Pakistan- the Balochistan Conundrum

by Tilak Devasher

  The next section (II) studies the historical development of Balochistan, especially during the British rule and the partition of the subcontinent. This is of critical importance since the root cause of Baloch alienation is the questionable legitimacy of the accession of the Baloch state of Kalat to Pakistan. Most Baloch believe that the Khan of Kalat was not only forced to sign the Instrument of Accession but that it was an illegal accession. The two Houses of the Baloch legislature had been empowered to decide the issue of accession and the Khan could not have done so on his own. There is also an element of ‘stab in the back’ since it was Jinnah who, as the Khan’s lawyer, had argued the case for Kalat’s independence with the British. Once the British left and after he became Governor-General of Pakistan, Jinnah forced the accession of Kalat to Pakistan, betraying the trust reposed in him.

  Section III focuses on the roots of Baloch alienation with special emphasis on the political and administrative marginalization, economic exploitation of the resources of Balochistan over the decades and the consequent deprivation of the people. Citing statistics, this section compares Balochistan with the other provinces of Pakistan to understand why the alienation among the Baloch is so deep-rooted and persistent. In fact, the socio-economic indicators of Balochistan are alarming. It is a province that suffers from an acute water shortage; 70 per cent of the people live in poverty; about 1.8 million children are out of school and more than 5,000 public schools consist of a single room; the maternal death rate stands at 758 out of every 100,000; and almost 15 per cent of the people of Balochistan suffer from Hepatitis B or C. Add to this, poor governance, massive corruption, nepotism, mismanagement of resources and unemployment, and the potent, dangerous mix can well be imagined.

  The next section discusses in detail the development of the Gwadar port and the CPEC that has been billed as a game-changer for Pakistan. Will it be a game-changer for Balochistan too? If so, why are the Baloch so opposed to it? The Baloch cite the fact that natural gas was discovered at Sui in Balochistan in the 1950s, yet major parts of the province are still deprived of its benefits. Not surprisingly, there is the cynical belief that the province will not get its fair share of the benefits of the development of the Gwadar port or of the economic corridor.

  Section V looks at the serious human rights violations in Balochistan, especially by the state in trying to deal with the insurgency. Kept under wraps for long, the true situation of the human rights violations is gradually beginning to see the light of day. An important element of such violations is the crackdown on the media to keep a lid on the happenings in Balochistan and to ensure that only the state’s narrative prevails.

  The last section looks at the current insurgency in Balochistan with focus on the separatist challenge that Pakistan faces and the response by the Pakistani state, especially the army, to this challenge. This would include the various stratagems adopted by the state to thwart the insurgency and whether and to what extent they have been successful.

  Finally, the conclusion will touch upon what the future holds for Balochistan and Pakistan. Is the situation irretrievable? How plausible is Balochistan breaking away from Pakistan, a la Bangladesh?

  Pakistan’s conundrum is that Balochistan is too large and too strategically important a province to loosen its grip. Yet, the policies adopted for the last seven decades have done everything to keep the province alienated rather than bring it into the mainstream.

  Will the next seven decades be any different?

  I

  AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION

  1

  The Land

  BALOCHISTAN IS AN ANCIENT LAND with the history of its people shrouded in mystery and debate. Its geographical location had given it a distinct position as a bridge between the Indian and the Mesopotamian civilizations. Archaeological discoveries at Mehergarh in Balochistan make it among the earliest civilizations in the world; the Kech civilization in central Makran dates back to 4000 bc, the buried city near Zahidan, the provincial capital in western Balochistan, now in Iran, dates back to 3000 bc.1 According to the Imperial Gazetteer: ‘All tradition asserts that the former rulers of Kalat were Hindus, Sewa by name. It is not improbable that they were connected with the Rai dynasty of Sindh, whose genealogical table includes two rulers named Shiras.2 Kalat was, in fact, once called Kalat-e-Sewa (Sewa’s Fort), after Sewa, a legendary Hindu hero of the Brahvi-speaking people.

