EDITORIAL:Frontier Post
Sheer hypocrisy
This is sheer hypocrisy and perfidy, plain and simple. MQM supremo Altaf Hussain says give the Balochs their rights. But they have all the rights, constitutionally. But those stay usurped by their tribal sardars and chieftains, to which no lesser complicit have been the federal ruling clans over the time that have all along pampered religiously these unvarnished oppressors, suppressors and exploiters at the cost of their exploited. The Baloch commoner is indeed the most wronged person on this land. This is well within the domain of public knowledge, though known passionately in the province but not unknown either all over the country. The political leaderships across the spectrum know of this as intimately as the backs of their hands. Who amongst them doesn’t know that sardars and chieftains harbour fearsome private armies in their stables to do their bidding and keep their enslaved tribal people under their thumbs? Who doesn’t know they keep private jails where they incarcerate the recalcitrant amongst their tribes? Who doesn’t know while these exploiters flourish phenomenally even in winter and rain, the tribal people held in their serfdom’s bondage only become abysmally more impoverished even in summer and sunshine? Who indeed doesn’t know these oppressive lords resist and allow not development in their fiefdoms lest their enslaved commoners become prosperous and raise their heads against the suppressive domination they have foisted on them with a daunting muscle power? Who doesn’t know these blood-sucking lords push in their own lackeys in any enterprise they allow reluctantly in their sultanates, crushing in the process the meritorious, the deserving and the rightfully entitled? Who doesn’t know they infest the Levies with their own henchmen to serve their interests, not the state’s or the citizenry’s? And who doesn’t know they protect their domains of exploitation, suppression and oppression like serpents?And yet the political clans across the spectrum lie and lie blatantly, despite knowing all this, as has Altaf just to be in step with the fashionable prattle in vogue. What could be a more atrocious travesty of truth that they glorify these oppressive exploiters as political leaders of the very people they oppress? What indeed have they done for their people to be so branded? The Bugtis, the Mengals, the Marris, the Jamalis, the Jams, et al have been in the legislatures and in the governments at the centre or in the province at one time or the other? What did they do for the Baloch commoners’ uplift? Nowadays, there is feverish talk about the Baloch people’s ownership of the province’s fabulous mineral resources? But what kind of ownership is being asked for when the Sui gas royalties travel down direct into a Bugti scion’s pocket to fatten his own treasures and beef up his arsenals? Not a dime is going to the Bugti tribe’s betterment. No school, no clinic, no public service has it got from this fabulous dough. Is this the ownership the self-styled Baloch leaders and their cheerleaders in the nation’s political class are calling for? Even now the sardari clan is holding the reins of power in Balochistan. What has it done even to set up a mineralogy institute to produce trained local manpower for enterprises in the minerals field so that the province’s populace benefits and maximally? And now that the provincial government has taken over the control of the Gwadar port authority, what steps has it taken to make something good of this port, once touted to be the jewel of a transnational transportation network but now turned virtually into a white elephant. And has it taken any measure for establishing an institute to produce trained manpower locally to man the port operations?But for how long is his perfidy to go on like this? How long are the oppressors to be pampered and eulogised and their oppressed ignored, neglected and brushed aside as nonentities? How long will the political class, all flush with affectations, keep on the suppressors’ side and shun the oppressed like plague? Will it ever side with the truth and abjure the falsehood? When indeed will it come to realise that the oppressed Baloch youth is now rising up to get what is his due and inalienable right? When will it understand that a change is on where the Baloch commoner and the Baloch youth are shedding the past to embrace the present as an emancipated and empowered citizen? Just recently, sardar Attaullah Mengal said that the Baloch youth had spun out of his control. But he was being short with the fuller truth. The Baloch youth in reality is getting out of the sardari stranglehold’s captivity to cease to be the sardars’ foot soldier and their feuds’ gun fodder. The times have changed. The conditions are changing. And the Baloch youth too is changing. It is this youth that the political class must court, not the outmoding sardars. It is this youth that should get all the state patronage. The rights it has remained denied of must come to it in full measures, not to sardars who had had too much of them hitherto. And people like Altaf, too, must stop posturing. Their antics strike too funny, and loathsomely.
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