PAKISTAN
THE BALOCHISTAN
CONUNDRUM
TILAK DEVASHER
To
THE BALOCH
Who deserve better
Mujhe jang-e-azaadi ka maza maloom hai,
Balochon per zulm ki intheha maloom hai,
Mujhe zindagi bhar Pakistan mein jeenay ki dua na do,
Mujhe Pakistan me in saath saal jeenay ki saza maloom hai.
—Habib Jalib
(Rough translation)
I know the pleasure of the war of independence;
I know the heights of oppression inflicted on the Baloch;
Don’t pray that I should live my entire life in Pakistan;
I know the punishment of living in Pakistan for sixty years.
Contents
Balochistan at a Glance
List of maps and tables
Preface
Introduction
I: AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION
1. The Land
2. The People
3. Religion
4. Language
II: TIMES GONE BY
5. History till Partition
6. Accession to Pakistan
7. Post-Accesssion Insurgencies
III: THE ROOTS OF ALIENATION
8. Political and Administrative Marginalization
9. Economic Exploitation
10. Socio-Economic Deprivation
IV: CHINESE GAMBIT
11. Gwadar
12. The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor
V: RELENTLESS PERSECUTION
13. Human Rights Violations
14. The Judiciary
15. The Media
VI: ENDURING INSURRECTION
16. The Separatist Challenge
17. The Response of the Government
18. The Response of the Army
Conclusion
Notes
Index
About the Book
About the Author
Praise for Pakistan: At the Helm
Copyright
Balochistan at a Glance
Overview:
The largest province of Pakistan created in July 1970.
Area:
3,47,190 sq. km; 44 per cent of land area of Pakistan.
Population:
Pakistan 2017: 207.685 million; 1998: 132.352 million. Growth: 2.4 per cent.
Balochistan 2017: 12.335 million; 1998: 6.567 million. Growth: 3.37 per cent.
Overall, 5.94 per cent of Pakistan’s population in 2017 as compared to 4.96 per cent in 1998.
Male: 6.4 million; Female: 5.8 million.
Population Density: 19 per sq. km
Literacy Rate: Pakistan: 58.92 per cent; Balochistan: 43.58 per cent
The Division-wise area/population1:
Division Area
(sq. km) Population (1998) Districts
Quetta 64,310 1,699,957 Quetta, Pishin, Qila Abdullah, Chagai, Nushki.
Zhob 46,200 1,003,851 Zhob, Musakhail, Qila Saifullah, Loralai, Barkhan, Sherani.
Kalat 140,612 1,457,722 Kalat, Mastung, Khuzdar, Kharan, Washuk, Awaran, Lasbela.
Sibi 270,55 4,94,894 Sibi, Ziarat, Dera Bugti, Kohlu, Harnai
Nasirabad 16,946 1,076,708 Nasirabad, Jaffarabad, Jhal Magsi Kachi.
Makran 52,067 832,753 Kech, Panjgur, Gwadar
Social Indicators2
Indicators Balochistan Pakistan
Female Literacy 15% 33%
Primary School Enrolment 49% 68.3%
Female Participation 21% 49.2%
Access to Sanitation 7% 18%
Infant Mortality Rate
(per 000’LB)
108 100
Village Electrification 25% 75%
Access to Safe Drinking
Water
20% 86%
List of maps and tables
Maps
Districts of Balochistan page xiv
Physical map of Balochistan page 7
Balochistan under the British page 13
Ethnic groups in Balochistan page 33
The Khanate of Kalat, pre-British period page 63
Areas of Balochistan ceded to Afghanistan and Iran page 70
China–Pakistan Economic Corridor page 178
Tables
The division-wise area/population page xii
Social indicators page xii
Population by mother tongue page 50
Language distribution, district-wise pages 50–51
Literacy rates in Pakistan (2008–11) page 115
Rate of growth of Gross Regional Product by province page 125
Human Development Index, district-wise page 144
Districts with lowest HDI value page 145
Districts with highest HDI value page 146
Estimated HDI for Balochistan districts page 147
Trends in regional disparity page 152
Security-force-personnel fatalities (2011–19) page 251
Preface
WHILE RESEARCHING FOR MY FIRST book, Pakistan: Courting the Abyss, I came across two laments about Balochistan that moved me deeply. The first was the anguished cry of a father at the ‘enforced disappearance’, i.e., extra-judicial abduction, of his son:
I am tired of speaking, of crying, of telling our story again and again. If only suicide was not prohibited by religion, I would have killed myself. The court has been hearing our case for years but my son is still not with me.1
The second was the lament of a young student:
What concerns me most is a word. It is a simple word that is not heard on the lips of people in most parts of the world, but for me it is a word that desperately needs to be heard more often. Whenever I do hear this word, or say it myself, it stirs emotions that I cannot explain. I cannot do justice to the memories they evoke.