  Arguably, the earliest account of Balochistan was written by Lucius Flavius Arrianus (Arrian) whose Anabasis of Alexander described Alexander’s campaigns and his epic march through the deserts of Balochistan and the Makran coast on his way back to Greece. During the retreat in 325 bc, he was greatly harried by the Baloch. His biographer wrote, ‘I had never seen the Great Alexander so sad and dejected—filled with sorrow and uncertainty.… The outcome [of fighting with the Baloch] was disastrous for Alexander’s army and against himself.’ Alexander, in fact, had almost perished during the campaign that took the lives of almost three quarters of his army. Historians claim that Alexander had not experienced anything as terrible in his travels before and had come the nearest to defeat in Balochistan’s almost impenetrable deserts and rugged terrain.3 It is here that a soldier brought Alexander a helmet filled with water when there was none for miles. Instead of quenching his thirst, he spilled the water on the burning sands to assure his soldiers that he would not drink if they could not.4

  According to the Imperial Gazetteer: ‘When the site of the present arsenal at Quetta was being prepared, a statuette of Hercules was discovered. Mounds opened at Nal and Mamatawa in the Jhalawan country have yielded interesting finds of pottery. That found at the former place possesses striking resemblances to pottery of the eighth century bc found in Cyprus and Phoenicia and of Mycenaean technique. At Chhalgari in Kachhi are indications of interesting Buddhist remains. Such finds of coins as have been made from time to time render it clear that all sorts of traders, from ancient times to the present, have left traces of themselves along the routes leading from Persia to India.’5

  Greek historian Herodotus had divided Balochistan into three distinct parts—Aracosia: Kandhar and Quetta region; Drangiana: Helmand, Sistan and Chagai; and Gedrosia: Makran coast.6

  Centuries later, the Baloch fought and harried the British during the Raj. Rudyard Kipling wrote here. Prior to the partition of India, the distinguished faculty members and graduates of the Staff College in Quetta included Field Marshals Bernard Law Montgomery, Sir Claude Auckinleck, Lord Slim of Burma, S.H.F.J. Manekshaw, K.M. Kariappa and Muhammad Ayub Khan, and Generals Lord Ismay and Sir Douglas Gracey.7

  Located on the south-eastern Iranian plateau, with an approximately 600,000 sq. km area, rich in diversity, Balochistan is larger in size than France (551,500 sq. km).8 In terms of geography, it has more in common with the Iranian plateau than with the Indian subcontinent. Edward Wakefield, a British political officer who travelled in Balochistan, made the following observations about the climate and geography of Balochistan: ‘From our carriage windows … I looked out on a new world, a world that had nothing in common with the India we had known before. Here were rugged, barren, sun-browned mountains, cleft by deep ravines and gorges. Forbidding of aspect in the full light of day, the hills were now, in the first light of dawn, clothed with a gentle effulgence that made them seem welcoming and friendly. The air, too, was different from that of India, but of the Central Asian plateau. Simply to breathe such air in such surroundings was exhilarating.’9

  In 1946, M.A. Jinnah, the legal advisor of the Khan of Kalat, submitted a Memorandum to the Cabinet Mission that, inter alia, demanded the separation of Balochistan from British India on geographical grounds: ‘Geographically, Kalat does not fall within the territorial limits of India. On the north, it is separated from India by the massive barrier of the southern buttresses of the Sulaiman Mountains. On the south, there is the long extension from Kalat of the inconceivably wild highland country, which faces the desert of Sindh, the foot of which forms the India
n frontier. This, the land of the Baluch, and the flat wall of its frontier limestone barrier is one of the most remarkable features in the configuration of the whole line of the Indian borderlands.’10

  However, as has been well put: ‘The force of historical experience has defied the logic of geography, and the political history of the area has been linked with powers that were centred in the Indo-Gangetic plains of the Indian subcontinent.’11

