Pervez Hoodbhoy
Published March 11, 2023
DAWN
“YOU mean they actually read books in Balochistan?” My Lahori friend sounded sceptical. For him, as for most Pakistanis, Balochistan is a war zone where people want guns not books. But, just back from the 2023 Gwadar Book Festival, I told him he was not only wrong but as wrong as wrong could be. Young Baloch are thirsty to know; they buy nearly three times more books than sold at literary festivals in Karachi, Lahore, or Islamabad.
More importantly, this festival — and others I have attended in Balochistan — was organic, energetic and unfettered. Thankfully, I neither saw nor heard support for BLA/BLF terrorists. With a shoestring budget, staffed by young volunteers, and held inside a rundown high-school compound, the GBF was unlike the tepid, uninspiring Karachi-Lahore type of lit-fests. Held in five-star hotels with abundant corporate and embassy funding, these are feel-good events with lots of self-congratulations, but topics and speakers deemed controversial are carefully excluded.
My friend was pleasantly surprised to learn that more female students than male students asked questions after my Gwadar University lecture. I had long complained to him that, over the past 35-40 years, female students at my old university in Islamabad have taken up the veil and turned into passive listeners, rarely summoning the courage to stand up and ask.
But if my well-read, well-travelled, and well-meaning friend was so consistently wrong, what’s going on in other minds? When news is blacked out, good news and bad news both stop. For fear of weakening CPEC, authorities are hypersensitive about negative news. Except for that cleared from ‘above’, print and TV media may not touch Balochistan on anything.
DAWN
“YOU mean they actually read books in Balochistan?” My Lahori friend sounded sceptical. For him, as for most Pakistanis, Balochistan is a war zone where people want guns not books. But, just back from the 2023 Gwadar Book Festival, I told him he was not only wrong but as wrong as wrong could be. Young Baloch are thirsty to know; they buy nearly three times more books than sold at literary festivals in Karachi, Lahore, or Islamabad.
More importantly, this festival — and others I have attended in Balochistan — was organic, energetic and unfettered. Thankfully, I neither saw nor heard support for BLA/BLF terrorists. With a shoestring budget, staffed by young volunteers, and held inside a rundown high-school compound, the GBF was unlike the tepid, uninspiring Karachi-Lahore type of lit-fests. Held in five-star hotels with abundant corporate and embassy funding, these are feel-good events with lots of self-congratulations, but topics and speakers deemed controversial are carefully excluded.
My friend was pleasantly surprised to learn that more female students than male students asked questions after my Gwadar University lecture. I had long complained to him that, over the past 35-40 years, female students at my old university in Islamabad have taken up the veil and turned into passive listeners, rarely summoning the courage to stand up and ask.
But if my well-read, well-travelled, and well-meaning friend was so consistently wrong, what’s going on in other minds? When news is blacked out, good news and bad news both stop. For fear of weakening CPEC, authorities are hypersensitive about negative news. Except for that cleared from ‘above’, print and TV media may not touch Balochistan on anything.
Designers of the Gwadar CPEC project had only roads and the port in mind, not Gwadaris’ welfare.
None has underscored this sad fact more brilliantly than a fisherman’s son, Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rahman of Gwadar’s Haq Do Tehreek. At last year’s Asma Jehangir Conference in Lahore, he stole the show. When a mouse found its way into a halwai’s shop in Lahore, he thundered, Pakistani media was set ablaze. But when dead bodies appear by roadsides in Balochistan, none dare whisper. The redoubtable maulana, also a Jamaat-i-Islami leader, is currently under arrest and charged with murder. People say he is at the centre of a tussle between two agencies, one of which wants him in, the other out.
As an outsider to Gwadar (last visit circa 1960) I could not figure out which of a multiplicity of security organisations has the top charge. Each protects its own turf and probably has its own extra-salary income sources. Along all highways and major roads, hilltops bristle with Omani-style forts and fortifications. Bunkers and check posts are everywhere.
Passing through the dry-as-dust town of Turbat, I wondered what made the local economy tick. Answer: smuggling. No attempt — not even the flimsiest — is made to hide the free flow of petrol, oil and LNG from across the Iranian border. On their way to Karachi and parts of Punjab, pickup trucks loaded with fuel-filled jerry cans are the largest fraction of road traffic. Luxury coaches to Karachi, I was told, have a tank under the chassis containing eight to ten thousand litres. Pre-assigned cuts warm pockets along the way.
