Najam Sethi on Balochistan

From The Friday Times

Holy writ of state

General Pervez Musharaf is once again thundering about restoring the “writ of the state” and “sorting them out”. First it was “terrorists” in Waziristan. Now it is “miscreants” in Balochistan. The Waziristani terrorists were mainly “foreigners” while the Baloch miscreants are aided and abetted by a “foreign hand”. Nearly 50,000 “troops” are conducting a “pacification” programme in Waziristan and another 50,000 are raiding hideouts in the Marri-Bugti area of Balochistan. But there is no “army operation” in these areas. The helicopter gunships belong to the interior ministry. Over 90% of Balochistan is in ‘B’ category (no law and order), but never mind, the writ of the state is firmly established in the country.

Governments are expected to misinform and be niggardly about the facts. But this is ridiculous. In this day and age, the truth will out sooner rather than later. And it is not just in Balochistan and Warizistan that the writ of the state is missing. Rising crime, honour killings, rapes, or mischief with the blasphemy law all reflect a feeble state. Wherever there are armed non-state actors – the jihadis, for example – the writ of the state is under challenge. Wherever there are swathes of territory that are not subject to the laws of the land – the ‘tribal areas’, for example – the writ of the state can be washed and hung out to dry. When was the last time that General Musharraf thundered about restoring the writ of the state regarding crimes against women, police corruption, jihadi threats, tribal vendettas, kidnappings and raids? Indeed, when was the army – sorry, paratroops – sent in to sort out all these trouble makers who make Pakistan look bad? When militant cadres of the Ittehad eTanzeemaat e Madaris eDeenia (ITMD) take to the streets next week to resist attempts by the state to expel foreign students in local madrassahs, will the writ of the state be enforced by scattering the demonstrators to the wind, or will Ejaz ul Haq, the minister for religious affairs, cajole them by obfuscating the matter as he has done on the issue of madrassah registration?

Balochistan is a good example of state selectively. The Marri and Bugti “miscreants” are not being offered any inducements or deals to abandon militancy, unlike their counterparts in Waziristan who are terrorists one day and patriots the next. Indeed, the famed writ of the state is curiously invisible when the terrorists start rampaging all over the place as erstwhile Taliban. In Balochistan, however, the painstaking deal between Nawab Akbar Bugti and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain is unilaterally put into cold storage and the Frontiers Corps is blithely allowed to breach the agreement.

Much the same sort of state self-righteousness is evident in proclamations of “development work” in Balochistan. It is propagated that the “Sardars” don’t want their tribesmen to benefit from the fruits of federal education and infrastructure development plans because that process would unshackle the people from slavery and erode the power and influence of the Sardars. In other words, the conflict is portrayed as one between a do-gooder state and the bad Sardars. But the facts are quite to the contrary. There was no conflict in Balochistan for a span of two decades in the 1980s and 1990s when all the “bad Sardars” were on the side of the “do-gooder state” – the eldest sons of Nawab Khair Buz Marri, who are today the so-called leaders of the Baloch Liberation Army, were provincial ministers at one time or another, and the eldest son of Sardar Ataullah Mengal, who is today championing the cause of insurrection in Balochistan, was the chief minister of the hapless province – and yet there was no notable peoples-oriented development work by the federal government in the province. The only major infrastructure project in Balochistan in the last twenty years is the Gwadar port project and a transport grid to service it. But this is a strategic national security project which has property speculators and developers in glittering Karachi and Lahore and Islamabad and Peshawar salivating rather than in dismal Quetta or Mach or Kohlu or Sui which remain one-horse towns. Nor has it helped to “open up” and upgrade Balochistan by providing the Baloch middle classes with opportunities for upward mobility and security.

To be sure, the Nawabs and Sardars of Balochistan are no angels. Indeed, the Baloch tribal system has lost much of its original democratic functionality without becoming less exploitative or oppressive. But why should some Sardars be treated roughly by the state while others are embraced unabashedly? Why are cruel Sindhi vaderas, extremist tribal mullahs, aggressive Punjabi jihadis and urban ethnic blackmailers kosher as state allies? Why have a couple of Baloch sardars, who were allies not so long ago, suddenly become enemies against whom the holy writ of the state has to be enforced?

The state is selective with the truth. It is self-righteous and opportunistic in the same breath. And its credibility is eroding fast. As the periphery of Pakistan heats up, more and more lay people are worrying whether selective attempts to enforce the “writ of the state” will end up with no state to defend after all.