That word is Balochistan.
We pleaded and knocked on every door there is in the name of justice. Yet, no one heard us. What have we received from the people of Pakistan except neglect and torment?2
The pain and pathos in these two laments motivated me to study Balochistan in all its dimensions and to try and lift the veil of secrecy that Pakistan has imposed on the province. The result is this book.
Balochistan is a complex province with two main ethnic groups—the Baloch and Pashtuns. The book is focused on the Baloch and touches on the Pashtuns only in passing.
The words ‘Baloch’ and ‘Balochistan’ have been spelt in several ways over the years—Baloch, Baluch, Belooch, Biloch, etc. In this book, the words used are ‘Baloch’ and ‘Balochistan’ after the 1990 provincial government decree that the official English spelling was to be ‘Baloch’. The plural of Baloch is also Baloch. The language is spelled as Balochi.
A word about statistics. Unfortunately, no two sets of statistics on the same issue match. Hence, I have tried to use the best available and, at places, have also given variations to enable the reader to make an informed judgement.
At the time of writing, the detailed results of the 2017 census have not been published. Hence, where available, the provisional census figures have been used. In other cases, figures from the 1998 census have been used.
I would like to thank the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) for commissioning this book. My special thanks to Ambassador Nalin Suri, the former Director General of ICWA, for encouraging and supporting me in the writing of the book.
My thanks to my wife and children for being pillars of strength in all my writing endeavours. My thanks also to my editors Udayan Mitra and Antony Thomas at HarperCollins India for all their effort in bringing out this book.
Despite the support, all the shortcomings and errors
in this book are mine.
Introduction
Life is still in the grip of chilling poverty and deprivation. The first crescent is yet to be visible and children are yet to learn to pick flowers. Flowers may lose fragrance but at least not lose petals.
Balochistan is distinct from rest of Pakistan not only geographically but also in its sufferings and the treatment meted out to it …
No one wants to be aware of suffocation of people in Balochistan …
This is the fateful hour for Balochistan …
The discontent due to hatred and alienation and lack of voice in own affairs nurtured miseries and expropriation. Mistrust and hatred spreads and grows in evil soil of poverty and strife. These reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life is dead. The hope should be kept alive. Investment is needed for happiness and living of people struggling against overwhelming odds since long.
No remorse can mend a heart deprived of love. The truth exists, and ultimately comes out.
THE ABOVE WORDS ARE NOT written by a Baloch separatist or a journalist sympathetic to Baloch national aspirations or even by a human rights activist recounting the tragedy that Balochistan faces due to the suppression of its people by the Pakistani state. These words, surprisingly, are part of the Executive Summary of the White Paper for the Budget 2015-16 prepared by the Finance Department of the Government of Balochistan.1
These words poignantly encapsulate the tragedy of Balochistan and articulate Pakistan’s enduring Balochistan conundrum. The fact that the provincial government of Balochistan (2013–18), in which the then ruling party at the federal level—the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)—was a coalition partner, was moved to express such sentiments in the budget documents shows how widespread the disaffection with Pakistan is in Balochistan.
