Train hijack is a ghastly reminder of how Baloch are a victim of Pakistan’s exclusionary politics – Firstpost

Terrorism has no justification whatsoever. Use of violence to kill or persecute another human being is something that no civilised society must ever tolerate. Yet one cannot isolate terrorists from the social-political milieu under which they operate. This is because one’s understanding of their surroundings and the grudges that forced them to pick up arms can go a long way in securing a lasting peace.

It is with this intent that the Baloch Liberation Army that has hijacked an entire train in Pakistan must be approached. The whole world watched them as they took hundreds of civilians as well as military personnel hostage. Now the Pakistani military operation against them may have ended with a large number of casualties on both sides. But where did it all begin?

The BLA or the Baloch Liberation Army is a terror outfit that mainly operates in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. It was first established in the year 2000 with an aim to secure independence from Pakistan and has since targeted military personnel, sometimes even civilians as well as foreign nationals to achieve its goal. It rose to prominence in the 2000s only when it started carrying out certain high-profile attacks to secure international attention.

In 2013, it was involved in abduction and killing of bus passengers in Balochistan, half of whom belonged to the Pakistani security forces. In fact, Jaffar Express, the train which they have hijacked this time around, is one of their regular targets. In the past also there have been many attacks and blasts targeting this train that runs between Quetta in Balochistan and Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

In recent times, BLA has become an even more dangerous threat to Pakistan’s security owing to the consolidation of various Baloch separatist factions into one group—the Baloch Raji Aajoi Sangar or BRAS. BRAS comprises many other Baloch separatist organisations besides BLA and is soon planning to form a Baloch National Army with a unified military structure.

On its target are not only the personnel serving in the military or the Pakistani government officials but Chinese nationals as well who are part of the multi-million-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Project. This is because of their grudge against the CPEC which has accrued several economic benefits for all parties involved but has systematically excluded the welfare of Baloch people from its purview.

Today, China has invested close to $65 billion in the initiative with a seaport in strategically located Gwadar, an airport as well as multiple mining projects having come up in the last decade in Balochistan province but all this has come at the cost of excluding indigenous Baloch people from the benefits. Not only the local workforce has been completely sidelined but also the heavy military deployment to secure the corridor has led to their human rights abuse with enforced disappearance, sexual abuse, extrajudicial killings being the norm.

One may say that Colonialism may have ended for the rest of the world but the Baloch are still living in an era of double colonisation by not only Pakistan but by China as well. It is for this reason that they have started targeting CPEC infrastructure and the Chinese experts who are working there with even the $240 million worth New Gwadar International Airport lying dysfunctional because both the Chinese and the Pakistani government are fearful of a possible attack from Baloch separatists.

While China has come on the radar of Baloch nationalists only recently, their resentment with the Pakistani state goes much back in time. The Baloch people who today form an ethnic minority in the country had lived as semi-autonomous princely states for a very long time during the colonial era. The British had signed a treaty with them in 1876 to secure the north-western frontier of their own empire which has over time become the foremost basis for the Baloch separatists to seek independence. In 1947 when partition of the Indian subcontinent took place, Baloch nationalists used the same treaty to declare their independent status but Pakistan forcefully occupied their territory leading to the very first round of armed rebellion by them.

In the subsequent decades, they faced the exact same kind of repression by the Pakistani state as the ethnic Bengalis did. It is a well-known fact that the dominance of Punjabis in the government as well the military has led to marginalisation of every other ethnic group in the country. The Baloch also faced the effects of the same when not only they became one of the highly underrepresented groups in the power echelons but even their cultural identity was also sabotaged with the imposition of Urdu language.

In the late 1950s, there was a second round of insurgency in the province when the Pakistani government imposed a ‘One Unit’ policy bringing all four provinces of West Pakistan (Sindh, Punjab, North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan) under one single administrative division. The goal was to have just two divisions in Pakistan— West and East Pakistan for ease of administration but Baloch separatists opposed this due to decimation of their political identity through unification with other provinces. Although the ‘One Unit’ policy was later dropped, the grudge that it left in the hearts of the Baloch people was deep-seated.

A lot of this was reflected in the first full-scale insurgency that erupted in Balochistan between 1973 and 1977. The liberation of East Pakistan in 1971 was seen by the Baloch separatists as an encouraging sign for their own freedom. This led an anxious Zulfikar Ali Bhutto government to suspend the provincial government of Akbar Khan Bugti in Balochistan. It also dispatched a large contingent of Army to the province for a mega military operation that killed thousands of innocent Baloch people. At that time, Pakistan had even received air support from Iran as well that had a fear of the spillover of insurgency into its own Baloch population.

Between 1940 till today, Baloch separatism has witnessed many phases till date but one reality that has remained constant is the economic apartheid that Baloch people have faced. Balochistan is a sparsely populated province in Pakistan but it is also its largest with a land area that accounts for almost half of the entire country’s territory. It is also its most blessed province in terms of natural resources with huge untapped reserves of natural gas, copper, gold and oil.

Yet, it is also the poorest province in the country because all these riches have been exploited by the successive Pakistani governments for their own parochial interests. For instance, the gas pipelines to transfer natural gas out of the province have been fully developed but the local infrastructure to transport the same to Baloch people so that they can meet their own energy needs are missing even today. Also, as per the available data only 36 per cent of the province is electrified while the rest is still struggling to get proper power supply. In fact, if Pakistan is an undeveloped country today then Baloch are placed even worse. In comparison to the national per capita income, their per capita income is not even half of that.

Even in Human Development Indicators, if Punjab and Sindh rank higher than the rest of the country then Balochistan is at the bottom with negligible literacy, highest incidence of poverty and the most inadequate access to healthcare. No wonder that they detest exclusionary politics of the Pakistani state. Their resentment with state of affairs is bound to strengthen further because even the ‘game-changer’ CPEC scheme has excluded their economic interests. Picture this, out of the thirteen mega energy projects that have been jointly initiated by Pakistan and China, six are in Punjab, six in Sindh, one in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and none in Balochistan.

Stories of this economic apartheid that Baloch people face are widely shared in the media by activists, members of Baloch diaspora as well as many scholars and journalists. Yet all these sagas of persecution and repression have never got the attention that they truly deserve. Even the instances of Baloch diaspora being murdered in foreign countries have been totally ignored by the otherwise proactive western governments.

The train hijack episode has brought back the plight of Baloch people on the international platform in a big way. In the coming days, the state in Pakistan will use this incident to persecute ordinary people in the province even more. Although like I said at the outset that terrorism has no justification and taking people hostage or using violence is an unacceptable move by all means. But the world should not forget what the Baloch are facing on a regular basis in that country. This is the least of the hopes that they can have today.

The author is a New Delhi-based commentator on geopolitics and foreign policy. She holds a PhD from the Department of International Relations, South Asian University. She tweets @TrulyMonica. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.