Pakistan- the Balochistan Conundrum

by Tilak Devasher

  Such fears have been enhanced due to the announcement by the China–Pakistan Investment Corporation (CPIC) at a press conference held in London in October 2017 of a mega housing project ‘China–Pak Hills’ in Gwadar. The CEO of the corporation, Jian Zheng, disclosed plans to finance $500 million in the first phase of the housing project in which almost half a million white-collar Chinese would reside by 2023. The development project would encompass over 10 million square feet of built-up area. It would be a ‘mixed-use gated development tailor-made for Chinese professionals in Gwadar, offering an all-encompassing lifestyle to live, work and play, with a host of facilities that will set the benchmark of future developments.’ However, the federal government has called the report bogus, denying that the Gwadar Port Authority had given any such permission. Nevertheless, the CPIC has put forward documentary evidence depicting the possession of ‘no objection’ certificate with the company from the concerned authority.25

  The Baloch are aware of the history of Karachi, the capital of Sindh. It had a Sindhi population of 0.5 million in 1947 but now it has more than 14 million people. Almost 90 per cent of them are non-Sindhis rendering the Sindhis a minority in their capital city.26

  Currently, Balochistan has a fifty-one-member provincial assembly based on the population. The expected influx will lead to additional seats in the legislature, making the Baloch a minority in every respect. ‘Even the chief minister will be an outsider,’ fears Baloch Senator Dr Jahanzeb Jamaldini of the BNP(M)27. Thus, what the Baloch want are legislative guarantees like banning outsiders from getting local Computerised National Identity Cards (CNICs), domicile certificates and registration as voters, for preserving the current demographics.

  According to Attaullah Mengal, ‘If there are jobs in Gwadar, people would flock there, Pakistanis and foreigners alike. With time, they would get the right to vote. The problem is that one Karachi in Gwadar is sufficient to turn the whole population of Balochistan into a minority. Gwadar will end up sending more members to the Parliament than the rest of Balochistan. We would lose our identity, our language, everything. That’s why we are not willing to accept these mega projects.’28

  Recognizing the threat, the Pakistan Senate in January 2019 called on the government to take measures to preserve the demographic balance and ownership rights of the local population of Gwadar and protect the same against the expected large-scale migration into Gwadar in the wake of CPEC projects.29 However, at the time of writing, nothing seems to have been done in this regard.

  Also, Gwadar is being connected to Karachi but there are apprehensions that the federal government is dragging its feet connecting Gwadar through Turbat, Panjgur and Khuzdar to Quetta. Consequently, the rest of the province will not derive much benefit from the project. This is making the people restive as they feel that they are being converted into a landlocked province despite having the longest coastline in the country. 30

  Hence, its own people have become the port’s greatest opponents. As Kaplan notes, the poor and uneducated Baloch population had been shut out of Gwadar’s future prosperity. And so, Gwadar became a lightning rod for Baloch hatred of Punjabi-ruled Pakistan. Indeed, Gwadar’s very promise as an Arabian Sea–Central Asian hub threatened to sunder the country.31 Not surprisingly, when the former planning minister Ahsan Iqbal announced grandiosely that ‘Gwadar will revolutionize the life of Baloch people’ at a function in January 2018, there were very few takers.32

  Water

  Lack of drinking water is a key issue in Gwadar. While Gwadar is touted as the key that would unlock Pakistan’s fortunes, the only key the residents of Gwadar today are looking for is adequate supply of drinking water.

  According to official estimates, the average per capita water requirement is of around 18 gallons per day. On this basis Gwadar needed around 5.5 MGD of water in 2012 and 6 MGD by the end of 2017.33 The main source of supply is the Akra dam, which could supply about 3–3.5 MGD to Gwadar and adjoining areas, including Jewani, Peshkan, Sur Bandar, Ganz and Bal Nagor. The requirement of 6 MGD was when the city had not yet expanded fully. As and when the city booms, the requirement for water will rise manifold due to the various projects and massive increase in population. The requirement for a 2.5 million population will imply a minimum 150 MGD of water and could even go as high as 250 MGD.

