Pakistan- the Balochistan Conundrum

by Tilak Devasher

  Hence, in Balochistan’s case, numerical equality of constituencies has resulted in marginalization and exclusion. In the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) constituencies, the state had legally allowed the population to be half that of the national average to compensate for ‘the representation deficit’. No such provision was ever made for Balochistan. Clearly, the electoral delimitation is not geared towards mainstreaming the Baloch. On the contrary, it would only strengthen the Baloch narrative of deprivation and increase their alienation.6

  Bureaucratic Under-representation

  In the bureaucracy, according to a study, of the 830 civil service posts in Balochistan, ethnic Baloch held only 181 in 1979. There was just one Baloch each holding the rank of secretary, director and deputy commissioner. As regards the police, all the high officials were non-Baloch and so were three-quarters of the police force. The status in judicial services was not very different.7 During the beginning of the Bhutto period, it was estimated that out of approximately 40,000 civil employees in Balochistan, only about 2,000 were Baloch and most of them held inferior jobs.8

  To correct the age-old imbalance in representation of the Baloch and to create in them a sense of participation in governance, the Zia-ul-Haq regime promised in 1980 to make their representation in the federal bureaucracy commensurate with their 3.9 per cent share of Pakistan’s national population. Despite this, according to Baloch MP Abdul Rauf Mengal, as on March 2005, there were very few government servants from Balochistan in Islamabad and not a single Baloch in foreign missions abroad. According to a statement made by then Senator Hasil Bizenjo in the Senate on 29 April 2009, not even a single head of around sixty government organizations and institutions was from his province.9 The government and its organs, therefore, continued to be perceived as outsiders ruling over the Baloch

  Even today most officials working in senior positions in Balochistan, from chief secretary to inspector general of police as well as most of the government secretaries in Balochistan, come from Punjab or other provinces. The late Nawab Bugti used to often tell his visitors that if they visited the Balochistan secretariat and checked out the nameplates outside each office, they would find virtually no locals running provincial affairs. Moreover, in the central bureaucracy, despite the province-wise quota based on population, most of the positions have gone to non-Baloch under the ‘domicile clause’ of the quota system.10 Resultantly, thousands of people are occupying government jobs either on bogus and doctored identity documents showing them as Baloch or are receiving salaries without doing any work.11

  No less a person than the former chief minister of Balochistan Dr Abdul Malik told the senate standing committee on interprovincial coordination that lots of people were getting jobs in various federal departments and corporations on the Balochistan quota, on the basis of fake domicile certificates. This fake domicile certificate racket has been going on systematically and wilfully to deprive the Baloch people of progress on the economic ladder.12 Senator Jehanzeb Jamaldini repeated the charge when he said, ‘People of other provinces get domicile of Balochistan and get jobs on our quota. Officials of District Management Group (DMG), police and other departments, when temporarily posted in Balochistan, make Computerized National Identity Certificates (CNICs) and domiciles for their kids from the province and later get jobs on our quota.’13

  For example, it was revealed in May 2016 by arrested employees of National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) that corrupt officials had issued as many as 90,000 identity cards to foreigners in Qila Abdullah and other areas. The employees revealed that the officials had pocketed a bribe of somewhere between Rs 40,000 and Rs 100,000 per identity card.14

  The provincial government had sent the data of 295,457 employees to NADRA for verification. During the process, the CNICs of 249,000 government employees were confirmed while those of 45,000 could not be. They had either fake or wrong ID card numbers. The CNICs of 28,367 were found to be fake, CNICs of 1,600 employees were found blocked,15 271 employees held more than one CNIC and occupied two government jobs simultaneously. It also found that forty-one employees were below eighteen years of age when appointed and were, therefore, ineligible for the posts they currently occupied; another 624 were found to be foreigners. Likewise, when the data of 46,932 pensioners in the province was passed through the same verification process, the identity of 12,341 of them could also not be validated.16

