Nawaz’s foolhardiness

Editorial:THE FRONTIER POST

Why is Mian Nawaz Sharif so hell-bent on sprinkling bags of salt on the open wounds of the deprived, denied and wronged Baloch people with his perfidious talk and poking fun at their nagging woes by playing brazenly dirty opportunistic politics on their colossal grief? He has been posing foxily as if he had had no part in the injustices inflicted on the Baloch people in spates whereas he too has been very much part of the centre-sardar nexus that has kept the Baloch commoners so callously caged in penury and backwardness, keeping them from coming into their own and stifling their very spirit and grit to be the masters of their will and vote. He was part of the problem in the past; he is part of the problem even now. No part of the solution has he ever been. He speaks for sardars, who are part of the problem; not of commoners, who actually are part of the solution.
He befriends sardars; and means them, not the commoners, when he speaks of the Balochs’ tragic predicaments. No wonder, his self-serving talk warms up the rapacious sardars’ hearts; it nauseates the suppressed and oppressed commoners they hold in their tight strangleholds. Yet not any hesitant has he been in ditching even sardars if so warranted by his political interests. He says after the 1997 election, Baloch nationalists had supported his government at the centre. Yes, they did; a clutch of sardars donning the nationalists’ garb were on his side. But how did he return the compliment to them? Of it he speaks not, the fact being too damning. He pulled down Sardar Akhtar Mengal’s provincial ministry. So much of his pious sentiments for Balochistan’s people.
But veritably Balochistan never ever figured up any prominently or imperatively on his radar screen all through his power stints. He consumed huge precious sum in building an unarguably unneeded motorway in Punjab; but he too shelled not essentially required one billion rupees from the federal treasury to put into operation the Saindak copper-gold mine, lying idle since its development in September 1995 by a Chinese company, for want of working capital. He now speaks enthusiastically of the Gwadar port, calling it a potential entrepot of regional dimension and proposing making of it a free port. But he conveniently glosses over the huge fuss he dished up when an Omani royal got actively interested in building this port during Benazir Bhutto’s second government.
He cried foul, flimsily. The Omani royal, he alleged, had gifted a costly necklace to her and a prized-breed horse to her mother to clinch the port deal. A disgusted royal walked away and Benazir got scared off for fear of accumulating slur; and the port project fell flat. But, woefully, this jewel of a port that he now considers Gwadar to be, enthused him not a wee bit when he succeeded Benazir in the prime minister’s chair. It was his bete noire Pervez Musharraf who built it, not he. Not even the pathetic condition of fishermen community inhabiting Gwadar’s coastal region drew Nawaz’s interest a notch. While he launched a patently politically-motivated vote-bank-building yellow cab scheme to expand his support base in urban Pakistan, he gave not even a fleeting thought to help the Gwadar fishermen, still plying their trade on outmoded boats, to modernise their fishing vessels.
And as he flung into parcelling out kaacha lands in Sindh to landless haris, albeit selectively, he thought of no such scheme for the similarly-placed Balochistan’s peasantry. Indeed, Balochistan was never his favourite all through his power stints. At best, it was sardars and chieftains, not least the commoners, who engaged his attention, if at all. He built no schools, technical institutes, universities or professional colleges to help the Balochistan youths to fructify the enormous potential, promise and talent they are brimming with. Not even he cared to promote the province’s rich horticulture, leave alone bigger things like building dams, canals and rural roads to bring to full fruition its virgin agriculture’s potential. Given this, expecting from him to have given some attention to the province’s huge mineral wealth’s exploitation for its people’s benefits is like expecting milk from a ram.
He indeed would be quite content if, say, gas royalties land in a sardari pocket to buy deadly weapons, even anti-aircraft guns, to keep their tribal folks in dread, fight blood-soaked tribal feuds, and, if need be, to battle with state security forces. The people can go to hell, he would care less. It is the sardar’s grief that torments him; not the commoner’s. But he must know a new awakening is taking place among the Balochistan youth that would in time throw aside his sardari pals as mere redundancies and irrelevancies. This is inevitable. And he must know Balochistan is not just Baloch. It is also very much Pakhtun and Hazara, and no lesser Punjabi settlers and Urdu-speaking migrants. They cannot be wished off, so integral part of the Balochistan polity are they now. Will he call them, too, to his proposed all-party conference on Balochistan? Let’s see.