One fact — more than any other — strikes a visitor instantly. The men who designed New Gwadar wasted not a moment in worrying about Gwadaris, the original inhabitants. Pushed away from the harbour, areas permitted for their fishing keep shrinking. A proposed new road will devastate the local boat construction industry. The old town looks like a dump, but Rawalpindi doesn’t care.
Those building the port — the Chinese — are invisible. Locals humorously call them yajooj-majooj. Instead of romping around the incredibly beautiful beaches, they live inside that which from afar looks like a prison camp. Once the project is over, I am sure they will be anxious to get back home and savour freedom.
A near-accidental visit to the Gwadar Institute of Technology turned out to be a surreal experience. A plaque says this super-modern institution was handed over by China in 2021. The auditoriums, lecture halls, classrooms, and laboratories are picture perfect. I counted over 60 training simulators for cranes, gantries, heavy vehicles and forklifts. Later, upon googling, the per-piece price ranged from $30,000-$50,000. All are spanking new, still under plastic covers. On this vast but desolate campus there are no teachers, students, or staff — only chowkidars. No one has a clue of how to get things moving.
This is development gone mad. But who is to blame and who will foot the bill? Was there a PC-1 planning document, and what’s in it? Still, Gwadar’s development will doubtless benefit those who have always won. Vast areas have been cordoned off with razor wire for various official organisations and their housing schemes. Colonisation, of course, is too strong a word to use here. Let’s just say it’s the familiar desire for officer colonies.
An unexpected encounter between Quetta and Gwadar led to a three-hour conversation with a junior army officer, a Kakul graduate. Brilliant and likeable, he engaged the TTP in firefights in South Waziristan. Well, how do they compare against BLF/BLA? He laughed: these are criminals and adventurists. But TTP are formidable hardcore terrorists. He then paused: he’d rather fight elsewhere where he would be liked by people, not here.
Intriguing! This begged my question — why don’t you people just go back home? Leave law-and-order to the local police and Baloch Levies? He sighed. Yes, this should happen sooner rather than later. But both are under-equipped, under-trained and, being locals, have families that terrorists can target. This young officer doesn’t want to be seen as part of an occupation force. Though troubled, he still loves the army.
Those at the centre of power imagine Balochistan as some faraway, barren land of tribals. Far too rich to be left alone, they think it must be governed from afar. Stunted development springing from this regressive mindset is driving Pakistan back onto the rocks. Balochistan — and for that matter the concept of Pakistan — will have to be re-understood in very new ways. Else history will exact its awful toll as it did once. But next time around, the price could be still steeper.
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.
Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2023
Balochistan: the foreign hand?
Pervez Hoodbhoy
Published February 26, 2022
WITH the present uptick of attacks on security forces, we are back to a familiar routine. Between when a terrorist incident occurs and blame is assigned, the separation is no more than a few minutes. The investigation-free and evidence-free conclusion never changes; whatever happened is the work of foreign forces. Domestic political opponents — even if perfectly peaceful and totally unconnected with the incident — can conveniently be labeled as foreign agents and stomped upon hard. It is hoped that fear will leave them paralysed and speechless.
This may explain why Hafeez Baloch was forcibly disappeared three weeks ago by armed men who alighted from a black pickup. This bright young man is an M.Phil candidate in particle physics in my department at Quaid-e-Azam University. The incident happened in front of his terrified students and fellow teachers while he was teaching at a small private school in Khuzdar, his hometown. Hafeez had used the winter vacations to take a short trip home and earn some desperately needed cash. Just days away from returning to Islamabad for submitting his final thesis, his teachers and fellow students tell me he was a bookworm not known to have the slightest connection with any violent group.
Fearful of how the security forces might react, the local police balked at registering an FIR. While in their captivity, Hafeez will doubtless have been accused of being a foreign agent. Like countless other young Baloch men arbitrarily picked up in the past, he too will be deeply scarred emotionally — and perhaps physically — during this ordeal. One does not even know if he will ever be seen alive again. The mounting sense of Baloch grievance will go up yet another notch.
Pakistan’s external enemies are claimed to be behind its problems of national integration. But those who play secret games under the guise of national security bear far greater responsibility. It is they who made our country suffer so grievously from terrorism between 2001 and 2014. Although inimical foreign powers have undoubtedly sought to inflict hurt, Pakistan’s wounds during that terrible period were largely self-inflicted.
Forcibly disappearing Baloch students won’t eliminate terrorism but will weaken the federation of Pakistan.