  At the same time, the Senate Standing Committee on Cabinet Secretariat was informed that a large number of posts of Grade 18 and above were lying vacant in Balochistan for a long time. It was reported that officials were serving on only forty-two out of 103 posts of Grade 18, 19, 20 and 21 in the province. Only one appointment had been made out of five posts in Grade 21; five out of twenty-three in Grade 20; nineteen out of thirty-five in Grade 19; and seventeen out of forty posts were filled in Grade 18.17 As a result, the Balochistan government had resorted to desperate measures like trying to fill 20,000 out of 35,000 vacancies in different provincial departments in ninety days.18

  As per a recent study by noted economist Kaiser Bengali, there were fifty-three divisions in the federal administrative structure including eleven offices catering to the President House, Supreme Court and others. He noted that of the total employees in the basic pay-scales (BPS) of 1–22, only 4.1 per cent were from Balochistan—one percentage point less than its population share. The provinces share in the higher posts BPS 17–22 was even lower at 3.9 per cent. The province’s share in BPS 20–22 was a mere 2.1 per cent. According to him there were thirteen out of fifty-three divisions and offices, including the President’s Secretariat, where there were no Balochistan-domiciled personnel in BPS 1–4; there were no Balochistan-domiciled officers in BPS 20 in thirty-one out of fifty-three; there was no Balochistan-domiciled officer in BPS 21 in forty-nine out of fifty-three and there were forty-seven out of fifty-three where there were no Balochistan-domiciled officers in BPS 22. In other words, there were only thirty-two Balochistan-domiciled officers out of a total of 1,525 officers in BPS 20–22. His conclusion is stark: ‘The absence of Balochistan-domiciled officers in the top echelons of the civil service means that the province has little say in national level policymaking.’19

  In September 2017, members of the treasury and opposition benches joined hands to criticize the federal government for not addressing the issue of denial of jobs and the discrimination against local youths in the foreign office, planning commission and other autonomous organizations. One member pointed out that officers of the Central Superior Services (CSS) from other provinces were given several facilities and perks on their appointments and postings in Balochistan. These included promotions to the next grades, one extra salary and four return air tickets, etc. However, officers from Balochistan were denied all these facilities when they were posted to other provinces. Former chief minister Dr Abdul Malik Baloch revealed that 110 autonomous corporations were working in the country but there was no representation from Balochistan in these institutions. He accused Islamabad of ‘behaving like the East India Company’.20

  According to the data made available to the National Assembly, more than 3,000 posts reserved as per the 6 per cent quota for the province under the Aghaz-e-Haqooq-e-Balochistan package (details mentioned in a later chapter) for those domiciled in Balochistan were vacant in fifty federal government ministries and departments. Moreover, Balochistan’s quota for the top posts was close to non-existent as only six ministries had twelve posts allocated for the province in Grade 20, four had been sanctioned in Grade 21 while there was no quota for the province in Grade 22. Furthermore, no quota had been set aside for the province in Grades 20 to 22 in the rest of the twenty-four ministries. According to Mir Muhammad Yousaf Badini, a senator from Balochistan, the issue had been raised several times before the government and parliament but nobody took Balochistan seriously. Another senator from Balochistan, Daud Khan Achakzai, asked, ‘If the quota is not fulfilled, how will the sense of depriva
tion be diminished?’21 The disparity among provinces was also revealed when the Chief Justice of Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar while hearing suo motu cases at the Quetta Registry pointed out the province was paying its doctors Rs 24,000 a month whereas a driver of the Supreme Court was being paid Rs 35,000.22

  Under-representation in the Army

  In the armed forces, the number of Baloch has been extremely small. Historically, there was always resistance to recruitment from Balochistan into the British Indian Army. This finally resulted in 1929 in an armed uprising in the Baloch regiment, which since 1929 did not have any Baloch in it.23 Many years later, Baloch nationalists in Makran were to launch an agitation during the 1960s and 1970s against recruitment in the Oman Army.

