Baloch imbroglio
IT’S always troubling when relatively peaceful protests incur a violent response from governments that claim to be combating terrorism.
Back in the early 2000s, the Musharraf regime, in its futile quest to be considered a worthy partner in the so-called war on terror, adopted a strategy whereby it began to demolish houses where a member of the household was suspected of collaborating with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. As an inevitable consequence, more people flocked to the very forces that the Pakistani state sought to obliterate.
More recently, actions against the leadership of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), alongside the attitude towards the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement and its leading cadres, who spent more time in prison than in parliament, follow a similar trajectory. Meanwhile, the forces that PTM leaders Manzoor Pashteen, Ali Wazir and Mohsin Dawar have opposed continue to wreak havoc.
Last weekend, the same attitude was deployed towards doctors Mahrang and Sabiha Baloch, and around 150 of their BYC colleagues. They were taken into custody, and have been charged with a range of offences stretching from terrorism and incitement to rebellion and murder. This attitude might seem familiar to officials in other nations that tend to counter fissiparous tendencies by stepping up repression — which inevitably reinforces multifarious forms of resistance. Atrocities against peaceful resistance are an obvious recipe for heightened violence.
It might seem simplistic to claim that cracking down on organisations such as the BYC is a boon for the likes of the banned Baloch Liberation Army, whose atrocious train-jacking earlier this month has officially been attributed to Indian and Afghan influence or interference. That claim might not be entirely absurd, but the long-term relegation of Balochistan to a stepchild status can hardly be blamed on New Delhi or Kabul.
The province that occupies nearly half of Pakistan’s terrain wasn’t an eager accessory to the outcome of the two-nation theory in 1947, and has remained a partially unhappy component since it was compelled to accept accession in 1948. Equality with other provinces, however, has never convincingly been on the agenda.
The state’s follies match those of its adversaries.
Balochistan over the centuries was never an easy territory to control, as would-be colonisers from the Greeks and Persians to the British recognised sooner or later. Religion was never likely to serve as a sufficient glue — as made clear by the independence of Bangladesh, facilitated 54 years ago today by the launch of Operation Searchlight. Deploying a similar strategy just a couple of years later, helmed by the same general, in what was territorially the largest province in the rump nation, was arguably the nastiest folly of the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto regime, undermining its status as Pakistan’s first democratically elected government.
The hopeful interregnum in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (then known as NWFP) lasted less than a year, and the Baloch leaders of the National Awami Party as well as key Pakhtun components subsequently ended up in prison. Trumped-up charges of treason were the norm.
As a teenager, I had the pleasure of being acquainted with the briefly empowered Baloch leaders who stayed over at my parents’ home during rare visits to Lahore. There was one occasion when I was completing my homework at the dining table while ZAB’s interior minister, Qayyum Khan — the architect of the Babrra massacre of Ghaffar Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgars in 1948 — was spouting off on PTV. What’s he saying, Ghous Bakhsh Bizenjo or Ataullah Mengal asked me, as they returned at night from some function. He’s cursing you, I accurately responded. They smiled and retreated to their bedrooms. Mir Bizenjo’s snores soon shook the house.
But my favourite memory of him is when, confronted with a steak at dinner, he demanded a chapati from our Bengali cook (a refugee from the Inter-Continental, who was primarily a baker and delighted me with his delicious desserts before he was helped to return to his homeland), who was simultaneously amused and appalled by the request.
I last encountered Ataullah Mengal in London in 1982 — again as a guest of my parents — soon after a visit to the Pakistan embassy, where the so-called information minister had been mouthing off against the former chief minister to a Pakistani media outlet as I awaited his attention.
I wasn’t particularly impressed by his son Akhtar Mengal, either during his tenure as chief minister or by his appearance this Monday on Shehzad Ghias’ The Pakistan Experience podcast. The inability to rescue Balochistan from its history, geography and political relegation resides not in the hard state we are all familiar with, but in a reciprocal compromise that neither terrorist actions nor a terrorising response can facilitate.
Published in Dawn, March 26th, 2025