Balochistan presents a mosaic of conflicts and fault lines with multiple layers of violence. These range from those between the Baloch nationalists and the state; inter- and intra-tribal feuds and clashes to ethnic divisions, sectarian clashes and terror strikes. During the last decade, the most ominous development has been the sickening frequency with which people have gone missing and how their tortured bodies have started turning up after some time. This is proof that the constitutional right to life and freedom from arbitrary detention are violated with impunity. These multiple conflicts have facilitated criminal elements and groups to mushroom in the province.
As a result, kidnapping for ransom has become part of the prevalent terror. Add to this the smuggling of drugs and weapons from Afghanistan—via the porous border and through the coastal region of Balochistan—as well as human trafficking,2 and the complex nature of the province can well be understood. Not surprisingly, Balochistan, even seventy years after the creation of Pakistan, has been described as ‘an edgy place’,3 ‘a boiling cauldron of ethnic, sectarian, secessionist and militant violence, threatening to boil over at any time.’4 The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) likened the situation in the province to ‘an active volcano that may erupt anytime with dire consequences. The situation is alarming and worsening by the day.’5
The moot question is, why is Balochistan a lingering problem, a festering sore for Pakistan? The short answer is that, of the various conflicts, the most enduring and bitter one has been between the Baloch nationalists and the state, which has been continuing in some form or the other ever since the forced accession of the princely state of Kalat (as most of Balochistan was then called) to Pakistan in 1948. The Pakistan state has accentuated the conflict by treating the province as a colony, to be used to extract its resources without ploughing much back to improve the living conditions of the local people.
In its essentials, this conflict is between two mutually opposing narratives: that of the Pakistan state and that of the Baloch nationalists.
The state narrative has its roots in the movement that led to the creation of Pakistan. Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s (henceforth Jinnah) argument for Pakistan was built on the ideological edifice of Islam providing the glue for a nation. In his presidential address to the open session of the Muslim League in Lahore on 22 March 1940, Jinnah said: ‘The Mussalmans are not a minority. The Mussalmans are a nation by any definition ... and they must have their homelands, their territory, and their state.’6
Such an argument, however, was contrary to what Islam preached, as had been pointed out by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a senior leader of the Congress party, in an interview: ‘It [Pakistan] is being demanded in the name of Islam.… Division of territories on the basis of religion is a contraption devised by Muslim League. They can pursue it as their political agenda, but it finds no sanction in Islam or Quran.… Strictly speaking, Muslims in India are not one community; they are divided among many well-entrenched sects. You can unite them by arousing their anti-Hindu sentiment but you cannot unite them in the name of Islam. To them Islam means undiluted loyalty to their own sect.’7 Not surprisingly, Islamic scholars like Maulana Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), opposed the creation of Pakistan since it was claimed in the name of Islam.
In the Muslim majority provinces of the north-west and east of India, Islam was not the salient identity. Hence, Jinnah’s vision that Islam would provide the glue for the divergent nationalities that came to constitute Pakistan came a cropper. Here, with the population being overwhelmingly Muslim, Islam was never in danger. Such a slogan made political sense in the Muslim minority provinces like the United Provinces (UP) and the Central Provinces (CP) where there was resentment among the Muslim elite at having lost power to the British, and the fear of being swamped by the numerically larger Hindu population under a representative government. Islam had become the salient identity for the minority population in these provinces. By trying to transfer the fears of the Muslims in the minority provinces on to the Muslim majority provinces, where the Baloch (together with Bengali, Pashtun, Punjabi and Sindhi) ethnic identity was the salient one, Pakistan started on shaky foundations.
Additionally, during the Pakistan Movement, Jinnah had argued strongly for a weak Centre and strong provinces. His break with Jawaharlal Nehru was precisely on this point, since the Indian National Congress under the leadership Nehru wanted a strong Centre. In fact, greater autonomy for the provinces was part of Jinnah’s famous fourteen-point demands of 1929. This, however, was a tactic to ensure the support of the Muslim majority provinces where the Muslim League was weak or non-existent. After Pakistan was created, Jinnah changed tracks overnight and ensured that Pakistan became a unitary state even though the 23 March 1940 Lahore Resolution had originally talked of ‘constituent units’ that would be ‘autonomous and sovereign’. Thus, the Baloch, together with the Sindhis and Pashtuns, were not allowed autonomy or delegated the powers to govern themselves—a promise that Jinnah had made in the run up to the creation of Pakistan.
Just as Jinnah dismissed provincial autonomy after Pakistan was created, so too did his successors, civilian and military. Since 1947, the effort of every government, especially of the military, has been to trample on provincial rights and autonomy and to impose the Central government’s authority in Pakistan in the quest of creating a ‘strong and unified’ Pakistan. It has been argued that the highly centralized state of Pakistan and its unwillingness to allow regional autonomy has been one of the key factors that led to the nationalist forces repeatedly launching a guerrilla war against the state.8 Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, for example, said that he would ‘ideally like to break up the existing provinces and replace them with fifty-three smaller provinces, erasing ethnic identities from the map of Pakistan altogether.’9
Instead of understanding the real reasons for the secession of East Pakistan to form Bangladesh in 1971, the catastrophe reinforced the feeling that provincialism and provincial autonomy would lead to further dismemberment of the state. Hence, any form of provincial rights or nationalist movements was anathema and the military was used to crush such movements. As history shows, identity issues, problems of nati
onalism and ethic aspirations are rarely resolved with military force alone. In 1974, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto held that regionalism or provincialism, connoting the pre-eminence of narrow, parochial loyalties, vis-à-vis the nation-state of Pakistan, would lead to catastrophe.10 In 1977, President Zia expressed similar sentiments when he met the Baloch leaders in jail. During the meeting, Zia told them that ‘we are all Muslims, and we should not say that we are Baloch or Pashtuns’. The Baloch leader Mir Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo replied that ‘we are Baloch and Pashtuns and we will never make a viable Pakistan except on that foundation’.11
The efforts to create a centralized state included policies like ‘One Unit’, ‘Basic Democracies’, merging the Pashtun areas (the old British Balochistan plus some Baloch areas) into Balochistan in 1970, etc. Implemented in 1955, the ‘One Unit’, for example, created a single provincial entity that subsumed all the provinces of West Pakistan as a counter to East Pakistan, which was numerically superior to other Pakistani provinces.
While One Unit failed to establish a Pakistani identity amongst its disparate minorities; it had the effect of further alienating the smaller ethnic groups. In reality, the efforts at creating a centralized state have had the opposite effect of heightening alienation among Baloch nationalists and fuelling the national movement. As Selig Harrison, an authority on Baloch nationalism, notes: ‘Dominated by Punjabi military and bureaucratic elites, a succession of authoritarian Pakistani regimes has identified their interests with the preservation of a unitary state and have thus resisted pressures for democratic government that have been linked, inseparably, with demands for provincial self-rule.’12 In the process, Pakistan lost East Pakistan that became Bangladesh. In Balochistan, Bhutto dismissed the government of Sardar Attaullah Mengal in 1973 precisely because it was articulating provincial rights. Thus, the Baloch demand for provincial rights was consistently denied by the state of Pakistan.
Two reasons account for the failure to forge a common national identity using Islam and centralization. One, none of the provinces that became West Pakistan were in the forefront of the Pakistan Movement and neither did the Muslim League have a significant presence here. In fact, there was no Muslim League presence in the Baloch areas and no Baloch attended the 1940 Lahore session of the Muslim league.13 Two, centralization could not replace the centuries-old ethno-nationalism of the people of the various provinces of Pakistan. All the provinces had separate histories, cultures, languages, etc. Islam in the area was a common bond but given the overwhelming majority of Muslims, it was not the only important identity. Not surprisingly, the creation of a state based primarily on an Islamic identity led to a host of issues, especially when faced with a people like the Baloch whose tribal traditions were of a more secular nature. As Abdul Hayee Baloch, a Baloch political leader, put it: ‘The establishment has never accepted the fact that Pakistan is a multi-nation country. Pakistan came into existence in 1947, but Balochs, Pathans, Sindhis, Punjabis and Seraikis have been here for centuries. They have their own cultures and languages.’14
Pakistan- the Balochistan Conundrum Page 1