  An academic study revealed that from the areas that became Pakistan, British recruitment was 77 per cent from Punjab, 19.5 per cent from NWFP, 2.2 per cent from Sindh and 0.6 per cent from Balochistan.24 In post-colonial Pakistan, the proportion did not change much. The ethnic group strength of Pakistan’s military officer corps in the 1970s was approximately estimated as 70 per cent Punjabi, 15 per cent Pashtun, 10 per cent Mohajir and 5 per cent Baloch and Sindhi.25 As regards higher military positions, it was maintained that until June 1959, out of twenty-four generals in the Pakistan Army, eleven were Punjabis and eleven Pathans.26 Even later, there were hardly any Baloch in the top echelons of the armed forces.

  According to former Baloch chief minister Attaullah Mengal, ‘There are only a few hundred Baloch in the entire Pakistan Army. The famous Baloch Regiment has no Baloch in it. The Kalat Scouts was a paramilitary force raised during the Ayub regime and had only two people from Kalat within its ranks. The same is the case with the Sibi Scouts created to police the Marri areas. It does not have a single Baloch in its ranks. The officers are from Punjab and soldiers from the Frontier.’27

  According to another study, ex-servicemen from Balochistan for the period 1995–2003 numbered 3,753 men only while the numbers for Punjab and the NWFP for the same period were 1,335,339 and 229,856, respectively.28 The quota for recruitment of soldiers from Balochistan and Sindh was raised to 15 per cent in 1991. Similarly, the height and educational standards were relaxed for them. Despite this, it was estimated that in December 1998 there was a shortfall of about 10,000 other ranks from Balochistan and interior Sindh.29 Moreover, with the quota being on a provincial basis and based on ethnicity, it was assessed that the bulk of recruits to the army from Balochistan were Pashtuns rather than ethnic Baloch.

  Could this situation be changing? According to the army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, more than 25,000 Baloch students were receiving quality education at various Army and Frontier Corps-run schools and cadet colleges all over Pakistan: ‘Nearly 20,000 sons of Balochistan are serving in the army, including over 600 as officers, while 232 cadets are undergoing training at the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA), Kakul,’ he added. These numbers get even higher, Bajwa continued, when ‘we take into account Baloch youth in Pakistan Air Force, Pakistan Navy’ and other law-enforcement agencies. However, once again, he did not clarify if these were ethnic Baloch. The use of the term ‘sons of Balochistan’ obviously meant the whole of Balochistan.30

  In 1997, Senator Kachkool Ali Baloch complained that despite having 750 km coast out of total 1,100 km in Pakistan, not a single seaman in the Navy belonged to Balochistan.31

  Military Footprint

  Balochistan has a heavy military footprint that is a hark back to its colonial past and its forced accession to Pakistan. Apart from the four existing cantonments at Quetta, Sibi, Loralai and Khuzdar, there are three naval bases, four missile testing sites, two nuclear development sites and fifty-nine paramilitary facilities. According to press reports, Sardar Akhtar Mengal stated that there are 35,000 Frontier Corps (FC), 12,000 Coast Guards, 1,150 levies, 6,000 Balochistan Reserve police, 2,000 marines and four army brigades deployed in Balochitan.32 Today, provincial governments in Pakistan have no rights to levy either entertainment tax or property tax on the property located inside the cantonments, including private properties. The cantonments have become a sort of parallel government by themselves where the writ of the provincial government does not run.

  The proliferation of cantonments is a sore point with the Baloch. They perceive these cantonments as usurpation of their traditional land by the army. According to a report, ‘Over 500 acres of land was forcibly occupied in Sui’, when citizens refused to sell their land; the same process is being repeated in Kohlu ‘leading to similar resentment’.33 Not surprisingly, in the Baloch perception, the cantonments are instruments of colonization and the security forces the colonizing forces. In addition, the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force manned mostly by outsiders operating under the Central government, has by its conduct left no stone unturned to heighten the animosity of the Baloch. Over the years its check posts, numbering 493 in 2006, have become instruments of extortion, humiliation and intimidation.34 As a result, Baloch leaders have been agitating vociferously in parliament and outside against the setting up of three new cantonments at Sui, Kohlu and Gwadar in the province.

