THE murder of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti at the hands
of state security forces is both a human and a
national tragedy, with consequences of
unimaginably perilous scale. That such
disproportionate force was used to kill a 79-year
old ailing man and that his bereaved family has
been denied the opportunity to offer their last
respects and accord him a proper burial is
deplorable.

There may be many questions about Akbar Bugti’s
conduct as a tribal leader. Today, however, he
stands tall as a man who forsook the comforts of
his home in Dera Bugti and took up abode in
mountain caves to fight for the rights of his
people. The same cannot be said of many of his
detractors living in the comforts of official
residences and in cantonments and defence housing
schemes in Islamabad, Lahore or Karachi.

The calamity and the sordid handling of the
aftermath reflects General Musharraf’s arrogant
faith in military solutions to the patently
political problems that the country faces,
including those that have been created by the
perpetuation of the current military dictatorship
since October 1999. The generals have certainly
not learnt any lessons from Pakistan’s
unfortunate history of a quarter of a century
ago, nor from the current failure of the world’s
sole superpower to enforce its writ in Iraq, or
of the mighty Israeli army’s failure to write its
agenda in Lebanon.

In 1971, the then generals opted to lay down
their arms before the Indian army rather than
negotiate and arrive at a compromise with the
leaders of the people of the eastern wing of
Pakistan. This attitude appears to be pervasive
even today. And general Musharraf’s
chest-thumping speech in Murree, hurling threats
at the people of Balochistan, as well as of
Pakistan, is likely to stoke more defiance rather
than scare anyone.

The policy drift that the country has suffered
under General Musharraf’s leadership portends
disaster for the country. Questions about the
general’s judgment had arisen immediately after
the inane militarily untenable Kargil
misadventure. He also made a foreign policy
U-turn, hours after the tragedy of 9/11, and
Pakistan shifted from being the most pro-Taliban
country in the world to the most ardent
’terrorist’ busting country in the US camp. The
slogan that was then trumpeted as a rationale for
the U-turn was that Pakistan must come first.

The implications of the principle of this
simplistic justification are disturbing. Extended
further, it could imply that, under external
pressure, the Kashmir cause or the nuclear status
could be abandoned on the grounds that ’Pakistan
has to come first’. After all, it could be
perceivably argued that there can be no struggle
for the freedom of the Kashmiri people if there
was no Pakistan or of what use will the nuclear
arsenal be if there was no Pakistan?

Now General Musharraf has proclaimed that the
writ of the government will be enforced ’at all
costs’. One hopes that ’all costs’ does not imply
that the writ of his government - of questionable
legitimacy - will be imposed even at the cost of
Pakistan. These questions are not frivolous,
given the increasingly apparent absence of any
degree of political intellect in general
Musharraf’s policy decisions. After all, the
legacy of disastrous policy decisions by the
coterie of Generals headed by Yahya Khan did not
provide any assurance of intelligent conduct.
And, given the current military regime’s
paramount and almost exclusive objective of
clinging on to power, there can be no confidence
in the quality of decision-making on national,
regional or international issues.

General Musharraf has tried to present the
conflict in Balochistan as one where a mere three
sardars, out of about 75, are attempting to
sabotage development. The argument holds no
water. Several facts need to be taken into
account. Balochistan is a very heterogeneous
province. The sardari system is a Baloch
institution. Out of 26 districts, one-third of
them in the north/north-east are populated by
Pukhtuns and, as such, not subject to the sardari
system. The system also does not prevail in the
Mekran coast and adjoining districts.

It appears, therefore, that the sardari system is
prevalent only in about one-third of the
districts in the eastern/central part of the
province. This is the part over which up to about
75 sardars are said to hold sway. As such, the
area controlled by the three ’anti-development’
sardars is likely to be rather small. The
question that arises, is: why has development not
blossomed in the rest of the province?

An overview of the development scene in
Balochistan is discomforting and the extent of
relative deprivation in the province is
appalling. Eighteen out of the 20 most
infrastructure-deprived districts in Pakistan are
in Balochistan. The percentage of districts that
are classified as high deprivation stands as
follows: 29 per cent in Punjab, 50 per cent in
Sindh, 62 per cent in the NWFP, and 92 per cent
in Balochistan. If Quetta and Ziarat are
excluded, all of Balochistan falls into the high
deprivation category. And Quetta’s ranking would
fall if the cantonment is excluded from the
analysis. The percentage of population living in
a high degree of deprivation stands at 25 per
cent in Punjab, 23 per cent in urban Sindh, 49
per cent in rural Sindh, 51 per cent in the NWFP,
and 88 per cent in Balochistan.

