The Baloch youth

THE FRONTIER POST

Amazingly, at this point in time when everything about the Balochistan problem is being talked out, what is not being talked about is what in fact must be spoken the most: the commoner Baloch youth. He is the jewel of a human being, bubbling with enormous talent, vitality and energy, but living suppressed in the captivity of the sardars and in the indifference of the state. But whenever luckily he has broken this unbreakable shackle, he has proved his tremendous mettle to turn out into an acknowledged doctor, engineer, lawyer, civil servant, diplomat and general of sterling quality. Such a promising youth in fact is he. Yet he is being laid to waste by the conspiracy of his circumstances. He needs to be protected, nourished and promoted. But he has no patrons. To help him fructify his huge wealth of innate talent and energy, he should have the opportunities to grow and advance. But he remains largely denied of them — even now. To make up for this denial over the past six decades or so, education up to the university level should have been made free for him. But what to talk of this, he doesn’t have access even to adequate schooling. Can you imagine that even at this time there are as many as 1,000 schools in the region that are simply ghost schools that exist merely on papers, not on the ground. And amazingly not even those self-styled champions of the Baloch people have made an issue of it. Indeed, while they tire not of chanting of Baloch ownership of the province’s natural resources, never ever have they asked for a top-class university of mineralogy in Balochistan to produce trained Baloch engineers to run the crucial sector of mineralogy indigenously. Nor have they ever asked for technical institutes to produce skilled and semi-skilled manpower locally for the sector. Isn’t it shameful that the initiative to this end has been taken by the army, not by the overbearing sardars, the self-touted Baloch nationalists or the civilian administration of the province? To them, the ownership of natural resources in reality only means the ownership by sardars to their own fullest benefit, not of the commoner Balochs and their youths. Couldn’t the billions of rupees that have over these years poured into the provincial treasury from the centre be spent on laying out first-class educational facilities in diverse fields and disciplines for the commoner Baloch youth, rather than landing in privileged private pockets? This much for the concern of tribal sardars by inheritance, the so-called Baloch nationalists and the provincial civil administrations for the Baloch people and the commoner Baloch youth. But no better has ever been the centre under successive military and civilian rulers. It has been ever out to mollycoddle collusive sardars and chieftains and local power-wielders and ever spurning of the Baloch commoners, particularly their youth. Can anyone deny in all honesty that the Balochistan package of this PPP-led central government too is all tuned to fattening the financial and muscle powers of the local power-wielders and power-brokers, not to emancipate and empower the commoner Baloch youth to become a fuller human being and give vent to his potentials to advance in life and make a mark on the national scene? When Pakistan came into being, all the candidates from then East Pakistan who qualified in the first examination of central superior services were taken in, irrespective of quota to make up for the near absence of officers of that area in those services in the pre-partition days. Why never ever has a similar treatment been given to the common Baloch youths? Not even once, not even now? Lately, the army has lowered its criterion for recruitment of Baloch youths to its ranks and the officer corps. But no such relaxation has been made by the civilian leadership for recruiting the Baloch youth to the civil services or civilian jobs. In the given conditions, if some unsuspecting Baloch youths fall prey to the poaching of foreign agencies or the overseas-based dissidents, who is to blame if not the state itself? Let all and sundry know that for the state’s raw deal, the common Baloch youth is very disgruntled, very angry and in a very nasty mood. It is he who needs to be cajoled, pacified and appeased, not the scions of sardars working on aliens’ agendas. Invest in him to be a proud Pakistani. Give him the opportunities to grow and flourish. In it lies the real key to the Balochistan problem. Everything else is a mere ruse.