The words that ended the reign of Mir Khudadad Khan of Kalat were etched in the finest ink of English morals, the nib sharper than any sword. The Empire’s conscience could not condone that the native ruler had castrated two of his slaves, stoned a third man to death, and decapitated five women, all for the theft of Rs 8,500. Fifteen years earlier, in 1877, Khudadad had begged the Viceroy, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, to be recognised as just another Indian prince under the protection of the Empire, not ruler of an independent state. Then, he was taught he was just a feudatory, not a friend.
About 350 train passengers, including upwards of 200 security personnel, are being held this morning near the fly-blown stations of Pehro Kunri near the Bolan Pass. They’re prisoners of the elite Majeed Brigade commandos from the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), who attacked the Jaffar Express on Tuesday. Dozens are feared to have been executed. There has been periodic gunfire, eyewitnesses have told media, but few details have become known.
Khudadad had travelled down the same train line to exile in Loralai. The historian Sardar Khan Baluch would lament: “Khudadad Khan fought for the whole of his life to organise a government. Mahmud Khan II prepared the coffin for the state. And Ahmed Yar, the present Khan, buried all the glory and vanity of his line.”
The BLA’s increasingly violent war seeks to undo the tragic history which led the region’s clans to lose their independence to the British empire, and the nation-state that replaced it. Economic injustice, large-scale immigration from Punjab and other areas, and access to weapons left behind by the United States in Afghanistan, have all fuelled the intensification of the fifth Baloch insurgency, which has simmered on since 2004.
For Pakistan’s military establishment, though, this may be good news. The violence gives the state reason to ignore and brutalise genuine democratic movements for change, represented by figures like Dr Mahrang Baloch, the leader of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC). The BYC’s campaign against extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances has provided the province’s emerging middle class with a new language to assert their rights. Even though Pakistan’s cash-strapped military might not welcome another long insurgency, it is preferable to mass political challenges to its authority.
An uneasy accession
To understand the special place Balochistan has in Pakistan’s strategic imagination is to engage with the tenuous nature of imperial sovereignty on its furthest borders. Fears of a Russian invasion through Afghanistan and the Bolan Pass drove British policy through much of the 19th century, historian TA Heathcote records. The British were, however, reluctant to shoulder the substantial cost of garrisoning the resource-poor region. Thus, its officers sought to cajole and bribe tribal chieftains, or Sardars, to cooperate with their ends.
Encounters between the two sides suggest the Baloch were no simpletons.
“A watch! What’s the good of a watch,” a Sardar demanded to know from Major General Charles Macgregor. “I replied, ‘To tell the time, the time for prayers, for food, etc. He rejoined, ‘Every one knows the time for food, and ought to know the time for prayers, without a watch; which, as far as I can see, is no use at all except to stick by your side.’”
The tribesman eventually concluded: “Two rupees each is better.”
Faced with Britain’s withdrawal from India, the Khan of Kalat, Mir Ahmad Yar Khan, set about negotiating a deal that would leave him in power. The problem, historian Dushka Saiyid explains, is that there were three distinct Balochistans: territories along the Afghan border directly administered by Britain, districts leased from the Khan of Kalat after their annexation in 1884, and the territories still ruled by chieftains. To the withdrawing empire, it was clear that Kalat was not a sovereign entity.
Las Bela, Kharan, and Makran, Kalat’s most important feudatory states, broke ranks, amid (unfounded) rumours that Yar Khan was considering joining India. Even as he committed to acceding to Pakistan, Khan dragged his feet on signing the accession documents. Led by his brother, an armed Lashkar even threatened to go to war.
Then, in 1955, as part of a larger effort to confront ethnic Bengali nationalism, the (Baluchistan States Union) BSU merged into a single West Pakistan. Fears now flared that the Baloch might be overwhelmed by better-educated settlers from elsewhere in Pakistan. This led the Baloch Sardars to begin pushing for autonomy but they ultimately failed to form a united front.
General Ayub Khan’s coup of 1958 closed the doors on political negotiation, and Yar Khan was imprisoned. The legendary anti-British insurgent, Nauroz Khan of the Zarakzai, now took up arms against Pakistan. The old fighter’s group of 1,000, though, was in no position to force secession. Five men from the group, including Nauroz Khan’s son, were later hanged.
