The Balochistan joke

Editorial:THE FRONTIER POST

Nowadays, holding amid great fanfare a road show is a cabinet committee on Balochistan. But what kind of a joke is this? Who really needs a committee, a commission or a task force to know of the problem afflicting Balochistan? Has such an enterprise not been undertaken in the past many a time that this government has again embarked on a new one? How long indeed is this joke to go on? When will the perfidy going around the select coterie of political elites, commentariat galaxy and civil society groups be put paid to and the Balochistan problem be truthfully told and addressed? When will honesty prevail and it will be conceded candidly that the crying need of the hour is to demolish the elitist status quo in the Baloch belt for the Baloch commoner to emancipate to become a fuller human being, master of his own life, will and vote? When will it be recognised that the Baloch community’s real stakeholders are no more those traditional power centres, namely, the compulsive exploitative and suppressive sardars and chieftains, and the self-styled deceitful nationalists? The stakeholders are now the commoner Baloch youths. An innately-talented lot being swayed by a forceful awakening, they are not ready to live as serfs and slaves. They are restive, struggling to emancipate. And it is their struggle that needs to be buttressed by every conceivable means. They require educational facilities that they should get at any rate, even at the cost of incurring the anger of entrenched powers centres that deem they have descended from heavens with some divine right to rule and reign over the Baloch commoners. They require jobs and opportunities to grow, flourish and prosper, which they should get in any event. The precious billions pouring into the provincial treasury should cease landing in privileged pockets under one cloak or the other. That prized dough must go into establishing schools, universities, professional colleges and technical institutes for the commoner Baloch children to be educated and groomed in various professions and skills to be respectable earning citizens. The valuable moolah must be used by way of easy loans and grants to help the Baloch youths to fork out into diverse businesses and trades. And as the military has opened its doors wide to the Baloch youths for recruitment, why the civilian apparatus is so loath of following suit? Why nobody is ever pushed in Islamabad about moving proactively to obviate the persistent niggardly representation of the Balochs in the central services? Why never ever has some innovative method been employed to redress this criminal injustice to the Baloch youths? Why never ever some attractive incentives have been introduced to draw them into these services? Why indeed the elites across the spectrum are always out to pamper their cohorts, the Baloch elites, not the commoners? Why even now they are fretting so hard to preserve and reinforce the status quo in the Baloch belt and strengthen its oppressive traditional power centres? Why the cabinet committee is not bothering to reach out to the Baloch commoners, especially their youth, and find out what they want and how to meet their hopes and expectations? Is it because the elites of the centre are intrinsically sympathetic to their Baloch peers — the Baloch sardars, chieftains and self-styled nationalists? But they have in their much-touted Balochistan package already given them on a platter a state-funded private militia in the form of the Levies to suppress and oppress their enslaved tribal folks. Ostensibly, the force comprises the nominees of the tribe. But who doesn’t know that they are actually the nominees of tribal sardars and chieftains? Is that not enough of it that the centre’s elites are so keen to further cajole, flatter and adulate them? What else they want to give them to make them happy? Will they tell? Nevertheless, if they have any sense left to them they would realise that the time has come critically to show if the state is with the commoner Baloch youth or with the Baloch elites. The first option bodes well for the Pakistani state. The second option spells very ill for it. They must know this.