Such feelings required deft and sophisticated handling, traits that the leaders of Pakistan severely lacked and continue to lack. Even though East Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh precisely because for the people of East Pakistan, language was more important a marker of identity than religion, Pakistan continues to persist with an Islam-based centralization policy. For the Baloch, their national identity emphasizes their centuries-old culture and their specific territorial presence rather than Islam—at least not the kind being propagated in Pakistan. The Baloch were, thus, at cross-purposes with the very idea of an Islam-based Pakistan. The Pakistan state failed to understand this in 1947 and it has consistently failed to understand this till now.
The Baloch narrative hinges on the indelible historical memories of being independent and the injustices the people feel that they have undergone since they were forced to accede to Pakistan. Earlier, in the nineteenth century during British rule, decisions of the boundary commissions had altered the historic boundaries of the state between the British Empire, Persia and Afghanistan.15 Despite this, there was a rump Baloch nation represented by the princely state of Kalat that declared independence in August 1947 after the British left the subcontinent. Many Baloch believed and continue to believe that the forced accession of the Kalat state to Pakistan in March 1948 snuffed out their identity. The basic Baloch position is that the Khanate of Kalat was never a part of India. The British violated solemn treaty arrangements by treating it as an Indian state just prior to their departure and Pakistan was guilty of forcing its accession. This is an issue that resonates even today and is perhaps the single, most important, reason why the Baloch have not reconciled to being part of Pakistan.
Post accession, the alienation of the Baloch was aggravated due to the treatment meted out to them that has resulted in systematic economic exploitation and discrimination. This was coupled with the perception that their Baloch identity was being further sacrificed at the altar of a common Pakistani identity. The feeling has grown that the federal government, dominated by Punjab, was discriminating against them and was ‘colonizing’ their province by exploiting their vast natural resources. This feeling of alienation has been further stoked by recent developments: the continuing military operations in the province with its offshoots of enforced disappearances and kill-and-dump policies; the exclusion of the Baloch in decisions pertaining to mega projects like the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and development of the Gwadar port; the fear of being turned into a minority in their own province and so on.
As a result, when the Baloch compares himself with his counterparts in other provinces, especially Punjab, he asks, rightly, what has he gained from being a part of Pakistan? What Prince Abdul Karim wrote in 1948 from exile in Afghanistan to his brother the Khan of Kalat, Mir Ahmad Yar Khan, seems as if it could have been written in 2019: ‘... the Pakistan people are not only more aggressive than the British, but they are also in the habit of biting off their own friends… From whatever angle we look at the present government of Pakistan, we will see nothing but Punjabi fascism. The people have no say in it. It is the Army and arms that rule… There is no place for any other community in this government, be it the Baluch, the Sindhis, the Afghans or the Bengalis ... total Punjabi Fascism rules supreme everywhere.’16 Six decades later, Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri was to echo similar sentiments when he said in an interview: ‘We cannot live with the Punjabis. There is no room for compromise in my book. We have to get rid of them.’17
All this has bred a feeling that Balochistan is not an equal partner in Pakistan. Way back in 2003, a team of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, ‘… noticed discontent almost everywhere in Balochistan because of the widely shared perception of the people’s exclusion from public affairs. They felt deprived and ignored.’18 In 2009, the HRCP reported that a section of the Baloch had concluded that they were being viewed as enemies of the state: ‘They feel abandoned by the people as well as political forces in the rest of the country. There is a sense of isolation, rejection and dejection.’19 It cautioned that the ‘… sense of deprivation and suppression is deep rooted in Baloch nationalist identity; the establishment’s failure to negotiate and compensate further isolates a population that has long put up with armed and aggressive tactics to curb the struggle for their rights’. For the Baloch, this, together with socio-economic disparities and lack of provincial autonomy, has made the conflict essentially one over identity—to preserve their culture, language and ultimately all that it means to be a Baloch.20
The mega projects being implemented with the assistance of China (Gwadar port and the CPEC) have exacerbated Baloch grievances. With China investing upwards of $60 billion in various projects and the port of Gwadar in Balochistan being the outlet, the strategic importance of Balochistan has increased phenomenally. This, in turn, has changed the dynamics between Islamabad and Quetta. It is this changed dynamics that has increased the ferocity of the crackdown on the Baloch while they apprehend becoming a minority in their own land.
The Baloch are not per se opposed to such massive projects like the development of Gwadar as a major port. What they object to is that they have not been consulted; and they believe, based on earlier such projects, that jobs and benefits would go to the dominant Punjabis. Already, there has been an influx of workers from outside the province into Gwadar and they have been buying up local land. The Baloch see this as clinching evidence of outsiders, especially the Punjabis, getting rich at their expense.