  Gwadar, however, is an arid area known for persistent droughts. Due to periodic paucity of rain, the Akra dam dried up in 2012 and the water crisis continued for about 175 days, easing only after rains in the catchment areas of the dam. Due to the water shortage, the residents were forced to depend on private water tankers that cost Rs 15,000 per tanker. At the peak of the water crisis, one gallon of water was sold for Rs 1,000.34 In September 2017, the price was at least Rs 17,000 per tanker or six rupees for one gallon of water.35 The tankers fetched water from the Belar dam—a catchment area getting water from the Daramb mountain facing the Iranian border on its west. These tankers made twenty-seven trips a month, barring Fridays, to provide water to the residents of Surbandar, Peshukan, Gwadar and Jiwani.36 The crisis turned so bad that the Pakistan Navy had to ship in around 300,000 gallons of water in two tankers.

  In December 2015 the water level in Akra dam dropped drastically and a water crisis once again hit Gwadar. It continued for eighty days till March 2016. Water shortage again hit the city in December 2016 and ended in January 2017, lasting for forty days. To overcome this crisis, authorities supplied water to the people through tankers at a cost of Rs 1 billion.37

  In 2017, due to lack of rain and the resultant drought-like situation, Gwadar was again hit by a severe water crisis. Water had to be brought from the Mirani dam located at a distance of 142 km from Gwadar. Water comes to Gwadar through tankers. It is first delivered to the waterworks town, after which it is supplied to the population through tankers.38 Only 30–40 gallons of water are provided to each household once a week.39 The Mirani dam was meant to be the main source of supply for Turbat. The people of Turbat have started complaining that water from the dam is supplied to Gwadar while Turbat itself has been pushed into a severe water crisis. According to the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (PCSIR) in Karachi, water quality tests on samples collected from Mirani dam in July 2017 revealed that the water was microbiologically not fit for human consumption.40 Moreover, the tankers supplying water to Gwadar are the same being used to supply petrol and diesel, a fact that would make the water highly polluted.41

  There have been intermittent problems with water tankers, largely because of non-payment of outstanding dues by the authorities. As a result, the tanker owners frequently have to face the burden of heavy loans they obtain for the payment of fuel, salaries of tanker drivers and to meet other costs to continue water supply from Mirani dam to Gwadar.42

  The Chinese have built a small-sized desalination plant that provides one million gallons of water for the consumption of the workers at the port. Two desalination plants set up during Musharraf’s tenure failed to function and got mired in corruption. Moreover, the plants require a lot of electricity to run and there is an acute shortage of it in Gwadar.43 The Senate was told in March 2017 that up to 700 million rupees would be needed ‘for repairing and re-operation’.44

  Asks Kaiser Bengali, former economic adviser to the chief minister of Balochistan, ‘How can you build a major port and a major city where there is no water?’ He added, ‘There are no answers to anything. Transparency is seriously lacking.’ While there is talk of building more dams and a desalination plant, observers are sceptical because the country’s electricity grid is about 640 km away and power is imported from neighbouring Iran, a system that leaves the area with scheduled daily blackouts.45

  For the present, foreign investors and domestic companies have not been seriously affected since they have access to bottled water. The worst sufferers are the locals, the poor fishermen. According to an apocryphal story, when a house was burgled in Gwadar, the only items stolen were containers of fresh water—a
staple that has soared in value since reservoirs dried up. According to a legislator from Gwadar city, ‘Gwadar has become known to the entire world due to the multibillion CPEC project, but nobody knows how its population is suffering due to the water shortages.’46

  If this is the situation today, the future can well be imagined. Failure to supply water may expose Gwadar to the same fate as Fatehpur Sikri47 or Myanmar’s famed capital Bagan.

