Baloch Nationalism: Aims and Potential.

Baloch Nationalism and the Geopolitics of Energy Resources: The Changing Context of Separatism in Pakistan. Authored by Dr. Robert J. Wirsing.

The Baloch nationalist movement is not a unitary
force. Neither in its leadership nor in its tactics and
goals does it speak with one voice. For some Baloch
nationalists, the horizon of nationalism does not extend
much beyond the boundary of a single tribal identity—
Marri or Bugti, for instance. For others, the horizon
embraces all of the 70-odd Baloch tribes resident
within or near the borders of Balochistan. Some Baloch
nationalists demand complete independence. Most,
hailing the 1973 Constitution as a workable basis for a
reconstructed and strengthened federalism, limit their
aspirations to greater autonomy. Anti-state violence has
been the chosen tactic of some. For the great majority, a
remedy of grievances has been sought mainly through
established state institutions. Notwithstanding these
differences, however, there is virtually no chance that
the problems confronting Islamabad arising from the
current resurgence of Baloch nationalism can be swept
aside.
The actual scale of the present Baloch rebellion is
a matter of considerable controversy, not only with
regard to the number of tribesmen under arms but also
to the number of tribes directly involved, the amount
of damage they have inflicted, and their degree of
success in maintaining control over significant swaths
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of provincial territory. Fueling the controversy is the
fact that much of Balochistan is inaccessible and off
limits to news media representatives and independent
observers. That has made reliable and verified
information about the fighting there extremely hard to
come by. There are huge differences, for instance, in the
estimates given of the number of tribesmen currently
in rebellion. One close observer has claimed that the
Bugti tribe alone has as many as 10,000 tribesmen
under arms.36 A leading English-language newspaper
in Islamabad, The Nation, quoted President Musharraf
as having told a gathering of Pakistan Muslim
League-Quaid-i-Azam(PML-Q) leaders on March 26,
2005, that the Bugti, Marri, and Mengal tribal chiefs
commanded private armies of 7,000, 9,000, and 10,000
men, respectively.37 Spokesmen for the Pakistan army
interviewed by the author in early 2007 ridiculed such
figures, insisting instead that to label the sporadic and
often desultory acts of violence as an insurgency was
itself fundamentally misleading.
A senior police bureaucrat in an off-the-record
interview with the author at the same time put the
figure of full-time fighters for the entire insurgency
at no more than 1,000.38 According to him, the Baloch
militants are “not a structured army or organization.”
The so-called Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and
Balochistan Liberation Force (BLF), he said, are “myths
[existing] only on paper.” In fact, he claimed, only two
tribes, the Marris and the Bugtis, are responsible for
most of the violence; and only one of them, the Marris,
is a major problem. The third of the trio of historically
troublesome tribes, the Mengals, have few tribesmen
under arms, he added, and generally offer little but
moral encouragement to the militants. This means that
the insurgency, in this official’s view, is a serious law23
and-order problem in only two of the province’s 27
districts, and only a minor vexation elsewhere.
The government’s estimates of the rebels’ manpower
have waxed and waned over time depending
on circumstances and the government’s immediate
political desire either to over- or understate the
problem’s magnitude. Minimizing the number of rebels
suits Islamabad’s present understandable objective to
have Balochistan seen by potential foreign investors in
the mega-projects discussed above as a good place to
invest. But such a picture is almost certainly excessively
sanguine. Many well-positioned and knowledgeable
individuals among the author’s interlocutors, while
freely admitting the relative narrowness of the
insurgency’s immediate tribal and territorial base,
insisted that severe alienation from the Pakistan state
was spreading rapidly to the province’s urban areas
and to growing numbers of educated Baloch youths.
That trend, unless reversed, would, of course, give the
nationalist movement an entirely different and much
more threatening coloration. Given the fairly massive
scale achieved by the 1970s insurrection, Islamabad
is in no position to be complacent over the present
rebellion’s currently more limited dimensions.
Baloch nationalism has deep roots in Pakistan. In
fact, alienation from the state has been a constant in
Pakistan’s post-independence history ever since 1948
when the country’s fledgling military, faced with
an independence movement in Kalat in southern
Balochistan, forceably annexed the principality. In the
years since, indigenous alienation has from time to
time led to renewed rebellion, as in the 1970s with the
eruption of a full-scale insurgency so well described
in the pages of Selig Harrison’s book. While no Baloch
rebellion has extended to the entire province or
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succeeded in mobilizing more than a handful of the
Baloch tribes that dwell there, distrust of the Punjabdominated
central government and festering discontent
with the political order fostered over the years by that
government are very widely shared among the Baloch.
