South Asia Investor Review

American billionaire and President-Elect Donald Trump's confidante Elon Musk's recent tweets have revived the allegations by the far right that the  British Pakistani  gangs are mainly responsible for sex crimes against children in the United Kingdom.  Earlier, these claims were repeated by former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman when she said in a television interview that child grooming gangs in the UK were “almost all British-Pakistani”.  This claim elicited a strong response by British Press regulator   IPSO  which said that Braverman’s decision to link “the identified ethnic group and a particular form of offending was significantly misleading” because the (British) Home Office’s own research had concluded offenders were mainly from white backgrounds. The British Home Office  Report  on Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation (December 2021) said that while some high-profile cases involved men of Pakistani ethnicity (2%), the academ...

Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022) died this week. The sun set on the British Empire during her reign that began in 1952. The dismantling of the empire had already started with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 before she ascended to the throne. It continued in the 1950s and 60s with dozens of nations in Asia and Africa declaring their independence. British colonialism was soon replaced by western neocolonialism led by the United States. Black and brown people continue to suffer from the scourge of racism in a world dominated by white Europeans. Corrupt ruling elites with colonized minds ensure that true decolonization does not occur in the former British colonies. They treat their own people with the same disdain as did their former colonial bosses. The struggle for true independence continues.  Haq Family With British Royal Family at Madame Tussauds in London Economic Extraction: When the British arrived in Mughal India, the country's share of the  world GDP was 25%...

St. Louis County Health Director Dr. Faisal Khan, a Pakistani American, was subjected to racial abuse at a St. Louis County Council meeting, according to multiple media reports. He apparently got caught up in the middle of a fierce, angry debate on new mask mandates amid surging infections attributed to the Delta variant of the COVID19 virus that originated in India. The anti-mask crowd is particularly strong in Republican states that voted for former President Donald J. Trump .   Dr. Faisal Khan Dr. Khan was subjected to racial slurs and physically assaulted after defending a new mask mandate to combat COVID-19.  In response to the abuse, he raised his middle finger at a crowd gathered at a St. Louis County Council meeting, according to a Wednesday letter obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “After being physically assaulted, called racial slurs and surrounded by an angry mob, I expressed my displeasure by using my middle finger toward an individual who had physica...

Is the killing of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis Police Officer symptomatic of a deeper problem in American society? Is the  Trump phenomenon  the result of ingrained racism in America? Is racism rooted in America's original sin of slavery?  Is it time to openly acknowledge and address it? Is it time for greater social change beyond the emancipation proclamation of 1860s and the civil rights legislation of 1960s? Is wide participation of white American protesters in recent marches a clear call for action by top leadership in the White House and the US Congress? George Floyd Memorialized By Pakistani Truck Artist Haider Ali What is  the status and the trajectory  of coronavirus pandemic in Pakistan? How widespread are the infections? What does COVID19 and  antibodies testing  tell us? Is easing of  lockdown  justified? How long a lockdown can Pakistan's poor afford? What is the alternative? Can mandatory face mask slow down the spr...

43.5% of Indians, the highest percentage in the world, say they do not want to have a neighbor of a different race, according to a Washington Post report based on World's Values Survey . About Pakistan, the report says that  "although the country has a number of factors that coincide with racial intolerance – sectarian violence, its location in the least-tolerant region of the world, low economic and human development indices – only 6.5 percent of Pakistanis objected to a neighbor of a different race. This would appear to suggest Pakistanis are more racially tolerant than even the Germans or the Dutch". Housing Discrimination:  It appears that there is a small but militant minority in Pakistan that is highly intolerant, but the vast majority of people are tolerant. My own experience as a  former Karachi-ite  is that there is little or no race or religion based housing segregation, the kind that is rampant in India where Muslims are not welcome in most Hindu-do...