Measured in terms of poverty, the percentage of
population living below the poverty line stands
at 26 per cent in Punjab, 38 per cent in rural
Sindh, 27 per cent in urban Sindh, 29 per cent in
the NWFP, and 48 per cent in Balochistan. Yet
another stark measure of Balochistan’s relative
deprivation is that while the country boasts of a
50-per cent-plus literacy rate, the same for
rural women in Balochistan is a mere seven per
cent.

Balochistan’s relative decline is also indicated
by provincially disaggregated national accounts
data. Estimates for the period 1973-2000 show
that Punjab alone has increased its share of
national GDP by two percentage points from 52.7
per cent to 54.7 per cent. Sindh - on account of
Karachi - and the NWFP have maintained their
share. Balochistan’s share has declined by nearly
one percentage point from 4.5 per cent to 3.7 per
cent. Resultantly, the annual rate of growth of
per capita GDP has been 2.4 per cent in Punjab
and 0.2 per cent in Balochistan.

Statistics tell only a part of the story. In
fact, given the conditions in Balochistan,
Pakistan’s national statistics do not tell the
full story. This is because no enumerator of the
official statistics collecting department makes
the effort to visit a settlement that is two days
walking distance away. Conditions in such
settlements are so dire that, if half the
children born in a family survive, it is
considered lucky. The absence of such data has
tended to show national statistics in a better
light than it actually is - and has tended to
conceal Balochistan’s real plight.

Apart from chronic underdevelopment, the
insurgency is also a product of the exclusion of
the Baloch from the mainstream national political
process. After all, in the period since
independence to date, how many of the corps
commanders or lieutenant-generals or brigadiers
have been Baloch? How many of the ambassadors or
high commissioners in Pakistan missions abroad
have been Baloch? How many of the federal
secretaries or additional secretaries have been
Baloch? How many of the heads of public
organisations - a la Wapda - have been Baloch?
How many of the heads of the Federation of
Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry have
been Baloch? How many of the members of
Pakistan’s national cricket or hockey teams have
been Baloch? And so on. Perhaps General Musharraf
or his prime minister or his more garrulous
ministers would venture to answer some of the
above questions, at least with respect to the
current situation.

Admittedly, Balochistan’s underdevelopment is a
product of over half a century of exploitation
and neglect. Unfortunately, however, General
Musharraf’s seven years in power has merely seen
an extension of the past record. The fact is
that, not unlike any previous governments, the
Musharraf regime has never had any development
agenda for Balochistan. The few mega projects
that have been undertaken, a la Gwadar, are
actually motivated by strategic considerations.
They are more likely to bypass the local
population and, worse still, turn the Baloch into
a minority in their home province.

The Baloch intelligentsia has seen through
Islamabad’s colonisation game and the general
insurgency is merely a response. The military’s
operation in Balochistan is a counter response,
not to the insurgency per se, but to the
challenge posed to Islamabad’s colonisation
agenda.

Resultantly, the situation is extremely
precarious. With the army possibly embroiled in
Balochistan, the defence of the eastern frontier
is likely to be compromised. There are likely to
be serious impacts on the national economy as
well. Without security across the vast province,
Gwadar port’s planned position as the third port
of the country and a transshipment point for
central Asia and western China will go up in
smoke. So will the under-discussion
Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project. The
rest of the country too will not remain
unaffected. Unlike in the case of East Pakistan,
Balochistan is not a thousand kilometers away.

Given Karachi’s geographical proximity to
Balochistan, the presence of large Baloch
settlements in the city, and the sympathetic
Sindhi nationalist element, any civil war-like
situation in Balochistan will inevitably envelope
Karachi in the theatre of conflict. And, given
that Karachi and neighbouring Port Qasim are the
only seaports of the country and handle the
entire shipping of export and import cargo, the
situation will impact the economy in all parts of
the country.

The postponement of the National Assembly
session, scheduled for March 3, 1971, in Dhaka,
finally snapped the tenuous emotional thread that
had bound the eastern province with the rest of
the country. Today, the killing of Akbar Bugti
has severely frayed the emotional thread linking
Balochistan with Pakistan.

The withdrawal of Baloch nationalist legislators
from the parliamentary process is an ominous
signal that cannot and should not be ignored. If
the damage to the federation is to be repaired,
the military establishment will need to withdraw
from the political, economic and commercial
arenas and a genuinely elected government will
need to take effective charge of the country to
assuage the deep wounds that have been inflicted
on Balochistan.