The death in custody of another ‘blasphemy accused’ once again highlights what many of us have long been stressing: a need to repeal the ‘blasphemy laws’, train the police force, revise the education curriculum to remove the hate-mongering, and enforce law and order with a firm hand.
Below, my article on Pakistan’s first national anthem by Jagan Nath Azad (slightly abbreviated version published today in Dawn ‘Another time, another anthem’)
Prof. Jagan Nath Azad. Photo courtesy: Chander K. Azad, Jammu
Beena Sarwar
As children we learnt that Pakistan didn’t have a national anthem until the 1950s. My journalist uncle Zawwar Hasan used to tell us of a reporter friend who visited China in the early 1950s. Asked about Pakistan’s national anthem, he sang the nonsensical ‘laralapa laralapa’.
If these journalists were unaware that Pakistan had a national anthem — commissioned and approved in 1947 by by no less a person than the country’s founder and first Governor General, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, long before Hafeez Jullandri’s Persianised lyrics were adopted as the anthem in 1954 — ordinary citizens may be forgiven for their ignorance. Continue reading
Filed under: History | Tagged: Chander K Azad, hindu poet reading naat, Jagan Nath Azad, Jaswant Singh, Jinnah, Jinnah commissioned anthem, Khushboo Aziz, Luv Puri, Milli Gazette, Pakistan flag, Pakistan national anthem, PIA, PIA Hamsafar, poet Lahore, The Hindu, Tilok Chand Mahroom, Zaheer Kidvai blog | 21 Comments »
Journeys to democracy 