On 9 May, unidentified gunmen killed seven labourers from Punjab working in the city of Gwadar, on the coast of the Pakistani province of Balochistan. A month earlier, gunmen had boarded a bus in Balochistan’s Noshki district, identified nine residents of Punjab province by their documents, and shot them dead. Two other people were also killed on the Quetta–Noshki highway that day, possibly by the same gunmen. The Balochistan Liberation Army, a banned separatist group, claimed responsibility for the killings. These episodes recharged the national debate about the Baloch separatist movement, and set off fresh alarm over how it is becoming increasingly xenophobic.
Of course, the xenophobia of the Baloch separatist movement is matched by the bigotry of the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan state, which, since it came into existence in 1947, has consistently failed to resolve the Baloch question by constitutional and political means. The state’s undue use of the military in Balochistan – as evident, for instance, in the enforced disappearances of thousands of Baloch people – has had a direct impact on the development of Baloch nationalism, turning it from a movement for provincial autonomy into a movement seeking separation from Pakistan. Now the powers that be, in all their wisdom, have decided to once again go down the same path by repackaging the old wine of military force in a new bottle. In June, with clamour growing over the recent attacks, they announced Azm-e-Istehkam – Resolve for Stability – a new anti-insurgency operation meant to bring the situation under control. Not having learnt lessons from the past military operations and frequent political interventions that have failed to quell the separatist insurgency in Balochistan, the Pakistan government is once again trying to find a military solution to a political problem.
The targeted killings of Punjabis in Balochistan is one of the many reasons that the Pakistan government has cited to justify the Azm-e-Istehkam operation. The operation’s official purpose is to reinvigorate the National Action Plan – an anti-terror plan conceived in 2015 following a terror attack on a school in Peshawar, in which 134 children were killed. However, this step goes directly against the Baloch demands for an end to the militarisation of the province and the recovery of the thousands of missing persons, for which the Baloch blame Pakistani military forces. The new operation not only ignores legitimate Baloch demands – besides those above, they include greater control over Balochistan’s rich natural resources – but also focuses the energies of the state entirely on the armed insurgency, without any parallel political effort to give the Baloch people a fair hearing and a fair deal. Ironically, ignoring these reasonable and crucial demands only fuels the insurgency.
The establishment in Pakistan should have learnt its lesson from the fallout of the killing of Nawab Akbar Shahbaz Khan Bugti in 2006. Bugti was a moderate Baloch nationalist who supported neither insurgency nor separatism and was amenable to discussion with Islamabad. Even so, he was targeted and killed by the military under the rule of the general Pervez Musharraf as part of a strategy to quell growing unrest in Balochistan. Anger over Bugti’s killing spiralled into the fifth and most significant insurgency in the province to date. With this, separatism became the dominant objective of the Baloch movement, overshadowing any idea of resolving the Baloch question either by dialogue with Islamabad, or through electoral and parliamentary means, or both.