Download or read book Political Conflict in Pakistan written by Mohammad Waseem and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a major reinterpretation of Pakistani politics. Its focus is conflict among groups, communities, classes, ideologies and institutions, which has shaped the country's political dynamics. Mohammad Waseem analyses the millennium-long conflict between Hindus and Muslims as separate nations but intermingled faiths, and the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh renaissances that created a twentieth-century clash of communities and led to partition. Political Conflict in Pakistan addresses multiple clashes: between the high culture as a mission to transform society, and the low culture of the land and the people; between those committed to the establishment's institutional constitutional framework and those seeking to dismantle the 'colonial' state; between the corrupt and those seeking to hold them to account; between the political class and the middle class; and between civil and military power. Waseem exposes how the ruling elite centralised power through the militarisation and judicialisation of politics, rendering the federalist arrangement an empty shell and grossly alienating the provinces. He sets all this within the contexts of education and media as breeders of conflict, the difficulties of establishing an anti-terrorist regime, and the state's pragmatic attempts at conflict resolution, under pressure from minorities. This is a wide-ranging account of a country of contestations. Mohammad Waseem is Professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Formerly a Fulbright fellow at Columbia and the Brookings Institute, and Pakistan chair at St Antony's College, Oxford, he specialises in Pakistan's ethnic, constitutional, electoral, sectarian, military and militant politics. His books include 'Democratization in Pakistan'.