  The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) sent a mission to Balochistan in October 2003 that visited several towns, cities and villages in Balochistan to assess the situation. In its report, HRCP called for a revamping of the law and order machinery and making the intelligence agencies accountable, and warned of the dangers of militarization of the people. The mission noted: ‘The dangers of militarization of the people cannot be exaggerated. Even a minimum degree of respect for the history of Balochistan demands that any extension of defence establishments in the province should be subject to double scrutiny and it should be undertaken only after convincing the people of its justification. The need to reduce the military’s presence in jobs traditionally and rightly reserved for civilians is even greater in Balochistan than in other provinces.’35

  Education

  The educational system in Balochistan is dysfunctional. Figures, including for access to education, are appalling and far below those of other provinces. It is self-evident that no improvement in living standards and alleviation of poverty can be possible without improvement in educational levels and standards. In fact, high rates of illiteracy and low standards of educational progress are the root cause of the Baloch lagging behind other provinces.36

  According to figures revealed by provincial ministers in 2017, one million to 1.1 million children were enrolled in government schools; around 350,000 children were studying in madrassas and 300,000 children were studying at private schools.37 In 2009 the number of children studying in 1,095 madrassas was only 85,000. According to the adviser to the Balochistan chief minister on education, over 1.6 million children of school-going age were not in schools. However, according to a report released by the Academy for Educational Planning and Management (AEPAM), a federal government institution, more than 1.8 million children were out of school in Balochistan. Education Statistics 2014-15 launched in February 2016 by AEPAM estimated that 24.02 million children between the ages of five and sixteen were out of school in Pakistan. Balochistan had the highest percentage of out-of-school children at 70 per cent, followed by Sindh at 56 per cent and Punjab at 44 per cent, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with the lowest percentage of out-of-school children at 36 per cent.38

  By the government’s own admission, of the 22,000 plus settlements in the province, there were government-run schools (primary, secondary and high schools) in only about 12,500 of them.39 The situation regarding girl’s education is far worse since girls continue to suffer severe disadvantages and exclusion in Balochistan. A staggering 75 per cent of girls aged between five and sixteen are out of school compared to 65 per cent boys within the same age bracket in Balochistan, according to NGO Alif Ailan. There is one girls high school every 77 sq. km. Owing to scarcity of high schools for them, girls in the respective areas have little option but to give up their education after completing middle school.40

  School dropouts is another majo
r issue. Every year 130,000 students enrol in schools but only 61,000 appear in matriculation examinations, out of which only 30,000 are able to pass while the number of university pass-outs is 3,000.41

  At an all-Pakistan level, eleven out of the sixteen districts in Pakistan with the worst net enrolment rate (NER) record were in Balochistan: none of the districts in the province lay in the highest quality of district education rankings. Of the thirty-two districts in Balochistan, twenty-three districts had an education score of less than 50 per cent.42

  Another problem with education was the issue of ghost schools. Speaking in the Balochistan assembly, the former minister for education Abdul Rahim Ziaratwal revealed that there was no record of 15,000 teachers and there were 900 ghost schools with almost 300,000 registered students that were fake.43 Yet, government records showed that funds were dispersed to those schools and teachers were receiving salaries every month.

  Article 25A of the Constitution made education for children aged five to sixteen a part of Fundamental Rights. The challenge for Balochistan is to convert the net enrolment rates (NERs) of primary, middle and secondary enrolment from the current 56, 25 and 14 per cent respectively to 100 per cent.44

  The Economic Survey of Pakistan 2011-2012 provides a comparative survey of literacy rates (10 years+) in Pakistan and the provinces:

  Higher Education

  Another example is the shocking stepmotherly treatment meted out to Balochistan by the Higher Education Commission (HEC), the supreme regulatory body of higher education in Pakistan, and how Balochistan has been deprived of its due rights. According to the HEC’s Annual Report 2012-13, the share of Balochistan in HEC scholarships and grants is not more than 3 per cent, which is half of Balochistan’s constitutionally mandated quota of 6 per cent. Some of the details are as under: