Indian scholar Ananya Vajpeyi wrote the following in The Telegraph, Calcutta, in July this year:
"In contemporary Pakistan's fragile civil society, Faiz's poetry is a bulwark against a State that has not stood strongly enough for democracy, a bubbling sectarianism that can erupt at any moment into yet another scalding episode of fratricidal bloodshed, and a continual erosion of the secular, cosmopolitan, democratic and enlightened values that were central to the founding vision of figures like Allama Iqbal and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. It may appear far-fetched to suggest that beautiful poetry could be a consolation for awful politics, but in Pakistan today this seems true."