaper account put it, "sectarian fault lines, cut deeply across the slopes below Fahil, where hillside roads lead to Sunni communities on the Palins below."
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