Balochistan also suffers from many missed opportunities on the one hand and outright deceptions on the other. In 1950 and again in 1960, Sardar Abdul Karim and Sardar Nauroz Khan respectively were duped into giving up arms and surrendering to the government on solemn promises, sworn on the Koran, of safe passage. Instead, they were tried in military courts. While both got long prison sentences, the son and six other companions of Nauroz Khan were hanged. In 1973, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto promised provincial autonomy as a quid pro quo for Baloch support for a consensus constitution. But having got that, he dismissed the government of Sardar Attaullah Mengal in Balochistan that led to a four-year insurgency. In 2000, negotiations began with a reluctant Marri scion Hyrbyair Marri in London but his demands were dismissed. In 2001, Musharraf called off talks with Akbar Bugti at the last minute just as the latter was about to board a special plane that had been sent for him. In 2005, the recommendation of a multi-party parliamentary committee on Balochistan was shelved. The then US ambassador Ryan Crocker told the chairman of the committee, Mushahid Hussain, ‘Senator, had your report been implemented, the situation in Balochistan would have been restored to normalcy.’21
Balochistan’s share of the national GDP had dropped from 4.9 per cent in the mid-1970s to less than 3 per cent in 2000. The province has the highest infant and maternal mortality rates, the highest poverty rate and the lowest literacy rate in Pakistan. Within Balochistan, ‘an average Baloch is twice as poor as an average Punjabi, Pashtun, or Hazara resident of the province.’ Even in Quetta, the capital, only a third of the households are connected to the government water supply system and receive water for about one or two hours a day.22
Summing up the feeling of relative deprivation, Jabal, the official organ of the Baloch People’s Liberation Front, had stated way back in July 1977: ‘In Islamabad’s calculations, Balochistan is a vast estate for plunder, an arid desert floating on oil and minerals. A large part of their political strategy is dictated by the desire to extract this treasure for the benefit of the Pakistani bureaucratic bourgeoisie and foreign imperialist interests.… The Pakistani oligarchy needs Balochistan’s oil and minerals to overcome the severe economic crisis gripping the whole country.’23 The situation is no different four decades later.
The federal government has often tried to co-opt the Baloch with developmental projects, but none of them have achieved any measure of success. The reason for this was well articulated by Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri. According to him, the Baloch wanted ‘to moderniz
e and to develop in ways and at a speed that we think makes sense under our conditions… But they [Punjabis] don’t want us to carry out modernization under our own control. They want to modernize us in their own way, without listening to us.’ Most of the roads built in Balochistan, he declared, were ‘not for our benefit but to make it easier for the military to control us and for the Punjabis to rob us. The issue is not whether to develop, but whether to develop with or without autonomy. Exploitation has now adopted the name of development.’24
As Baloch journalist Malik Siraj Akbar puts it, ‘development’ itself has different meanings for the Baloch and the federal government. For the Baloch, development is linked with the creation of employment opportunities and consequent improvement in their standard of living. For Pakistan, development means obtaining Balochistan’s mineral wealth and expediting the development of the Gwadar port and the CPEC.25 If the only way to do this is to consolidate its military presence and cause demographic imbalance vis-à-vis the Baloch people, then so be it. What Pakistani leadership has not appreciated is that by depriving the Baloch of the fruits of their resources, the long-term success of either development or of foreign investment would be doubtful.
The Central government argues that a few ‘miscreants’, i.e., a small number of tribal sardars, are creating trouble, are misleading the Baloch in order to maintain their privileges and grip on power and derailing the Central government’s effort to modernize and develop Balochistan. What the government has not been able to explain convincingly is why have so many Baloch, especially in the non-tribal areas like the Makran coast, taken up arms against the Central government, if it is only the sardars fighting for their privileges. Clearly, the message of the tribal chiefs resonates with the Baloch population motivating them to pick up arms, while the message of the Central government does not. The government does not seem to have understood that the people treated social and political issues separately. They opposed the domination of the sardars but supported the same sardars in political matters. That was why they blamed Islamabad and not the sardars for their deprivation.26
In reality, the situation is not due to a few ‘miscreants’ but is a complex combination of political memories of past injustices, betrayals inflicted on the Baloch, the economic neglect of the province and exploitation of its resources by Punjabi ‘colonialists’ for their own benefit, and now the fear of being converted into a minority due to the development of the Gwadar port and CPEC. The conflict is thus centred on a deep-seated belief among many Baloch that they should be masters of their own destiny. The Punjabi-dominated federal government, however, disputes such assertions. As Selig Harrison puts it: ‘To the Punjabis, who make up 58 per cent of the population, it is unthinkable that a Baloch minority of less than 4 per cent [6 per cent now] should have special claims to Baluchistan, which represents 42 per cent [44 per cent actually] of the land area of the country.’27 Consequently, positions have hardened on both sides.
The federal government did take several initiatives from 2008 onwards to structurally address issues of marginalization of Balochistan. These included the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the seventh National Finance Commission (NFC) Award, the Aghaz-e-Haqooq Balochistan package, the Pur Aman Balochistan package (details in the chapter on state response), and so on. These, on paper, granted financial, political and administrative autonomy to Balochistan and other provinces. However, the government has not been able to reap the fruits of these initiatives, and unrest and insurgency in Balochistan has continued. To believe that such ‘packages’ would win over the Baloch—with ongoing enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings of Baloch political workers by the security forces—was naive.
What do the Baloch want? At one end of the spectrum are separatists like Brahamdagh Bugti, grandson of the slain Baloch leader Akbar Bugti, who says that the Baloch tribesmen are fighting not only to demonstrate their displeasure but to make it abundantly clear to the Central government that they ‘should leave our homeland’.28 Today, such an assertion carries more weight than at any other time. Though the four previous insurgencies in 1948, 1958, 1962 and 1973–77 were confined to tribal pockets, they transformed the Baloch tribal society into a nascent nation. The current insurgency has crossed the tribal barrier. It has now acquired grass-root support and acquired a momentum of its own that has enabled it to survive over the last decade and a half.
At the other end of the spectrum are Baloch politicians who are opposed to violence and separation from Pakistan. They would be happy with greater provincial autonomy and control over their affairs—economic, political, social and cultural. They too articulate resentment at the way Balochistan has been exploited.
The violence and brutality of the state has escalated to a higher level ever since the outbreak of the current phase of insurgency that began in the first decade of this millennium. This is evident in the increased targeting of middle-class activists who have come to form the backbone of the movement. A large number of them have been subjected to ‘enforced disappearance’ or have gone ‘missing’, only to turn up later as bodies riddled with bullets and bearing torture marks. The issue of enforced disappearance is clearly the most horrifying aspect of the situation in Balochistan. Thousands of Baloch political activists have gone missing, while hundreds of them have been killed and dumped across Balochistan in kill-and-dump operations. The Supreme Court of Pakistan is on record that intelligence agencies and security forces have been involved in these extra-judicial arrests and killings. However, the judiciary has not been able to implement remedial action.
In addition to the above complexities, Sunni extremists, led by the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), have been on a killing spree, targeting hundreds of Shia Muslims, most of whom ethnic Hazaras. It is widely believed that the LeJ is covertly supported by elements within the Pakistani security establishment.
The conflict between the Baloch armed groups and the state has also led to the former killing unarmed Punjabi civilians—university professors, schoolteachers, journalists and labourers—as a part of their ‘revenge strategy’ against the government. As a result of these attacks, thousands of Punjabis, locally known as ‘settlers’, have fled Balochistan.
An added complexity is the presence of the Afghan Taliban and their ‘Quetta shura’ in the Pashtun areas of the province. It is important to distinguish between them and the Baloch. The Baloch are fighting for their rights and even survival, which is quite distinct from the Taliban who are seeking to claw back into power in Afghanistan. The Taliban want to establish an Islamic caliphate in Afghanistan and are being backed by Pakistan. The Baloch ethnic insurgency focused in the Baloch areas is, on the contrary, a secular fight against the Pakistan state.
A marked feature of the situation in Balochistan is the persistent lack of information about developments there. There is very little reporting about Balochistan in the media in Pakistan except when there is a violent incident there. The situation is, however, changing gradually. Balochistan and the conflict that continues within it has now started making the news indirectly, thanks to the focus on Gwadar and CPEC–related discussions of security requirements.
The US and other Western powers have remained largely mute spectators despite the appeals of the Baloch to pressurize Pakistan to stop its brutal repression in the province. Such a stand has been largely dictated by their dependence on Pakistan for cooperation in the fight against the al-Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan.Till the 1970s, US attitude towards and knowledge about Balochistan was best represented by a remark of Henry Kissinger, then a Harvard professor. On a visit to Pakistan in 1962, when asked to comment on the insurgency in the province, he remarked, ‘I wouldn’t recognize the Balochistan problem if it hit me in the face.’29
Things began to change after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 when Balochistan became a major conduit for the supply of weapons to the Afghan mujahideen. There was renewed interest in the region in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist strike in the Unite
d States when President Pervez Musharraf provided access to several key installations, including the airfields in Pasni and Dalbadin, from where US forces supported their operations in Afghanistan. Even so, the US policy towards Balochistan, insofar it has one, is dictated by its overall approach towards Pakistan.
The book begins by discussing the land and people of Balochistan, about their composition and disposition within the province. It elucidates the geography, demography and the strategic importance of the province. The fact that Balochistan covers almost half of the land area of Pakistan while accounting for just about 6 per cent of the country’s population is a stark reminder that more attention needs to be given to its geographical and demographic peculiarities to understand the province’s economic and social development. The main resource of the province is its geography and strategic location but its Achilles heel is the skewed land to population ratio.
Pakistan- the Balochistan Conundrum Page 2