In the years following 9/11, terrorist attacks became a daily occurrence once Gen Pervez Musharraf sided with America and joined its so-called war on terror. Earlier, Pakistan had been the Taliban’s principal supporter and, as is well known, that support continued secretly. However, publicly Pakistan had declared itself on the side of the Taliban’s enemy. In retaliating against this perceived betrayal, religiously inspired young boys from madressahs blew themselves up in bazars, hospitals and schools. The establishment, however, claimed all terrorists were either foreigners or foreign supported. The common refrain was: how could killers of Muslims be Muslim?
The loudest advocate of the foreign hand theory was the late Gen Hamid Gul. My first encounter with this famous general was after he addressed an audience sometime around 1998 in the physics auditorium at Quaid-e-Azam University. There he urged Pakistan to lead jihad around the world. During the Q&A session he was flattered at my calling him Adolf Hitler’s brother. We then sparred frequently on various TV channels. My last televised encounter with him was in early 2014, just after a horrendous back-to-back suicide attack some hours earlier. The general declared that the bombers were non-Muslim because they had not been circumcised. He angrily refused to provide proof.
The truth, however, had started leaking out soon after the bloody capture in 2008 of the Swat valley by Mullah Fazlullah’s forces. The powers that be of those times approvingly watched him — and the infamous Mangal Bagh — from a distance. Their U-turn came much later. After the 2014 massacre of 149 children and their teachers at the Army Public School in Peshawar, the denial mode was switched off. Thereafter the Pakistan Army launched Operation Rad-ul-Fasaad. The word ‘fasaad’ is a term strictly used for internal conflict only, not war against an external enemy.
Suddenly Pakistanis began to see TV propaganda video clips of PAF jets pounding targets in North Waziristan, artillery firing into the mountains, or, perhaps, some other celebration of these military operations. You rubbed your eyes in disbelief — how could aircraft of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan bomb Taliban fighters whose stated goal was to establish Pakistan as an Islamic state? How could they ever have been portrayed as non-Muslims?
It took a very long time to admit that Fazlullah’s TTP was actually a Muslim force. Now that the Afghan Taliban government in Kabul continues to harbour and protect the TTP, that delusionary bubble has finally burst. But has it? I don’t know. One day TTP is denounced as India-funded and, on the next, embraced as brothers. The confusion continues.
For now, let’s leave that as it is. What about Balochistan. Where lies the truth? How deep is India’s involvement?
India has certainly not been unaware of Pakistan’s difficulties in Balochistan. As a general rule, whenever a population is angry and alienated, for external enemies to find domestic allies is easy. India believes that Pakistan recruited Kashmiris on India’s side of the LOC to attack Indian security forces. Back in 1971, India could successfully exploit Bengali alienation to cut Pakistan in two. Today, Baloch alienation leads many Indians to talk about Balochistan as an arrow in India’s quiver against Pakistan.
Editorial: Cycle of distrust and disaffection must be broken to deal with renewed insurgency in Balochistan
Indian spymasters Vikram Sood and Ajit Doval, as well as PM Modi, have often spoken about doing a tit-for-tat for perceived Pakistani involvement in Kashmir. Meanwhile strategists like Pramit Pal Chaudhuri suggest the retribution could come through fanning Pakistan’s exaggerated fears of Baloch secession. India should hope, he says, that the Pakistan Army’s angry overreaction to dissent will keep Balochistan aflame.
The abductors of Hafeez Baloch — and of other young missing Baloch men who number in the hundreds — have taken the bait dangled by Pramit Chaudhri and others. Throughout the Baloch community of students in Islamabad, anger and fear run deep. The flagrant violation of Baloch constitutional rights is weakening the national spirit and harming the federation. Before the self-appointed guardians of Pakistan’s security cause further damage to our country through their illegal actions, they must be brought to task.
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and author.
Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2022
This may explain why Hafeez Baloch was forcibly disappeared three weeks ago by armed men who alighted from a black pickup. This bright young man is an M.Phil candidate in particle physics in my department at Quaid-e-Azam University. The incident happened in front of his terrified students and fellow teachers while he was teaching at a small private school in Khuzdar, his hometown. Hafeez had used the winter vacations to take a short trip home and earn some desperately needed cash. Just days away from returning to Islamabad for submitting his final thesis, his teachers and fellow students tell me he was a bookworm not known to have the slightest connection with any violent group.
Fearful of how the security forces might react, the local police balked at registering an FIR. While in their captivity, Hafeez will doubtless have been accused of being a foreign agent. Like countless other young Baloch men arbitrarily picked up in the past, he too will be deeply scarred emotionally — and perhaps physically — during this ordeal. One does not even know if he will ever be seen alive again. The mounting sense of Baloch grievance will go up yet another notch.