  Fishermen

  People most affected by the development of Gwadar port are the fishermen who constitute almost 80 per cent of the local population. They have lost their prime fishing grounds located along the east bay where the port was constructed. The locals could also lose their homes if Gwadar’s master plan, which was prepared with no local consultation, is implemented since they would be relocated some 15—20 km from the port area.48

  Prior to the recent development of the port, the town’s limits were basically confined to the old town. The Gwadar Development Authority (GDA) created a master plan for Gwadar’s expansion in 2005 in which the whole of the old town area became part of the port. Several housing projects and markets were to be built in place of the old town. The residents of the old town were to be shifted to the north, near the coastal highway. However, now even the master plan has been junked and a Chinese company has been tasked to create a Gwadar Smart Port City. The fate of the old town at the time of writing remains unknown.49

  The development of the Eastbay Expressway—a component of CPEC—that would connect the Makran coastal highway with the free-trade zone of the Gwadar port is also threatening to deprive local fishermen of access to the sea. The project would prevent them from fishing on Gwadar’s eastern port that had been the only source of income for many members of the community for centuries. Despite an agreement with the Balochistan government and the Gwadar Port Authority that led to the fishermen calling off their protests and strikes in 2018, development of the expressway has continued as per the original plan.50

  Tension has also been building up since the disclosure of the Federal Marine Fisheries Department’s plan to issue around a hundred licences for various types of fishing vessels in its exclusive economic zone (between twenty and 200 nautical miles). The Pakistan Fisheries Exporters Association and the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum immediately condemned the grant of licences to foreign parties in view of the likely depletion of the country’s marine resources. The closure of the traditional fish harbour at Gwadar and the move to uproot the old settlement’s population from their historical habitat could invite strong resistance.51

  Recent reports indicate that trawlers from Sindh were depleting fish stocks and damaging the provincial marine ecosystem. Trawling is illegal in Balochistan but according to media reports, bribes to the fisheries departments of Balochistan and Sindh, to senior bureaucrats, politicians and other influential people—to the tune of Rs 5 billion every month—allows this practice to go unchecked. According to an official, China will also trawl the waters to send fish back to China, further depleting fish stocks.52

  As the Daily Times noted, ‘… local communities will not derive economic benefit from the project for several years to come, which is why old sources of livelihood must be protected while CPEC projects are under construction. The Balochistan government and the Gwadar Port Authority must make good on their commitment to ensuring the fishermen’s access to the Arabian sea is preserved.’53

  Land Scam

  There has been massive real estate speculation in Gwadar. Robert Kaplan quotes the cover story, ‘The Great Land Robbery’, from the June 2008 issue of The Herald, a Karachi-based investigative magazine that had alleged that the Gwadar project had ‘… led to one of the biggest land scams in Pakistan’s history’. The locals owned the land for generations but had no documentary evidence of ownership. Taking advantage of this, influential persons could bribe revenue officials and get the land registered in their names. The land was then sold to developers from cities like Karachi and Lahore for residential and industrial schemes. Hundreds of thousands of acres were illegally allotted to civilian and military bureaucrats living elsewhere.54

  Speculation in land sent prices skyrocketing but very few locals benefited. Officials, civil and military, and politicians cornered most of the land.55 The Pakistan Navy was reported to have occupied a large portion of the land. In some cases, land was bought from locals for a pittance and then sold at ten to twenty times the price; government land was parcelled out to cronies who made huge profits by reselling the land to investors. However, since the port turned out to be a non-starter in the initial years, prices crashed and many people lost a lot of money.56

  Said a Gwadar Port Authority (GPA) official, ‘Gwadar’s lands have been seized by state agencies, the coast guards, the navy, the paramilitaries. Every general has a plot in Gwadar. They say these plots were given because this is a federal project. But this is a land grab.’57 Indeed, the military had sought to acquire more than 11,000 acres in Gwadar to construct what it calls a ‘combined defence complex’.58

  More recently, according to a press statement issued by the chairman of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) Justice Javed Iqbal, investigations showed the Gwadar Industrial Estate Development Authority had completely ignored the rules in allotting commercial and industrial plots in Gwadar. Plots had been distributed among favourites and relatives with the help of revenue authorities and provincial government officials. In so doing, notes the statement, applications of eligible industrial and other investors were rejected. Even the Balochistan High Court was forced to comment: ‘Nobody knows how the settled land owned by the state has been transferred to the private sector, that too for peanuts’. It also made the unsurprising observation that ‘… the provincial government and the Board of Revenue cannot be absolved of their responsibility in this regard’.59

  How Safe is Gwadar?

