SMOKERS’ CORNER: THE BLA RECKONING

In August 1974, one Abdul Majeed Baloch hid himself in a tree with a grenade in hand. The tree was located just outside a venue in Quetta where the then prime minister of Pakistan, Z.A. Bhutto, was holding a public rally. At the time, Balochistan was in the grip of an insurgency. Majeed, a young Baloch insurgent, wanted to assassinate Bhutto, but failed. On being discovered by the security forces, Majeed’s grenade accidentally exploded in his hand, killing him on the spot.

Thirty-six years later, during yet another insurgency in the province, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) began forming a unit of suicide bombers. The unit was named after Majeed (ie the Majeed Brigade).

It is widely believed (wrongly) that BLA was formed in 2000. It became increasingly militant after 2006, when Pakistan’s then military ruler, Gen Pervez Musharraf, ordered an operation that resulted in the death of prominent Baloch tribal leader Akbar Bugti. Musharraf had accused Baloch tribal leaders of “undermining progress in Balochistan” and of “siphoning off state funds allocated for the province.” Ironically, during the insurgency of the 1970s, Bugti had sided with the state.

Since 1948, there have been at least five armed uprisings by Baloch nationalists. There is one going on right now. 

The banned Balochistan Liberation Army’s journey from radical student activism to a well-equipped militant force mirrors the shifting sands of South Asian politics. The BLA’s historical trajectory, its ideological mutations and its potential role in an impending regional conflict need to be reckoned with

From 2011 onwards, BLA started to expand its areas of influence and began to be noticed by the media outside the province — especially when it adopted suicide bombings, which were once the domain of Islamist terror groups. BLA is entirely secular and has managed to also somewhat retain the ‘leftist’ legacy of its predecessors — even though there’s not much Marx or Mao left in its literature, just a vaguely left-leaning Baloch nationalism. 

No wonder then that non-Baloch ‘progressives’, who have often gone to great lengths in trying to differentiate BLA from Islamist outfits, have faced anger and even ridicule (for being ‘useful idiots’) due to BLA’s increasingly extreme tactics, which now include acts of ethnic cleansing and suicide bombings. 

The roots of the BLA are often traced back to the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF), which was one of the largest Baloch insurgent groups during the 1970s insurgency. BLF had stood for an independent Balochistan and ‘national communism’ — a term first coined by the Yugoslavian Marxist Milovan Djilas to describe a fusion of communism and ethnic nationalism. Yet, there was still a BLF when BLA was formed many years later.

BLA’s more immediate roots lie in an electoral experiment in 1988. Most Baloch groups were headed by tribal leaders in a milieu where a Baloch middle class was gradually expanding. Baloch student organisations began to exhibit frustration towards their tribal leaders. They accused them of diluting the intensity of the ‘Baloch cause.’ Just months before the 1988 elections, young, middle class Baloch activists formed the Balochistan National Movement (BNM). The party surprised pundits by winning some important seats from Balochistan, many of which were once considered strongholds of tribal leaders. 

Even though BNM split in the mid-1990s, it was one of the first manifestations of the growing divide between ‘rebellious’ Baloch tribal leaders and young, middle class Baloch nationalists. Another interesting detail that often gets lost in this regard is that when BNM was being formed, actually so too was BLA, mainly through recruits who were mostly radical Baloch students. 

In 2011, a group of American, Pakistani and Indian reporters interviewed two former Soviet agents in Moscow who told them that BLA was originally the project of Soviet intelligence agencies who were looking to foment trouble in Balochistan due to Pakistan’s involvement in the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s. 

So, BLA was initially put together in the 1980s but began to wither away along with the Soviet Union. Therefore, the fact is, BLA was revived in 2000 and not formed as such. It was already there. BNM factions that had dumped electoral politics were some of the first to join the revived BLA. By the mid-2000s, BLA was almost entirely being led by middle class Baloch.

Today, BLA is one of the largest and most feared anti-state Baloch militant outfits and also the most resourceful. In the 1970s, organisations such as BLF had received some funds and arms from Iraq’s erstwhile Ba’ath Socialist regime, and from the Afghan nationalist regime headed by Sardar Daoud. There has never been enough evidence of BLF ever having received any significant help from India or from the Soviet Union. 

Soviet interest in Balochistan largely increased in the 1980s, but then fell away with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Also, by then, the province’s ‘Pakhtun belt’ had begun to be dominated by Islamist groups, many of whom were once used by the state to bolster the 1980s ‘Afghan jihad.’

Despite being poles apart in their ideological views, BLA and Islamist groups operating in the province have largely tolerated each other, and have even collaborated. The narrative that there should be a serious dialogue between the “naraaz Baloch” [angry Baloch] and the state has run its course, as middle class Baloch radicals refuse to pay any heed to this narrative, which they see as the domain of ineffectual tribal leaders and conventional political parties. BLA’s core funders require it to continue intensifying its tactics and a zero-sum approach to continue receiving their support. Compared to the scruffy-looking and poorly armed Baloch militants of the 1970s, BLA fighters have proper uniforms, and sophisticated military gear and weapons. Provided by whom?

According to the political scientist Seema Khan, India has become a major financier of BLA. In her 2024 book Balochistan and the Mélange of Violence, she wrote, “India arms, funds, trains and shelters Baloch separatists.” It wants to keep the Balochistan cauldron alive to hamper Chinese projects there. 

BLA has used to its advantage regional tensions between Pakistan and China on the one side, and India, Iran and Afghanistan on the other. However, this may come at a cost because, as a new civil war in Afghanistan is becoming an increasing possibility, BLA — which has its bases in Afghanistan — will be expected to fight on the side of the ‘pro-India’ Taliban faction in Kabul against the disgruntled ‘pro-Pakistan’ Taliban faction (Haqqani Group). 

According to the political analyst Najam Sethi, such a civil war is likely to pitch an alliance of pro-India Taliban, Iran-backed militants, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and BLA against Sirajuddin Haqqani’s Taliban and non-Pakhtun militias backed by Pakistan and Central Asian countries. If this does happen, BLA could become scattered and, perhaps, the conflict’s first casualty.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 23rd, 2025