Is it a viable paradigm of leadership for long silences to alternate with brief interludes of chest-thumping bravado? As he wrapped up an all-party meeting on the crisis in Kashmir on August 12, conciliation seemed far from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s mind. Days of civil unrest had been met by unrelenting curfew. Defiant crowds coming out to assert their ownership over Kashmir’s streets had encountered brutal retaliatory force. The 60 deaths or more through six weeks of curfew were proportionately, over twice the toll exacted by four months of turmoil in 2010.

The Prime Minister was unmoved. As he brought out a litany of statistics on seizures of weapons in Kashmir, the intent was clearly to pin blame entirely on Pakistan’s perfidy. Parts of Kashmir that Pakistan holds (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir or PoK in the Indian discourse), Modi warned, remained in India’s line of sight. And then came the game changer: “The time has come when Pakistan shall have to answer to the world for the atrocities committed by it against people in Balochistan and PoK”.

This was not a barb hurled in pique. A strategic intent became apparent a few days later at the PM’s customary Independence Day address from Delhi’s Lal Qila. Independence for India he said, was an occasion to acknowledge the “people of Balochistan, Gilgit, (and) Pakistan Occupied Kashmir” who had extended their thanks to him for advocating their cause. This was “an honour” for all Indians.

For Pakistan, Modi’s professions over human rights in Balochistan were an open admission of India’s abetment of recent insurgent violence. The Karachi-based newspaper Dawn , a voice of moderation in Pakistan, deplored the provocative language, which it said, would escalate the damage. The August 7 bombing in a hospital in Balochistan’s capital city of Quetta had been pinned on India by some among Pakistan’s security establishment. But the Pakistan Foreign Office had, in a bid to cool tempers, offered talks with India soon afterwards.

That was not to be, Dawn regretted, since Modi had in “an extraordinary and premeditated verbal attack”, questioned Pakistan’s “control of a sovereign part of its territory, the very territory that Pakistan alleges India is interfering in”.

Modi’s Balochistan excursus earned an effusive welcome from Brahamdagh Bugti, leader of a party that has been in a state of war with Pakistan for over a decade at least. Scion of a feudal family of Balochistan, Bugti has lived in exile — first in Afghanistan and then reportedly in Switzerland — since 2006 when his grandfather, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, was killed in a rocket strike by the Pakistan Army.

In a work of anthropology published in 1967, Akbar Bugti was recorded to have carried out his first murder at the age of 12. In his own words: “The man annoyed me. I have forgotten what it was about now, but I shot him dead. I’ve a rather nasty temper you know, but under tribal law, it wasn’t a capital offence, and in any case as the eldest son of the chieftain I was perfectly entitled to do as I pleased.”

In more mature years, Akbar Bugti was appointed governor when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto headed the Federal Government and launched a large-scale military crackdown on an incipient Baloch nationalist movement. At some point, Akbar Bugti sought a separate truce with two other feudal chieftains (or “sardars”), Attaullah Mengal and Khair Baksh Marri. As recorded by Sherbaz Khan Mazari, another of the feudal chieftains that Pakistan abounds in, Mengal and Marri were willing at the time to go to Bugti’s estate for the negotiations, “but rejected outright the notion of visiting the Governor’s House”. Both Mengal and Marri were sardars and would not scruple over visiting an enemy in his tribal fief. But to be seen in supplication to a symbol of Pakistan’s federal authority was beyond imagination.

Akbar Bugti has since pursued active blood feuds with the Marri and others among Balochistan’s stellar line-up of feudal clans. His arrangement with the Federal Government went through ups and downs in accordance with the share he was granted in the province’s rich mineral and energy resources. Breaking point may have been reached early this century, when Pakistan began planning large-scale extractive programmes in Balochistan, several involving its most vital strategic partnership with China.

Balochistan has close to half of Pakistan’s land area, but only eight per cent of its population. It has historically been disadvantaged in the share it has been granted in national revenues. A better deal was crafted by a parliamentary committee headed by federal senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed in 2005, but remained unimplemented because of conflicting demands from the provincial sardars.

Bugti stepped up since to volunteer as India’s man in the Balochistan fight. But the struggle of the Baloch sardars for a share in the mineral wealth has remained distinct from the larger peoples’ cause, where the diverse population of the province, including its Pashtu and Hazara element, have vital stakes and perhaps a rather different attitude towards Pakistan’s federal authority.

Iran is unlikely again to sit back and watch India pursue its great game, since it has a substantial Baloch population in neighbouring provinces and fears a possible spillover that the west could exploit. Most acute are likely to be Chinese anxieties, since Balochistan is a vital link in its plan to access the trade routes of the Indian Ocean.

The expedition into this frontier of covert action has so far been cost-free for India because it has preserved the vital attribute of deniability. In flailing for a response to its own troubles in Kashmir, it may now have lost that fig-leaf.

Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in Gurgaon

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW