Nobody knows what was in Modi’s mind when he mentioned Balochistan. His comments deeply enraged Pakistan but excited the Baloch nationalists.
The biggest Balochistan story of 2016 was undoubtedly the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s comments on Balochistan days before his country’s Independence Day. Although Pakistan had been blaming India for many years for its alleged support for the ongoing turmoil in Balochistan, it was the first time that a head of the Indian government had publicly used, what the Indian media often describes as, “the ‘B’ word”. In his initial remarks, Modi had asked Pakistan to provide accountability for its actions against the people of Balochistan while he mentioned Balochistan for the second time during his speech on August 15, flaunting that the people of Balochistan had thanked him for his comments.
Modi’s remarks, as expected, triggered severe reactions and condemnation from the Pakistani government and the nationalistic media while Baloch separatists generously lauded his intervention. Pundits incessantly speculated about the motivation behind Modi’s unanticipated use of the Balochistan card and wondered whether he actually cared for the people of Balochistan or had intentionally chosen to do so in an effort to divert attention from the escalated situation in Kashmir. Sardar Akhtar Mengal, a former Balochistan Chief Minister and the president of the Balochistan National Party (BNP), said, “Neither Modi cares for Balochistan nor [Pakistan’s Prime Minister] Nawaz Sharif for Kashmir”, suggesting that leaders of India and Pakistan exploited the struggle of the people of the two volatile regions for their own gains.
Islamabad was obviously provoked by Modi’s mentioning of Balochistan but it was further infuriated because several Baloch leaders and activists openly welcomed his statements and thanked him as well. As a result, a number of government-sponsored anti-India protest rallies were staged in different towns and villages to pretend that the people of Balochistan were absolutely happy and satisfied with the government of Pakistan. Protesters burned Modi’s effigy which was clearly understandable but it was also the first time that the effigy of Baloch nationalist leader Brahamdagh Bugti, president of the pro-free Balochistan political organization, the Baloch Republican Party (BRP), was put on fire. The implicit reason for this blowback was Bugti’s overt appreciation for Modi’s comments. “By saluting Modi,” said Balochistan’s Chief Minister Sanaullah Zehri, “Bugti has proved that he is a traitor.”
At one point, it seemed that remarks by the Indian Prime Minister would have a domino effect as Bangladesh also supported his comments on Balochistan. During his visit to India, Hasanul Haque Inu, the Minister of Information in the Sheikh Hasina government, said Bangladesh was “constitutionally bound to support liberation struggles”, such as that of Balochistan. He promised that his government would soon announce a policy declaration on Pakistan’s human rights abuses in Balochistan. (That never happened).
“Pakistan has a very bad track record as far as addressing aspiration of nationalities is concerned,” said the Bangladeshi minister, “They learnt nothing from the defeat of 1971 and continued to practise the same policy of repression and are now targeting the Baloch nationalists.”
Then came former Afghan President Hamid Karzai to publicly support Modi’s remarks. In an interview with the Hindu on August 19, Karzai said, “In Balochistan there is extreme suffering at the hands of extremists promoted by state structures in Pakistan. Therefore the people’s concerns need to be addressed and aired…Mr. Modi’s comments should make Pakistan’s government see the gravity of the situation.” Karzai had spent several years of his life in Quetta before becoming the President of Afghanistan. This experience had uniquely educated him about Balochistan’s miseries.
On September 14th, India, for the first time, officially made a reference to Balochistan at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). “This [Pakistan] is a country, which has systematically abused and violated the human rights of its own citizens, including in Balochistan,” said Ajit Kumar India’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN. He further said, “Pakistan is characterised by authoritarianism, absence of democratic norms and widespread human rights violations across the country including Balochistan.”
By now, everyone seemed (prematurely) convinced that India had officially decided to make Balochistan an important part of its foreign policy, especially in its dealings with its archival Pakistan. Balochistan was probably going to be the immediately available ammunition for India to counter Pakistan whenever the latter raised the Kashmir issue. After all, Pakistani strategists had been deeply alarmed by the Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval’s earlier warning: “You do one more Mumbai, you lose Balochistan.”
Building on the momentum, on September 16th, Prasar Bharati, India’s largest public broadcasting agency that owns the All India Radio (AIR), launched an upgraded online and mobile service in Balochi language. Surya Prakash, the Prasar Bharati chairman, was quoted by the Press Trust of India (PTI) on the eve of launching the upgraded Balochi website, saying, “as the world’s largest democracy, we have the responsibility to disseminate news and information across the world that is factual and correct…AIR has a lot of goodwill among Balochi (sic) people, who have an emotional attachment and consider it an authentic source of information.”
