From his palace balcony, the Sultan of Muscat and Oman watched his slaves swim in the pool below, amusing himself by occasionally shooting at the fish near their bodies. Tiring sometimes of this murderous entertainment, a visiting correspondent recorded, Sheikh Said bin Taimur passed the time by sexually assaulting young girls and torturing his servants. Educated at Mayo College in Ajmer, and a habitué of London’s Dorchester Hotel, Taimur ensured his people remained backward. In 1970, the sultanate had 75 per cent infant mortality and 5 per cent literacy. Together with magazines and books, spectacles were banned, to make sure.
Late in 1957, a top-secret letter arrived in London, warning Prime Minister Harold McMillan that Taimur was taking time between rape, torture, and murder to design a plan that would mean war. A covert defence treaty that would see the coastal enclave of Gwadar handed over to India.
Ethnic Baloch crime cartels, the four-page intelligence dossier annexed to Prime Minister Huseyn Suhrawardy’s now-declassified letter alleged, were conspiring with “Indian Hindus and Arab smugglers” to ruin Pakistan. Taimur allowed Gwadar cartels to flood Karachi with smuggled gold and consumer goods, hollowing out the value of the Pakistani rupee. Employees of Pakistani origin were being “replaced by Madrassi and Gujerati Hindus”. An Indian diplomat was soon to be appointed Gwadar’s governor.
“Throughly half-baked,” foreign secretary Mirza Osman Ali Baig privately admitted when he was confronted about the intelligence reports. “He knew this was nonsense,” the United Kingdom’s High Commissioner in Karachi, Morrice James, recorded. The country’s top leadership, though, went along with the spies’ lies—with consequences that are still working to push Pakistan deeper into the abyss.
For weeks now, Pakistani troops have been facing off against protestors in Gwadar, who are demanding accountability for the thousands of extra-judicial killings and disappearances that have taken place during Pakistan’s long counter-insurgency in Balochistan. Led by the activist Mahrang Baloch, the protestors have also been demanding Gwadar residents receive equitable compensation for China-funded development projects.
Like they did in 1957, Pakistani officials have been hinting the protestors are tied to a pro-India plot, run by the Research and Analysis Wing. Though R&AW would be guilty of incompetence if it didn’t have ties with Baloch rebels, there’s little evidence that India is fuelling the deep political anger in the province. The maniacal conspiratorialism of Pakistan’s intelligence services is once again pushing the country’s leadership to make disastrous missteps.
A land without borders
“Gwadur has failed to kill Lieutenant Mockler for four years,” wrote colonial General Charles McGregor when he arrived in the village on New Year’s Day in 1887. “So of course that officer praises it.”
“The only materials for a landscape,” the General complained, “are a glaring, glittering, glabrous sea for a background, a shining, sandy plain for mid-distance, and bare volcanic hills for the background.” Then, he reflected: “There is no man so bad that some woman won’t speak up for him, and no place so bad on this earth that someone won’t speak up for it.”
The many peoples who lived along the Makran coast inhabited a world without frontiers: Traffickers and traders, pirates and fishermen, mercenaries and defeated rebels all coexisted. From the coastal villages, small vessels carried fish, wool, weapons, mercenaries and slaves to great ports like Hormuz and Muscat.
Luís de Almeida, the Portuguese naval admiral, burned down homes and ships in Pasni and Gwadar in 1581 to punish villagers who supported pirate raids on his fleet, historian Willem Floor records—but the region just didn’t generate enough revenue for empires to spend money occupying it.
Folk epics of the Baloch describe heroic resistance against the Portuguese, led by the chieftain Mir Hammal Jiand. “In mourning for Mir Hammal,” the historian Sabir Badal Khan writes, “Baloch women still do not wash their heads or comb their hair on Saturdays.”
Then, in 1784, Sultan bin Ahmad al-Bu’Saidi fled to Makran after a failed coup directed at his father’s rule over Muscat. The rebel prince was granted the jagir, or land grant, of Gwadar, gaining permission to gather half its revenues from Nasir Ahmad, the Khan of the Baloch kingdom of Kalat. The jagir might have been intended to be temporary, but a string of Omani forts manned with mercenaries made it permanent.