Pakistan’s external enemies are claimed to be behind its problems of national integration. But those who play secret games under the guise of national security bear far greater responsibility. It is they who made our country suffer so grievously from terrorism between 2001 and 2014. Although inimical foreign powers have undoubtedly sought to inflict hurt, Pakistan’s wounds during that terrible period were largely self-inflicted.
Forcibly disappearing Baloch students won’t eliminate terrorism but will weaken the federation of Pakistan.
In the years following 9/11, terrorist attacks became a daily occurrence once Gen Pervez Musharraf sided with America and joined its so-called war on terror. Earlier, Pakistan had been the Taliban’s principal supporter and, as is well known, that support continued secretly. However, publicly Pakistan had declared itself on the side of the Taliban’s enemy. In retaliating against this perceived betrayal, religiously inspired young boys from madressahs blew themselves up in bazars, hospitals and schools. The establishment, however, claimed all terrorists were either foreigners or foreign supported. The common refrain was: how could killers of Muslims be Muslim?
The loudest advocate of the foreign hand theory was the late Gen Hamid Gul. My first encounter with this famous general was after he addressed an audience sometime around 1998 in the physics auditorium at Quaid-e-Azam University. There he urged Pakistan to lead jihad around the world. During the Q&A session he was flattered at my calling him Adolf Hitler’s brother. We then sparred frequently on various TV channels. My last televised encounter with him was in early 2014, just after a horrendous back-to-back suicide attack some hours earlier. The general declared that the bombers were non-Muslim because they had not been circumcised. He angrily refused to provide proof.
The truth, however, had started leaking out soon after the bloody capture in 2008 of the Swat valley by Mullah Fazlullah’s forces. The powers that be of those times approvingly watched him — and the infamous Mangal Bagh — from a distance. Their U-turn came much later. After the 2014 massacre of 149 children and their teachers at the Army Public School in Peshawar, the denial mode was switched off. Thereafter the Pakistan Army launched Operation Rad-ul-Fasaad. The word ‘fasaad’ is a term strictly used for internal conflict only, not war against an external enemy.
Suddenly Pakistanis began to see TV propaganda video clips of PAF jets pounding targets in North Waziristan, artillery firing into the mountains, or, perhaps, some other celebration of these military operations. You rubbed your eyes in disbelief — how could aircraft of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan bomb Taliban fighters whose stated goal was to establish Pakistan as an Islamic state? How could they ever have been portrayed as non-Muslims?
It took a very long time to admit that Fazlullah’s TTP was actually a Muslim force. Now that the Afghan Taliban government in Kabul continues to harbour and protect the TTP, that delusionary bubble has finally burst. But has it? I don’t know. One day TTP is denounced as India-funded and, on the next, embraced as brothers. The confusion continues.
For now, let’s leave that as it is. What about Balochistan. Where lies the truth? How deep is India’s involvement?
India has certainly not been unaware of Pakistan’s difficulties in Balochistan. As a general rule, whenever a population is angry and alienated, for external enemies to find domestic allies is easy. India believes that Pakistan recruited Kashmiris on India’s side of the LOC to attack Indian security forces. Back in 1971, India could successfully exploit Bengali alienation to cut Pakistan in two. Today, Baloch alienation leads many Indians to talk about Balochistan as an arrow in India’s quiver against Pakistan.
Editorial: Cycle of distrust and disaffection must be broken to deal with renewed insurgency in Balochistan
Indian spymasters Vikram Sood and Ajit Doval, as well as PM Modi, have often spoken about doing a tit-for-tat for perceived Pakistani involvement in Kashmir. Meanwhile strategists like Pramit Pal Chaudhuri suggest the retribution could come through fanning Pakistan’s exaggerated fears of Baloch secession. India should hope, he says, that the Pakistan Army’s angry overreaction to dissent will keep Balochistan aflame.
The abductors of Hafeez Baloch — and of other young missing Baloch men who number in the hundreds — have taken the bait dangled by Pramit Chaudhri and others. Throughout the Baloch community of students in Islamabad, anger and fear run deep. The flagrant violation of Baloch constitutional rights is weakening the national spirit and harming the federation. Before the self-appointed guardians of Pakistan’s security cause further damage to our country through their illegal actions, they must be brought to task.
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist and author.
Published in Dawn, February 26th, 2022
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