In 2005, an incident in the Bugti area triggered unrest which was put down by the army, resulting in the first big migration of the Baloch. In June 2013, Nawabzada Guhram Bugti led a fifty-five-day long protest in Islamabad at the head of 400 tribesmen, demanding that 200,000 Bugtis displaced by the army be repatriated. He said: “These people are living under the open sky for the last eight years in Jamshoro, Sanghar, Ghotki, Rohti and Karachi districts of Sindh.”

There were Baloch claims that thousands of Baloch had been made to ‘disappear’ by the army in its paramilitary Frontier Corps manifestation. The phenomenon of the ‘disappeared’ Baloch has moved the rest of the country, the media taking the lead in highlighting the tendency of the army to function without accountability when dealing with Baloch ‘rebels’. An assertive Supreme Court headed by a former lawyer from Balochistan took note of the plight of the families looking for their sons. The Court held more than seventy hearings on the situation in Balochistan but to no notable effect. Apart from further persuading the public in the country that Balochistan was suffering under arbitrary rule, it has been unable to correct the status quo of oppression in the province.

British journalist Declan Walsh was expelled from Pakistan last year after his report, ‘Pakistan’s Secret Dirty War’ appeared in Guardian, graphically describing the atrocities earlier also reported in the Pakistani media. … But there are other human rights violations too in Balochistan that cannot be ignored. In May 2012, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) sent a large delegation of observers to Balochistan to inquire into the allegations of strong-arm methods by the security agencies and terrorism by the Baloch separatists. The report of this fact-finding mission was pessimistic. The province was undergoing rapid transformation, succumbing to Islamic radicalism encouraged by the state to counter the challenge it thought was coming from the ‘secular nationalists’.

Frederic Grare in his Carnegie Endowment paper of April 2013 writes: “The most worrisome factor is the changing sociology of the Islamic radicalisation in Balochistan. Unlike the Pashtun-populated areas of the province, the Baloch territory was until very recently largely secular. Today, the Tablighi Jamat conducts its activities outside the Pashtun areas. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is now recruiting in the Baloch population, and five of the most prominent leaders of the organisation in Balochistan are said to be Baloch.”

…The Hindu minority is scattered all over the Baloch-populated districts except those adjoining the sea. They were 22 per cent of the province’s population in 1947 but had to leave at partition till their percentage dwindled to 1.6 per cent. The Pakhtun areas were always hostile but in 2012 it was discovered that the rest of the province too was under heavy religious indoctrination from powerful seminaries. In consequence, Hindus were coming under pressure in the traditionally tolerant communities and were subject to kidnappings by insurgents in need of money for weapons. The HRCP delegation discovered that “over a hundred Hindus have been abducted in Balochistan, a minority of whom was released after a ransom was paid; those who did not pay up were killed and their bodies dumped.”

In its 2012 report, the HRCP said: “No one from the government had come to the victims. Hindus could not get out of their houses. Their education had been suspended. They were forced to pay extortion money. About a fifth of the Hindu population has migrated from Balochistan. The rest could not leave because they were poor. ….”

Pakistan has been through the trauma of separatist movements before. In East Pakistan, a province that broke away and became independent as Bangladesh in 1971, local grievances were focused on the Punjab province in West Pakistan and the ‘Punjabi Army’. In Balochistan too, the nationalist rancour is directed against ‘settlers’, most of whom are local-born Punjabis. Professionally more competitive, like the Hazaras, the settlers have suffered deadly attacks by the Baloch Liberation Army, and the province has lost a number of greatly prized teachers and doctors manning its depleted institutions.

Secular and Religious Terrorism

In 2012, out of 1931 incidents of terrorism in Balochistan, 800 had been owned either by the Baloch separatists or sectarian killers of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an offshoot of the Punjabi Taliban declaring itself as aligned with al-Qaeda. No terrorist was caught and punished, but there were cases of killers being allowed to escape from prison. There are over seventy gangs involved in kidnapping for ransom, some backed by Baloch federal leaders, many of whom keep private armies, and members of the Balochistan assembly.

Baloch and Talibal killers have their distinct patterns of behaviour – Baloch kidnapping and killing settlers and destroying gas pipelines; and Taliban killing the Shia – but they leave one another alone. This pattern goes back into history and is probably grounded in an unspoken ‘peace’ between armed tribal societies capable of doing great mutual arm. But now and then there is hostile reference to each other which could inflame into open war in some future time. And that time could be sooner rather than later if the Afghan Taliban take over once again in Kabul and cause the Pakistani Taliban to declare their own affiliated emirate in the tribal areas adjacent to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the northern part of Balochistan abutting Afghanistan, including Quetta.