Although AIR’s Baloch service had existed since 1974, the announcement about the new webpage came at such an explosive time that most Pakistanis embraced the news as if India was launching a Balochi language service for the first time. No matter how small a development this (setting up of the Balochi website) was, Indian publicists did an amazing job in deeply worrying Pakistanis with this initiative. Even one senior British (Broadcasting Corporation) journalist asked me: “The Indians have also set up Baloch websites, radio transmissions and this sort of things. It looks like a long term plan. Is it the intention of India to break up Pakistan by getting the Baloch to be independent?
With this, India raised tremendous false hopes and expectations among the Baloch. Some believed Modi would do for the Baloch what former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had done for the Bengalis back in 1971 leading to East Pakistan’s liberation and the making of Bangladesh.
On September 19, Brahamdagh Bugti announced that he would apply for political asylum in India.
“We have decided that we will formally file asylum papers to Indian Government,” Bugti said, “We will start work on it right away. Will go to Indian embassy and will follow the legal process.”
While several Baloch leaders had already received political asylum in Europe, it would be a very rare case if India accepted the Baloch leader’s request for asylum given the Pakistani government’s hostility toward him and longstanding complaints against India for its alleged support for the Baloch movement. This was seemingly the first big ask from the Baloch to the Indians. Was Modi a man of his words or a mere demagogue? Bugti’s request for asylum put Modi in an inevitable dilemma. The last time India had dealt with a high-profile case of political asylum was in 1959 when it granted asylum to the Dalai Lama. Of course, Bugti was no Dalai Lama but if India accepted Bugti’s asylum application, it would draw extraordinary reaction from the Pakistanis.
When Bugti submitted his asylum application on September 22 at the Indian embassy in Geneva, Pakistan’s Defense Minister, Khwaja Asif, warned the next day that granting asylum to the Baloch leader would “amount to harbouring a terrorist by a state…thus (India) becoming official sponsor of terrorism.” Likewise, Pakistan also threatened that it would send a formal request through the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to Interpol to seek Bugti’s extradition to Pakistan. Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the federal Interior Minister, described Modi’s statements on Balochistan as “interference in Pakistan”, adding that their (Indians’) feelings about Bugti “unmistakably establish who is behind terrorism (in Balochistan).”
Before requesting for asylum in India, Bugti had been waiting in Switzerland for some years for his earlier asylum application to be approved. He had seemingly turned frustrated with the long wait which is typical of asylum cases and the travel restrictions that most asylum applicants have to undergo.
When Anand Chandrasekhar of the Swissinfo.ch had asked Bugti in a July 2015 interview what he found most difficult about life in Switzerland, “Switzerland’s ‘most wanted’ asylum seeker” replied:
“The most difficult thing is waiting for my political asylum request to be processed. I have not received any response from the immigration authorities for the last five years. I cannot travel outside Switzerland. As a politically active person this is very hard for me, as I feel I am not able to do my best for my people by remaining in one country. Even my family cannot travel with me for a vacation.”
The Pakistanis, on the other hand, had a different version of events to describe the Baloch leader’s situation.
For example, on January 15, Pakistan’s Geo Television reported that Swiss immigration authorities had rejected Bugti’s asylum application…”citing Pakistan government’s decision of declaring him a terrorist. The Baloch leader however has been given the right to file an appeal against the decision.”
This news was circulated all over the Pakistani media.
The Express Tribune cited elated Pakistani officials express satisfaction over the Swiss authorities’ reported decision. A mocking provincial Home Secretary, Akbar Hussain Durrai, told the newspaper, “Now the chief commander of BRP has no option but to have meaningful dialogue with Pakistan.”
On March 13th, I had an hour-long interview with Bugti and asked him about his asylum case, he refuted Geo TV’s report and described it as planted story by the Pakistani government. He said he had issued a clarification via Twitter but did not have the time to respond to every “false news” the Pakistani media aired about him.
However, when Bugti announced that he wanted to apply for asylum in India, even some Baloch nationalists raised eyebrows. Hyrbyair Marri, a London-based separatist leader who had been granted political asylum in the United Kingdom in 2011, told the B.B.C. Urdu on September 21 that “unnecessary political asylum in India” by Baloch leaders would not have a good impact on the nationalist movement and Jihadi organizations would take advantage of it. He suggested that preference for political asylum in India should be given to political activists whose lives were immediately at risk in Balochistan and whose asylum cases had been rejected by European governments. When he was asked if he would also consider applying for political asylum in India, Marri, who launched in 2016 the Free Balochistan Movement, said he saw no reason why he would apply for asylum in India when the British government had already granted him asylum.