For much of the 19th century, the Persian empire and imperial Britain became locked in a struggle for power with Kalat, local chiefs and Gwadar’s Omani rulers. Even though Britain emerged as the preeminent power, scholar Mikiyo Koyagi has noted that territorial control of Balochistan continued to be fractured.
Local chieftains simply ignored new laws on cross-border smuggling. From the 1930s, as Sikh truck drivers from India pioneered land routes through Balochistan, the scale of trafficking grew dramatically. Silver coins, silk, dried fruits, and nuts were frequently smuggled out of Iran. Liquors, machine parts and opium flowed into Persia in return for silver and silk.
The making of a province
Faced with Britain’s withdrawal from India, the Khan of Kalat, Mir Ahmad Yar Khan Ahmadzai, set about negotiating a deal that would leave him in power. To encourage states like Kashmir and Hyderabad, the leader of the Muslim League, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, offered to recognise Kalat as an independent State. Kalat would have to surrender its foreign policy, communication and defence to the central government, but the Khanate would retain local power—much as Kashmir did.
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 then, territories still ruled by chieftains, like Kalat. The British, thus, insisted Kalat was neither independent nor sovereign.
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 Pakistan, though, Khan dragged his feet on signing the accession documents. Then, in July 1948, an armed Lashkar led by his brother, returned home to skirmish with the Pakistan army. The fighting did not last long — the Khan’s palace was strafed by two combat jets, bringing the long-drawn accession of Balochistan to an end.
From 1950, British foreign office records show, Karachi moved to cut off all access to the Gwadar enclave, setting up border and customs outposts, hoping to force Taimur’s hand. Even though Pakistan finally succeeded in buying the territory, it merely acquired a stage for new conflicts to play out. From 1958, local leaders began opposing the so-called One Unit scheme, which the provinces of East and West Pakistan into single administrative blocs. Left-wing groups went to war again in 1962, seeking revenue from the Sui gas fields.
Fighting blew up again after the India-Pakistan war of 1971, scholar Adeel Khan has recorded. The National Awami Party, or NAP, which won post-war provincial elections in Balochistan, irked Prime Minister Bhutto by evicting ethnic Punjabis from the civil services and setting up its own local police force.
In 1973, the Pakistani intelligence agencies raided Iraq’s diplomatic mission in Islamabad and seized a caché of 300 weapons President Saddam Hussein intended to send to Baloch rebels inside Iran. The NAP government was dismissed on dubious charges of treason, leading to a war that claimed the lives of an estimated 3,300 troops and 5,300 insurgents.
Imprisoned by fear
To shore up Pakistan’s strategic security in the province, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto pitched the construction of a naval base at Gwadar to the United States. President Richard Nixon declined to bite, former diplomat Dennis Kux has written, with his National Security Council concluding the project risked being a “white elephant” that would irk the Soviet Union and India without greatly contributing to American naval security. The same proposal, political scientist Alex Vantakas notes, had been made to the Soviet Union in 1972 and was also dismissed.
Fresh violence exploded again under General Pervez Musharraf’s regime in 2006. This time, the Pakistan Army turned to China for help—and seemed to get it, with a promise of over $50 billion in investments for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, linking Xinjiang’s cities with Gwadar.
Eight years ago, when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif watched trucks load the first cargo ship to arrive at Gwadar, he promised “the dawn of a new era”. The port has remained resolutely loss-making though, journalist Kira Schacht writes. China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) funds have gone into power plants and roads that have drowned Islamabad in debt but don’t help produce goods it can export.
The other great CPEC project, a Gwadar-China oil pipeline, now resembles a pipe dream. For 250,000 barrels of oil to be transported through a pipeline traversing the Karakoram, independent estimates suggest, would impose losses of over $10 billion a year compared with shipments sent by sea.
The increasingly-crazed Taimur was chased into his room by his guards in 1970 and threatened with incineration if he refused to abdicate. The British-backed coup brought his son, Qaboos bin Said al-Said, who ushered in a new era of reform and economic liberalisation. Hindu traders from Gujarat were even granted citizenship, going on to become key figures in finance, retail and logistics.
Left alone, freewheeling Gwadar might have organically expanded its deep ties with the Persian Gulf, growing into the Hong Kong or Shenzhen Pakistan desires. Imprisoned by the imagination of its intelligence services, though, Pakistan has proved unable to move beyond strategies of coercion and control.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)