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An endless rebellion
Like his predecessors, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was determined to concede no space to Baloch autonomy—despite the experience with Bangladesh. The National Awami Party (NAP), which won post-war provincial elections in Balochistan, irked Bhutto by evicting ethnic Punjabis from the civil services and setting up its own local police force. The NAP government was dismissed on dubious charges of treason, leading to a war that would claim the lives of an estimated 3,300 troops and 5,300 insurgents.
In September 1974, the Pakistan Army used its Iran-provided AH-1 helicopter gunships to strafe Baloch tent settlements in the grazing grounds of Chamalang Valley. As predicted, this drew the insurgents out of the mountain hideouts to protect their families. Forced to retreat from the settlements as their ammunition ran out, the insurgents ended up leading soldiers to their bases in the mountains. The battle of Chamalang led to the destruction of the insurgency in the Marri tribal regions, historian Rizwan Zeb records.
Late in 1975, the Baluch People’s Liberation Front leader Mir Hazar Ramkhani moved the remnants of the insurgency across the border into Afghanistan, developing bases in Kandahar and Kalat Ghilzai, which fed insurgent groups operating from three stations close to the border.
Even as the fighting continued, Pakistan’s government reached out to Balochistan’s tribal elite. Akbar Khan Bugti—later to die leading rebels—was installed as governor of the province. The army made engineers available to construct a network of roads from Kohlu to Maiwand and from Chel to Kahan. The roads allowed the rudiments of modern education and healthcare to enter the region.
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Killing democratic movements
Failure to address Baloch political grievances exploded in 2005. This was crystallised by General Pervez Musharraf’s refusal to prosecute a soldier alleged to have raped a local doctor. Insurgents loyal to Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti—who, in 1973, had lined up against the nationalist insurgents—responded by storming the Sui gasfields. Insurgents also besieged dozens of military outposts scattered across the province. General Musharraf responded with threats: “Don’t push us”, he warned, “It isn’t the 1970s when you can hit and run and hide in the mountains.”
Although Bugti was killed in the fighting which followed, the Baloch insurgency grew deeper roots. The most prominent of the new leadership was Takari Mohammad Aslam. Born in 1975, Aslam emerged from the ranks of a new generation of educated, urbanised young Balochs who stood apart from the region’s traditional tribal structure. Like many of his generation, Aslam harboured a deep resentment against ethnic-Punjabi immigrants in the area, who were claimed to be cornering economic opportunities and arable lands.
In his late teens, Aslam became involved in Baloch nationalist circles. Later, he began attending a study circle led by Khair Baksh Marri, a prominent Left wing Baloch politician who had returned to Pakistan in 1994 after two decades in exile.
The journalist Najam Sethi noted that this alienated “the old non-religious tribal leadership as well as the new secular urban middle classes of Balochistan who [saw] no economic or political space for themselves in the new military-mullah dispensation”.
From around 2000, Aslam joined the BLA, running its first training base in Bolan. The BLA is thought to have drawn in several hundred volunteers—among them, Aslam’s son Rehan, who was killed in the 2018 strike on the Chinese engineers. The organisation, however, proved incapable of mounting a sustained insurgent campaign. In 2006, Aslam led the remnants of the BLA across the border into Pakistan.
BLA leaders, Islamabad has long alleged, began receiving assistance from Afghanistan’s intelligence services—as retaliation against Pakistan’s sponsorship of the Taliban—as well as India’s Research and Analysis Wing. In 2016, Aslam was treated for combat injuries at the Max Hospital in New Delhi’s Saket.
Following the triumph of the Taliban in Kabul, the BLA lost its safe haven in southern Afghanistan, and many believed the insurgent group was about to be consigned to history. Events have shown otherwise.
The Pakistan Army will, almost certainly, see the savage terrorist attack on the train as an opportunity to step up the military pressure. As scholar Farzana Shaikh has noted, though, there’s no guarantee the Pakistan Army will be able to crush the BLA. To the generals, however, besieged by waning political legitimacy in their Punjab heartlands and the new political movements in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, there is no room for engagement.
Finding a political path to accommodate Baloch’s aspirations could pave the way for a different, democratic Pakistan. However, that is a Pakistan in which the generals and their political clients know they would have no space.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
Reading / listening to Mr Swami is wonderful. He manages to connect history, geography and current affairs so beautifully! I searched those places he mentioned on Google Maps and was stunned by the rustic beauty of the Bolan Pass.
Alas, a rapcious army is no solution for a beautiful country.
Hope Baluchistan is able to gain independence and become a tourist magnet for the world’s travellers.