  Balochistan is divided into four major physical areas: the Upper Highlands, the Lower Highlands, the Plains and the Deserts. The Upper Highlands, known as Khorasan, rise as high as 3,700 metres (m), with valley floors about 1,500 m above sea level. The Upper Highlands fall mainly in districts Zhob, Qila Saifullah, Pishin, Quetta, Ziarat and Kalat. It comprises a number of ranges such as Sulaiman, Tobak Kakari, Murdar, Zarghoon, Takatu and Chiltan ranges. The Lower Highlands are bracketed by three mountain ranges: the Mekran, Kharan, and Chaghi. They have an altitude ranging from 600 m to 1,200 m (1,970 ft to 3,940 ft). They are located in south-eastern Balochistan. There is a relatively small area of Plains as compared to Balochistan’s total land area. These are the Plains of Kachi, Lasbela and that of river Dasht. The Kachi plains, situated to the south of Sibi extend into Nasirabad division. Then there is the southern part of Dera Bugti district, and narrow plain area along the Makran coast stretching from Kachi to the Iranian border. The Deserts make up the north-west portion of the region mostly in Kharan and Chaghi districts. They are marked by their unique mixture of sand and black gravel.12

  Sir Thomas Holdich, the British geographer and traveller, described Balochistan as a ‘brazen coast, washed by a molten sea’. The Imperial Gazetteer gives a succinct summary: ‘Rugged, barren, sunburnt mountains, rent by huge chasms and gorges, alternate with arid deserts and stony plains.… This is redeemed in places by level valleys of considerable size, in which irrigation enables much cultivation to be carried on.’13

  The distinguishing feature of the white clay mountains of the Makran coast is that, instead of stone, they are made up of limestone or conglomerate and look like a wall. In the words of Holdich, these mountains appear: ‘Gigantic cap-crowned pillars and pedestals [that] are balanced in fantastic array … successive strata so well-defined that it possesses all the appearance of massive masonry construction … standing stiff, jagged, naked and uncompromising, like the parallel walls of some gigantic system of defences and varying in height above the plain from 5,000 feet to 50 feet’.14

  More recently, in 2009, Robert Kaplan wrote:

  To travel the Makran coast is to experience the windy, liberating flatness of Yemen and Oman and their soaring, saw tooth ramparts the color of sandpaper, rising sheer off a desert floor pockmarked with thorn-bushes. Here, along a coast so empty that you can almost hear the echoing camel hooves of Alexander’s army, you lose yourself in geology. An exploding sea bangs against a knife-carved apricot moonscape of high sand dunes, which, in turn, gives way to crumbly badlands. Farther inland, every sandstone and limestone escarpment is the color of bone. Winds and seismic and tectonic disruptions have left their mark in tortuous folds and uplifts, deep gashes, and conical incrustations that hark back far before the age of human folly.15

  Ecological factors have contributed to the division of agricultural centres and pasture lands. This, in turn, has impacted the development of the tribal economy and institutions. Describing the Baloch economy in the early 1980s, Selig Harrison wrote: ‘Instead of relying solely on either nomadic pastoralism or on settled agriculture, most Baloch practise a mixture of the two in order to survive.’16 This is also borne out by a Brahvi saying: ‘God is God, but a sheep is a different thing.’17

  Balochistan has two raised plains or plateaus. One is in Kalat and the other is the Quetta Valley. Kalat is a quadrangular plateau, measuring about 480 km (300 miles) by 480 km (300 miles) where the ancient capital city of Kalat is situated at a height of over 1,800 m (6,000 ft). Kalat straddles the mountain area of Sarawan in the north and the searing desert of Jhalawan to the south. Quetta lies at a height of 1,675 m (5,500 ft). Originally, it was called Shal. The British made it the capital of the province on 21 February 1877.

  Makran is unlike the rest of Balochistan. Nearly 95 per cent of its population is concentrated on less than 5 per cent of the land in contrast to the isolated tribal pockets in the rest of Balochistan. Its main port is Gwadar. It was at one time owned by Oman having been gifted by the then Khan of Kalat in the eighteenth century. Gwadar was sold back to Pakistan for about $3 million in 1958. ‘The sales agreement gave the sultan recruiting rights, and large numbers of Makranis serve in Oman’s Army and Navy’, writes Mary Anne Weaver. According to her, residents of Gwadar retain dual nationality with Oman and every year a large number of Makranis go and work in the Gulf.18

  Balochistan has been described as ‘a brooding and melancholy place’,19 arid, rugged and harsh. A British explorer wrote thus in the nineteenth century of the desolation of Balochistan:

