Editorial:THE FRONTIER POST
Amid great fanfare has the PML (N) steered through the Punjab Assembly a resolution in support of its head honcho Mian Nawaz Sharif’s recent confabulations with Sardar Attaullah Mengal, which statedly focused on “compensation of the past injustices done to the people of Balochistan and steps to bring them in the national mainstream”. Yes, a huge raw deal has been dealt to our compatriots of Balochistan over the time by every successive central government and no stone must be left unturned to make amends to this colossal injustice done to them. But wasn’t Nawaz himself very much part of that terrible injustice dispensation? He was the prime minister twice and has an empty slate to show for the redress of the Balochs’ grief or for Balochistan’s progress during his two power stints. Wasn’t it he who himself had engineered the fall of Mengal’s scion Akhtar’s ministry in Balochistan in his second power stint at the centre? Akhtar’s grouse was very legitimate. He was sour, and very rightly so, for being kept in complete dark about the 1998 nuclear tests, when the testing site of Chagai was right on his domain. Was he not a Pakistani and a patriot, trustworthy to be taken aboard? He should have been told but told he was not. At least, he could have taken care of the residents of the area in and around the testing site, who were driven out from their homes before the tests and then left to wander about in the wilderness, like forsaken animals, unattended, all alone, and out in the open to fend for themselves. Not even had Nawaz bothered making him part of his gaudy show he enacted in Lahore to “celebrate” Pakistan’s nuclear accomplishment. When Akhtar spoke out, instead of trying mitigating his valid grouse, an angry Nawaz pulled down his government with an engineered no-confidence assembly device. Then with what face was he talking of injustices and compensations to Balochistan’s people to Attaullah and with what trust was the elderly Mengal chewing up his stinking hogwash? Anyway, that is between the two of them. But Balochistan’s people are yet to know if ever he had had some plan to alleviate their unenviable doleful predicament or for developing their ever-neglected province. Not even a plaque of his they see on any development works in the province; nor do they remember him for launching any scheme for their wellbeing. Balochistan’s mountains and plains and it deserts and valleys bear no sign at all of his any interest in the province or its people. He built a grand motorway between Lahore and Islamabad, which was not really needed any pressingly as existing roadways were more than enough. The precious billions that he consumed up on this unneeded showpiece he could have spent on indispensably-needed roads and expressways in Balochistan, but he did not. He built to Lahore airport a grand terminal building when the existing one could easily do, but thought of no plans to give Balochistan’s residents some adequate air travelling facilities. While he toyed frantically with constructing a controversial Kalabagh dam, he even didn’t fiddle with giving even a medium-size waterworks to Balochistan. Not known is he either for any real interest in exploiting the province’s tremendous mineral wealth for its progress and its residents’ prosperity. No university or institution of higher learning or professional education for the benefit of the province’s youths he established, as has done the military now. Not even had he bothered giving Balochistan’s younger generation some institutes for technical education to become respectable earning hands for very many a family. It is the army that has done it, too. It is really so disgusting hearing him of talking of injustices and compensations in Balochistan when he all through his power spells was so neglectful of its development needs and its residents’ urgent wants. He really sounds so sham, so fake and so unconvincing. Clearly, it is all politics he is doing, but shamefully on our Baloch compatriots’ deep gore and their painful sore, in inflicting of which he had had no lesser a part.He asks for bringing Nawab Akbar Bugti’s killers to justice. Yes, no violent killing must go unpunished. But why he keeps mum on mutilated and bullet-riddled corpses chilling the province’s air with intense human grief, anguish and dread? Is it because that continuing brutal slaughter of the Baloch commoners doesn’t promise him getting his bete noire Pervez Musharraf while the late Nawab’s does? And why is he asking no questions about the hands behind the Punjabi settlers’ ethnic cleansing in the province and target killings of its Urdu-speaking residents? Is it because he senses no profitable politics there for him? And he speaks not of the woes of the province’s huge community of Pakhtuns. Is it because he sees no brownie points there, too?The people of Balochistan do need a balm, definitely not trickery or dirty politicking, if Nawaz could understand.
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