Traitors, aren’t they?

Side-effect
The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad.
Sardar Akhtar Mengal wanted to appear in the case of forced disappearances in Balochistan being heard in the Supreme Court. He was granted audience. Once in Islamabad, besides appearing in the court to give his testimony, he met a number of politicians, held a press conference and spoke to many journalists and commentators. He propounded his six points to move forward on Balochistan and to help resolve the current crisis.
Around the same time, the government and security agencies submitted to the court that no military operation, forced disappearances or extra-judicial murders are taking place in the province. They out rightly rejected the claims made by Baloch nationalists and rights activists about their persecution and denied all allegations levelled against the military, paramilitary and law-enforcing agencies.
The head of the Balochistan National Party, Akhtar Mengal is veteran Baloch leader Sardar Attaullah Mengal’s son. He was the chief minister of the province in the late 1990s. He was arrested in 2006 during Gen Musharraf’s regime and released in 2008 after the incumbent government was elected. The points he presented in Islamabad are neither new nor have any unconstitutional air about them. They are simple, practical and only for the short run.
They ask for all overt and covert military operations to end, forced disappearances and elimination of Baloch political workers to stop, those disappeared should be released, role of intelligence agencies in the governance and politics of Balochistan to be curbed, Baloch political parties to be allowed to function without interference, and, those poor Baloch who are displaced by conflict must be rehabilitated with respect.
But what do you do when the other side is in complete denial and says nothing of the sort is happening in Balochistan that Mengal refers to? Also, when the other side represents no one less but the State of Pakistan itself? That’s what you call a stalemate.
Contrary to popular rhetoric, I see little in common between the situation in Balochistan and the former East Pakistan – the reason being that Bengalis were in a majority and when the majority is denied their due share in power and resources, the dynamic is very different. Technically, the creation of Bangladesh cannot be called secession from Pakistan either.
Because the majority of people living in united Pakistan was pushed to have a separate country, making them into Bangladesh and us into the Islamic Republic of (West) Pakistan. If they had decided to keep the name of Pakistan, we would have been in a quandary.
We must also recognise that from day one, a fair segment of the West Pakistani elite, dominated by north Indian immigrant bureaucracy and the Punjabi feudal, wanted to get rid of East Pakistan. There was a sinister propaganda in the western wing of the country that East Pakistan bleeds Pakistan’s economy. For the Pakistani elite today, particularly the civil and military establishment, Balochistan is of paramount importance due to its economic resources. The case is different from that of East Pakistan.
Although Balochistan is spread over 45 percent of Pakistan’s landmass, it is the least populous province in the country. It is ethnically diverse and not as homogenous as East Pakistan was. The issue is not with the whole of Balochistan as a province or administrative region but with the denial of the rights of Baloch as a people who constitute the majority of population in the province and inhabit most of its land.
The forced annexation of the Kalat state, instead of a peaceful, democratic process of annexation through negotiation, had happened soon after the creation of Pakistan. Quaid-i-Azam was perhaps in a hurry. This did not sit well with many Baloch political workers and intellectuals of that time. However, the real trouble began when the Pakistani establishment under Gen Ayub Khan started dealing with the Baloch leadership with extreme disgrace and utter contempt.
The worst incident of all until then was the breaking of oath with Nauroz Khan, the chief of the Zehri tribe in Jhalawan. When during the armed struggle of 1960 to resist one-unit in West Pakistan and the usurpation of Baloch rights by the central government, Nauroz Khan was putting up resistance in one of the battles. Pakistani military swore an oath and urged Nauroz to surrender and prepare for negotiations. Nauroz Khan was betrayed, he and his sons arrested and no amnesty was granted. His sons were hanged in Hyderabad and Sukkur. He died a shocked man soon after in 1962.
Civilian Z A Bhutto, who was to be hanged himself by a military dictator, and his successors, Gen Zia-ul-Haq and Gen Pervez Musharraf, were no different from Gen Ayub Khan when it came to making an attempt to understand, let alone respect, the rights of the Baloch people. Ironically, Nawab Akbar Bugti worked closely with the Pakistani establishment just a few years before turning against it. The state couldn’t keep him happy either. And now, all of a sudden, a section of twisted right-wing politicians and journalists have started saying that Bugti in fact blew himself up. There should be a judicial commission to investigate his death. Why wasn’t this raised in the last six years?
Today, there may well be a foreign involvement in Balochistan as the interior minister Rehman Malik insists. But the foreigners can only train and arm the insurgents. Who produces them? The Pakistani establishment does by its own folly. And it refuses to learn. Simply refuses. Malik needs to remind himself that there was a time when Akbar Bugti was Pakistan’s minister of state for interior.
While Mengal was in Islamabad, we were told day in and day out by the self-proclaimed custodians of the ideology of the Islamic Republic, the pseudo-intellectuals who believe in a caliphate that never was, that the struggle in Balochistan is for the rights of the sardars and not for the rights of the people. This is believed and reverberated by those who live in the palatial homes of Lahore, Rawalpindi and Islamabad and cook their chapattis on piped natural gas from Balochistan. They loathe Baloch sardars for their cruelty and sympathise with Baloch masses for their innocence.
At the same time they treat their own domestic servants like dirt and those who own land back home in a village, find no problem in keeping low caste musallis working on their farms without paying them anything close to a decent wage.
Let me just recall what the Baloch demanded from the Pakistani authorities led by Gen Ayub Khan in 1963 and many months after the death of Nauroz Khan. This was the time when from Sardar Khair Bakhsh Marri to poet Gul Khan Naseer, many prominent Baloch rights campaigners were imprisoned.
The Baloch leadership sent a memorandum to the General with a list of demands. The document was drafted by Sardar Sherbaz Mazari while Maulana Bhashani, the veteran leftist leader from East Pakistan, was the emissary. The Baloch asked for the release of prisoners and restoration of their confiscated property, creation of a university in the province, making school education compulsory and free, construction of a college in each district, a high school in each tehsil, a primary school in each village, a dispensary in a sizeable village, a hospital in each tehsil, construction of roads in the province and the development of local harbours and fisheries. They demanded that government servants of lower grades must be domiciled in Balochistan and local labour is recruited on developmental projects. How seditious and unconstitutional!
Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com