Days after his interview with the BBC, Marri said in another interview on September 25 that he too could consider seeking political asylum in India if the United Kingdom turned hostile toward him. He admitted that “Britain is increasingly coming under the influence of Pakistan, especially on the issue of Balochistan.” He said he would seek asylum from India or the U.S. or some other “reasonable country that is not under Pakistani influence” if the U.K. decided to hand him over to Pakistan or create difficulties before him.
As Bugti filed his asylum case and awaited a decision for his application, the Indian government took the issue of “brutality against the Baloch people” to the United Nations General Assembly on September 26th. This too was an unprecedented diplomatic move by India. Shusma Swaraj, India’s External Affairs Minister, said:
“The Prime Minister of Pakistan used this podium to make baseless allegations about human rights violations in my country. I can only say that those accusing others of human rights violations would do well to introspect and see what egregious abuses they are perpetrating in their own country, including in Balochistan. The brutality against the Baloch people represents the worst form of State oppression.”
This was going to be the last use the ‘B’ word by the Indians on such a high level in 2016.
Nafees Zakaria, the spokesman of Pakistan’s Foreign Office, renounced Swaraj’s statement at the U.N. and described the reference to Balochistan as a violation of U.N. principles and the international law.
It is unclear why the Indians suddenly stopped talking about Balochistan with the same passion and persistence as they had done in August and September. During this period, the Baloch issue gained enormous attention in the Indian media and several television channels, newspapers and magazines published and aired in-depth reports about Balochistan. These reports helped in educating the Indian public about the conflict in Balochistan but India did could not take Balochistan to the next level with the same commitment that Pakistan had shown toward Kashmir for decades. Several writers and analysts wrote articles comparing Balochistan with Kashmir.
One reason why the Indians held back was probably the public display of infighting among Baloch leaders, lack of vision and strategy as to how they could take maximum advantage of the momentum Modi’s remarks had created.
In October, Baloch activist Naela Quadri, who had received remarkable attention in the Indian media and public policy circle during an earlier visit in May, announced plans to form a Baloch government in exile. Even pro-independence Baloch leaders from other parties wasted no time in neutralizing her.
Brahumdagh Bugti vetoed her plans saying Qadri did not represent the Baloch people.
“Naila Qadri is not representing Baloch People, rather than supporting they are damaging Baloch cause by their insane actions(sic),” he said on Twitter, “Government in exile is a national issue and National issues cannot be announced without national consensus.”
Khalil Baloch, head of the Baloch National Movement (BNM), said Qadri’s efforts to form a government in exile were meant to gain media attention. He asked, “How can an individual form a government in exile? Such matters are decided with consensus.”Another Baloch activist Mehran Marri called her “arrogant” and who “proclaims herself as ‘Durga Maa’.” He warned, “Indian media should understand, she does not represent #Balochistan.”
If Qadri’s initiative lacked the desired consensus, why didn’t all stakeholders in the Baloch movement sit down to develop that desired consensus? Apparently, disunity among the Baloch was the main cause for their failure to capitalize on an opportunity created by the Modi government. Due to these shortcomings, they had previously failed to take advantage of another opportunity offered by a 2012 hearing on Balochistan at the U.S. Congress. Balochistan has become an important issue that the United States, India or any other country can take advantage of whenever they need to embarrass or blackmail Pakistan. However, due to lack of unity, Baloch nationalists have not been able to use their movement in their own favor on the international arena.
In an interview with the BBC Hindi, Qadri, while responding to the criticism from fellow Baloch leaders, pushed back saying that it was imprudent on the part of fellow leaders to publicly state their differences. This, she said, would undermine the Baloch national interests.
“It is not a fight about representation. It is not a fight as to who will be [Independent] Balochistan’s Prime Minister or whose photo will be printed on Balochistan’s bills. The real challenge for all of us at this point is to give up our differences, unite on one page to end the ongoing genocide of the Baloch and win our freedom,” she proposed.
Afterward, Modi did not speak of Balochistan again. Bugti still awaits India’s verdict on his asylum request. Qadri faces the monumental challenge of uniting all factions of the Baloch movement and forming the government in exile. Islamabad continues to believe India is fueling the Baloch unrest. 2016 will be remembered as the year when India officially raised the Baloch issue at the United Nations. We will probably know in 2017 or in coming years if all this even meant anything to the Baloch movement.
http://www.balochhal.com/2016/12/20/balochistan-2016-year-end-review-part-ii-modis-balochistan-gamble/
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