Although headed by two men of Baloch nationality, Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in Balochistan are imports from Punjab ordered by the Taliban leadership ensconced in North Waziristan. Because of their strong base in southern Punjab and their long association with the Pakistan security establishment as ‘non-state actors’ for cross-border jihad, most critics of the Pakistan government accuse the army of fomenting sectarian pogroms to dampen the secular ‘separatism’ of the Baloch. The way the leader of the Lashkar, Malik Ishaq, was let off in Lahore in 2012 from hundreds of cases of Shia-killing ‘because of lack of evidence through death of witnesses’, convinces the Shia community of Pakistan that the state wants them exterminated. Malik Ishaq was taken to his headquarters in Rahimyar Khan in south Punjab in a dancing procession, which was seen as a bad omen by the Hazara of Balochistan.

The Baloch uprising is said to be on the boil in the southern districts of the province: Kalat, Gwadar, Panjgur, Turbat and Khuzdar, the last-named Brahui-dominated but a part of the Baloch ‘struggle’. More journalists have been killed in Khuzdar than in the rest of Pakistan. The most talked-about ‘clandestine’ orce is the Balochistan Liberation Army, originally led by Balach Marri until he was killed in 2007. His son, Hyrbyair Marri, currently leads the organisation seeking independence of a ‘greater Balochistan’, including Iranian and Afghan areas. It is said to have approximately 3000 fighters, mostly tribal. Brahamdagh Bugti, in exile in Switzerland since the killing of his grandfather, Nawab Akbar Bugti, by the Pakistani army in 2006, leads another clandestine Baloch Republican Army advocating independence of a ‘greater’ Balochistan and opposes any sort of political dialogue, calling upon the international community to intervene to halt Baloch ‘genocide’.

If the National Party, led by Abdul Malik Baloch, is a middle-class party that will take part in elections and therefore conditionally accept a status quo “in need of correction, the Balochistan National Party, led by Akhtar Mengal, is a ‘midway house’ between those who ‘accept’ the state of Pakistan and those who don’t.  …

The Great Game Revived?

Because of the many interventions by the Supreme Court, people in Pakistan are generally aware of the hidden military rule in the province through the Frontier Corps and the ISI. The ‘security narrative’ generally accepted by the media and most right-wing parties links the Baloch insurrection to the presence of India – the largest contributor to Afghanistan’s infrastructure development – from where it helps the rebels with funds, weapons and possibly training.

The other factor may be the involvement of China in projects in Balochistan that the nationalists are opposed to. The BLA has killed or kidnapped Chinese engineers in the province, a practice they share with the Taliban who train rebels from the Chinese province of Xinjiang and want to create an Islamic state there. A Chinese company prospected for copper at Saindak in the Chaghai district – where Pakistan tested its first nuclear device – starting in 1995. … China has also developed Gwadar port and has recently been awarded the management of port facility, which the international analysts of global strategy see as one of the ‘string of pearls’ bases China has developed in the Indian Ocean – ports built for Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma. New Delhi sees Gwadar as a link in the chain of ‘encirclement’ of India, seen together with the Karakoram Highway in the north of Pakistan. The US too sees Gwadar in the light of China’s general move to ‘enter’ the Middle East even as Washington makes it a strategic ‘pivot’ to South East Asia which the Chinese may see as a strategy of encirclement. India could be present in Afghanistan – which is a member of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) together with India and Pakistan – in response to Pakistan’s own flanking movement through Bangladesh to foment trouble in India’s northeastern provinces, as often reported in the Indian press. …

India Interfering in Balochistan?

There is hyperbole in Pakistan’s claim that India has opened twenty-five consulates in Afghanistan. The truth is that India still has only four, which it always had, and Pakistan has produced no hard evidence to the contrary that could be accepted by the international community. But the latest essay, A Deadly Triangle: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, written by William Dalrymple tends partly to address the anxiety of the Pakistani establishment: “A former Indian consul general to Kandahar privately admitted to me that he had met with Baloch leaders at his consulate there, but he claims his ambassador gave him strict instructions not to aid them in any way against Pakistan. Still, he hinted to me that RAW [sic] personnel were present among the staff at the Kandahar and Jalalabad consulates’.

Perhaps aware that most non-state actors sent into Kashmir by Pakistan were trained in Afghanistan, India made its own ‘flanking movement’ in Afghanistan with some help from Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance and the Central Asian states. Dalrymple continues: “As the Taliban, supported by regular Pakistan troops, pushed the Northern Alliance into ever smaller corners of Afghanistan towards the end of the 1990s, India as well as Iran continued to send supplies to the increasingly-beleaguered Massoud forces. In 2001 India built a hospital at their airbase in Tajikistan so that there would be a place to which they could ferry wounded Tajik soldiers for treatment. Lt General RK Sawhney, the Indian commander who oversaw this programme of assistance to the Northern Alliance, recalled to me vividly and with sadness the day the hospital received its first casualty. It was Ahmad Shah Massound himself, assassinated by two suicide bombers posing as cameramen.”

Excerpted with permission from Sleepwalking to Surrender: Dealing with Terrorism in Pakistan, by Khaled Ahmed (Penguin, Rs 799).