They constitute a nearly inexhaustible source of fuel
for the nationalist agenda.39
There is, in fact, powerful evidence that Balochistan
has not fared well at all in Pakistan’s political order. For
instance, a recent and methodologically sophisticated
study that disaggregated Pakistan’s gross domestic
product (GDP) into its provincial components for
the years 1972-73 to 1999-2000—a period of 28
years—found that the Punjab alone of the country’s
four provinces had seen its share of national GDP
rise. The North West Frontier Province (NWFP) had
managed merely to maintain its share while Sindh
and Balochistan provinces saw theirs reduced by
about 1 percentage point each—in Balochistan’s case
falling from 4.5 to 3.7 percent. The figures looked even
more dismal, moreover, when broken out in terms of
per capita GDP. In the Punjab, per capita GDP rose
annually in the period surveyed by about 2.4 percent,
in the NWFP by 2.2 percent, in Sindh (even with the
country’s industrial colossus of Karachi included) by
only 1.7 percent, and in Balochistan by a miserable 0.2
percent. “The results,” observed study authors Kaiser
Bengali and Mahpara Sadaqat, “tend to confirm earlier
evidence of an emerging north-south economic divide
in the country.” They also concluded, somewhat
despairingly, that “on the whole, Balochistan
appears—at best—to remain trapped in a low-level
equilibrium and—at worst—regressing further into
under-development.”40
Baloch leaders have been arguing for years
that turning the situation around required, among
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other things, an overhaul of the rules governing
intergovernmental fiscal relations—including both
those pertaining to how the central government shares
the divisible pool of tax revenues with the provinces (the
so-called “vertical” distribution), and those pertaining
to how the provincial share is divided up among the
four provinces (the so-called “horizontal” distribution).
There is apparent agreement among the provinces that
the provincial share in the vertical distribution, now
set at 47.5 percent of revenue collected, should be set at
50 percent.
However, where the Baloch are most adamant
about the need for change, and where there is as yet
no consensus among the provinces, is in the area of
horizontal distribution. As it now stands, revenues are
distributed among the provinces in accord with a strict
per capita population criterion. This formula finds
favor in the Punjab, and to some extent also in Sindh
and the NWFP. It means, of course, that Balochistan,
with just short of 5 percent of the country’s population,
inevitably gets a very small share of the pie. Possessing,
on the other hand, 43.6 percent of the country’s area,
with the unique costs entailed thereby, along with an
exceptionally low level of development, Balochistan,
say its advocates, requires a different distributional
formula.
One such formula, proposed by the renowned
economist Mahbub ul Haq, would adjust the provincial
population weight in accord with a complicated formula
involving a number of factors—the income level of each
province, the disparity of physical infrastructure and
social services, and differences in fiscal discipline and
revenue-generating effort.41 Another approach offers
an Inverse Population Density (IPD) formula, in which
the size of the province is given due weight.42 All such
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formulas are premised on the reasonable conviction
that population, while obviously the simplest criterion,
is “not always a reasonable approximation of need,”
and that Pakistan should not remain wedded to a
conflict-generating criterion that has long since been
abandoned by other countries, including India.43
Obviously, not all Baloch grievances can be as
readily addressed as by adoption of an alternative
revenue distribution formula. Baloch leaders have
for many years claimed, in particular, that they are
being demographically displaced and marginalized
in their own province, the reasons for which will be
discussed below. While reliable population figures in
regard to Balochistan’s ethno-linguistic composition
are notoriously hard to come by, demographic
circumstances and trends in the province lend this
claim strong support. Pakistan’s fifth and most recent
national census taken in 1998 reported a total national
population of 132.3 million. Of that, Balochi-speakers
accounted for 3.57 percent, or around 4.72 million.