  The coast-line of Baluchistan is six hundred miles long. On it there is one tree, a sickly, stunted-looking thing, near the telegraph station of Gwadar, which serves as a landmark to native craft and a standing joke to the English sailor. Planted some years since by a European, it has lived doggedly on, to the surprise of all, in this arid soil. The Tree of Baluchistan is as well known to the mariner in the Persian Gulf as Regent Circus or the Marble Arch to the London cabman. With this solitary exception, not a trace of vegetation exists along the sea-board from Persian to Indian frontier. Occasionally, at long intervals, a mud hut is seen, just showing that the country is inhabited, and that is all. The steep, rocky cliffs, with their sharp, spire-like summits rising almost perpendicularly out of the blue sea, are typical of the desert wastes inland.20

  As is to be expected, such a vast area has extraordinary climatic variations. In the northern and interior highlands, the temperature often drops to 40 degrees Fahrenheit in winter, though the summer is temperate. In contrast, temperatures soar between 100 and 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer in the coastal region though the winter is more favourable. Balochistan does not normally receive more than 5 to 12 inches of rain per annum despite being in the direction of the south-west monsoon.21 This is due to the low altitude of the Makran ranges. The infrequent rains occur mostly in winter though in the Lower Highlands and in areas closer to the Arabian Sea, rain falls in summer. As a result, only about 7 per cent of the area is arable.

  In 1839, another British officer, John Jacob, serving with General Keane’s forces marching to Afghanistan, wrote of the climate in these words:

  From April to October the heat in this part of the world is more deadly than the sword of a human enemy and scarcely an escort at this time marched through the country without losing many men for this cause alone … the place is remarkable for its dust storms of almost incredible violence and density. They occur frequently at all seasons of the year, sometimes changing the light of midday to an intensity of darkness to which no ordinary night ever approaches, and this darkness in severe storms lasts occasionally for one, two or more hours. These dust storms on both sides of the desert are sometimes accompanied by blasts of the simoon, a poisonous wind which is equally destructive to vegetables and animal life.22

  A Baloch proverb describes the heat of the plains in summer: ‘O God, when thou hadst created Sibi and Dadhar, what object was there in conceiving hell?’23

  The harshness of nature probably explains why, although many of the great civilizations—Greek, Arab, Hindu, Turkish, Persian—have sent conquerors through the area, there are few surviving traces of their passage.24 Neither of them succeeded to assimilate Balochistan into their empires.

  A relatively recent phenomenon of concern is a surge in the sea level. Reports indicate that the sea is intruding inland and encroaching upon properties and farmland. Over the last few decades, millions of hectares of land have been lost due to this phenomenon. The most affected areas along the Makran coast include Dam Bander, Pasni, Sub Ba
nder, Pashukan and Jiwani. The coastal erosion has been exacerbated by the destuction of mangrove forests, already under pressure from the fuel wood and timber mafia, in Balochistan. From 1990 to 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Global Forest Resources Assessment 2015 report discovered, Pakistan experienced its highest rates of deforestation at 2.1 per cent on an average, which also includes the felling of mangrove forests.25

  The Baloch culture owes much to the geography of the country: its rugged mountains and arid expanses of semi-desert wasteland has expectedly bred a distinct and self-reliant people who are used to hardship. Equally, their tribal structure and social mores replicate the harsh environment in which they live. As has been well put, ‘The specificity of Balochistan geography and geopolitics has affected and shaped the character of the Baloch, their vision of the world and the way they have continued to reproduce and reinterpret their cultural elements and traditions.’26 One example of the toughness of the people is described by Sylvia Matheson thus: ‘Only an exceptionally hardy people could have campaigned as the Bugtis did at that time, marching as much as sixty miles without a halt, raiding a camp or a military post, then retreating all through the intense heat of the day, the entire time without water or rest.’27

  It is this inhospitable terrain and climatic conditions that have been the greatest assets of the Baloch against invading armies despite being numerically smaller and has protected them from most outside influences. However, these same geographical conditions made communication difficult and led to isolation and divided the Baloch among themselves into competing tribes.28 It also prevented the growth of a centralized government at Kalat that could control the vast areas over a sustained period of time. It was largely due to this lack of communications that the Khan of Kalat was unable to rally the Baloch tribes against the British in 1839.29