  An area of concern is the Makran Trench that is located off the coast of Pakistan, close to Gwadar. The trench is a seismically active zone in the Arabian Sea. It is the meeting point for two tectonic plates—the Eurasian plate and the Indian plate—where one plate is inching beneath the other in a ‘subduction zone’. The last major earthquake in the area was over seventy years ago in 1945. It was of a magnitude of 8.1 on the Richter scale and had triggered a tsunami that pounded Iran, the area now constituting Pakistan, Oman and India and killed around 4,000 people. In 2017 a quake of 6.3-magnitude on the Richter scale hit the area.

  Despite the damage, not much is known about the zone. To find out more, a team of scientists from China and Pakistan have started to survey the area. The survey could provide critical data and enable an assessment about potential dangers. While hypothetical, given Gwadar’s proximity to the trench, another major earthquake or tsunami could adversely impact, if not damage, operations of the port.60

  Gwadar: A Military or a Commercial Project?

  The Pakistan government has been at pains to stress that Gwadar is a commercial and civilian project. However, it has been pointed out that Gwadar airport has long been seen as a military base. If this were not the case, why disregard normal procedure when the 6,600 acres for the new Gwadar airport were being purchased? It was the Military Estates Officer (MEO) in Quetta instead of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) that bought the land for Rs 1.05 billion. Any land acquired by the Military Lands and Cantonments (MLC) makes it the property of the Pakistan Army and this fact alone thoroughly exposes the claims that Gwadar is an exclusively commercial project.61

  Mohammad Ali Talpur makes the interesting point that Hartsfield–Jackson Airport, Atlanta, has been the world’s busiest airport since 1998 and attracts more travellers than any other airport in the world with 96,178,899 passengers passing through in 2014. It also manages more aircraft movements (take-offs and landings) than any other airport in the world with 881,933 in 2014 and is built only on 4,700 acres. Gwadar airport is twice the size of London’s Heathrow (2,965 acres) where a plane lands or takes off every 46 seconds at pe
ak time, handling 73,408,442 passengers and 472,817 aircraft movements in 2014. Gwadar is clearly oversized and is being built for objectives other than what is publicized. It will clearly have a large military component.62

  According to the Guardian, in theory, exporters in Xinjiang will have a much shorter journey to the Arabian Sea and international markets than via China’s eastern ports. In practice, sceptics wonder whether trucking goods over one of the world’s highest mountain ranges will ever be cheaper than the existing sea routes. They suspect China is more interested in Gwadar as a potential naval base near the oil supplies of the Gulf. This would fit in with acquisition of an area much larger than required for a civil airport.63

  In fact, even when the Karakorum Highway (KKH) was being built, the then military ruler Ayub Khan had said that ‘in order of priority, the first urgency was strategic and one of immediate significance’ and that the ‘economic and commercial importance of the highway’ was only ‘the second objective’ for Pakistan.64

  Chabahar

  Since the early years of the new millennium Pakistan has been concerned that the development of the Iranian port of Chabahar would adversely impact Gwadar’s potential as the main sea route for the Central Asian Republics (CARs) and for China, should the need ever arise. For years, India had been trying to persuade Pakistan to allow it to transport goods to Afghanistan through the land route but Pakistan did not agree. In 2002, India helped Iran develop Chabahar, located 72 km west of Gwadar. Chabahar provides India access to Afghanistan via the Arabian Sea, bypassing Pakistan. Since Islamabad views Chabahar through the prism of its relations with India, it is apprehensive about the Iranian port emerging as an alternative gateway to Central Asia apart from ending Afghanistan’s dependence on Pakistan for transit.