Roughly 3.59 million of these Balochi-speakers
(2.71 percent of the national population) resided in
Balochistan. The population of Balochistan province
itself was given as 6.5 million (4.96 percent of the national
population). Baloch (including the Brahui dialect),
the language of the province’s titular ethnicity,
was given as the mother tongue of 54.7 percent of
the provincial population; Pashtu, the language of
the second largest group, the Pashtuns, of about 29.6
percent.44
Language data from the 1972 census were
never published; and in the census taken in 1981,
language data were collected on a household rather
than individual basis, frustrating intercensus and
intergroup comparisons. The 1998 figures themselves,
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in any event, are not taken as fully authoritative, even
in official quarters. For instance, in a briefing in 2005
given by the Home Secretary of Balochistan to members
of the Parliamentary Committee on Balochistan, the
province’s ethnic composition was said to be 45 percent
Baloch and 38 percent Pashtun.45
Two important facts should be kept in mind with
regard to Baloch demography. One is that many
Pakistani Baloch, 23.9 percent of the total if we
extrapolate from the figures above, live outside of
Balochistan, especially in Sindh. The second is that the
Baloch may already be a minority in Balochistan, and,
even if one chooses to accept the official census figures,
they are almost certainly heading in that direction. One
reason for this is that more than a quarter-century of
nearly continuous warfare in neighboring Afghanistan
has resulted in the influx into Balochistan’s northern
districts of hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees,
most of them Pashtuns. Many of them are expected to
remain there, substantially augmenting the province’s
already formidable Pashtun minority. Another reason
is that the development of Gwadar is almost certain
to result eventually in a huge influx—estimates run as
high as 5 million—of non-Baloch into the province’s
southern reaches. Sandwiched as they are between
these two seemingly inexorable immigrations, the
Baloch have good cause for worry.
The fact is that modernization, globalization,
Pakistan’s steadily rising population, and the massive
forces of change unleashed by economic development
are threatening to leave the Baloch far behind. They are
among the poorest, least educated, and least urbanized
of Pakistan’s population; and they are too easily passed
over or pushed aside in the highly competitive social
and economic environments now gaining traction in
Pakistan. This is in part, of course, a structural problem,
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not lending itself readily to policy manipulation. But
these circumstances did not arise unassisted by the
government, whose policies have almost never been
designed to give serious attention to Baloch problems.
One final facet of Balochistan’s contemporary
situation impacting heavily on the aims and potential
of Baloch nationalism is best described as the militarystrategic
environment encircling the province. By this,
I mean that the present insurgency is taking place
amid circumstances that, by any reckoning, merit
classification as among the most unstable, violent, and
turbulent on the planet. In neighboring Afghanistan,
there is a bloody war in progress involving the armed
forces of many nations, with no end in sight. The spillover
effects into Balochistan—in the form, for instance,
of the province’s harboring of fugitives from the
fighting or its provision of sanctuary or training camps
for forces hostile to the U.S.-led coalition forces46—
have already turned Balochistan into something akin
to a second front in the Afghanistan war. On August
12, 2007, Pakistan’s President Musharraf made the
surprising admission at a major tribal gathering in
Kabul that Afghan militants were indeed getting
support from Pakistani soil.47
Observers often name the provincial capital,
Quetta, as the chief haunt of al-Qaeda and Neo-
Taliban chieftans. Pakistan routinely accuses India
of using its consulates in both Afghanistan and Iran
for the dispatch of covert agents in aid of the Baloch
rebels.48 Speculation is rife about which “foreign hand”
is currently most busily engaged in Balochistan in the
dirty business of arms supply, espionage, sabotage, and
assassination. In regard to the assassination of Chinese
engineers in Balochistan, in particular, responsibility
has been variously assigned, in addition to the Baloch
militants, to a grand assortment of agents, including
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the “Uighurs from the Uighur diaspora in Pakistan,”49
and the governments of India, Iran, Afghanistan, the
United Arab Emirates, Russia, and even the United
States. One conspiracy-obsessed published narrative,
blithely passing over a host of contradictions, offered
the unlikely thesis that Baloch nationalism’s most
potent international support was coming from a U.S.-
Russia-India intelligence triad whose diverse motives
somehow converged in Balochistan!50
While the larger part of this speculation about
foreign covert activities in Balochistan must be taken
with more than a pinch of salt, the ample record of
such activities in this part of the globe merits serious
attention. Pakistan has plenty of antagonists in the
region; and the Baloch insurgency, after all, can readily
serve more ends than those of the Baloch themselves.