Business Recorder Column February 20, 2024

An (in)credible election!

 

Rashed Rahman

 

The 2024 elections have aroused a perfect storm of allegations of gerrymandering, rigging and manipulation of results. Most people, including well informed commentators, seem at a loss though to offer a coherent, convincing explanation of this conundrum. This writer claims no special knowledge either, so the following arguments may appear convincing to some, in the realm of the speculative to others. These are the wages of venturing into unknown, slippery territory.

Let us examine a possible scenario to explain what the ‘plan’ for the 2024 elections may have been. The repression let loose against the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) and its leaders, particularly Imran Khan, had already dented the credibility of the polls long before even a single ballot had been cast. How then to explain the PTI’s winning around 100 seats in the National Assembly (NA)? This irrespective of the fact that the party has been claiming it won more, and that some 80-85 seats were stolen from it. It should be kept in mind that the PTI was fighting the election with one hand tied behind its back, a consequence of being denied its electoral symbol of ‘bat’, a circumstance considered crucial amongst a largely illiterate voting populace that identifies its preferred party through such electoral symbols. However, a qualification can be made to this accepted wisdom by the fact that the PTI’s vote bank (and arguably its leadership) belongs to an urban elite and middle class demographic. The PTI candidates were all contesting as Independents, requiring either familiarity of the voters with them, or extraordinary campaign efforts to establish the identity of particular PTI-backed Independents. Since neither of these was visible, the only other logical explanation is that factors beyond the local, i.e. national, were the not-so-hidden persuaders. The vote for the PTI, controversies notwithstanding, suggests a turn against the well-established penchant of our establishment to bend its back in every electoral contest in living memory in favour of the ‘desired’ result. If it may be assumed, and there are sufficient arguments to bolster this assertion, that the ubiquitous establishment was determined not to let the PTI back into power, how is even the ‘conceded’ tally of 100 plus seats to be explained? In this scribbler’s humble opinion, this was an effort to overcome the perception beforehand that we were heading into an unfair, unfree election. The tally of 100 seats was meant to bolster the credentials of an (in)credible election as free and fair. The fact that it does not appear to have succeeded, given the almost universal uproar from all quarters about the legitimacy of the polls, has less to do with the intentions of the authors of the plan and more to do with their failure to correctly judge the mood prevailing in the country.

While the gambit of conceding 100 plus seats to the PTI may have failed, the other half of the plan is also interesting. Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) was left dangling short of even a simple majority, forcing it to seek a coalition alliance with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and other smaller parties to cobble together sufficient numbers in the NA to form a government. This has afforded the PPP the opening to exact more than its pound of flesh. Not only is it mooting Asif Ali Zardari to return as President, it also wants the post of Speaker, preferably of the NA, ministries in the Punjab government to be led by Maryam Nawaz Sharif as Chief Minister (CM), a PPP-led coalition government in Balochistan (led by worthy Sarfraz Bugti, a lately embraced ‘member’) and, of course, its government in Sindh, where it enjoys as usual a more than comfortable majority.

Nawaz Sharif has revealed his discomfort at heading such a disparate, weak coalition government in the Centre. He has therefore ‘sacrificed’ his desire to return as Prime Minister (PM) for the fourth time, preferring instead to dump the vale of woes the office is likely to prove in the lap of brother Shahbaz Sharif. This absolves Nawaz Sharif of any responsibility of the possible failure of the government to deal with the veritable mountain of problems the regime is bound to face, central to which is the state of the economy and the expected ‘blessings’ of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to squeeze the already labouring life of the people out of their wretched bodies and more and more wretched existence. Moving Shahbaz Sharif back into the PM’s chair also serves the purpose of clearing the path for the entry into high office of Maryam Nawaz Sharif, following in the footsteps of the trajectory of her father’s political career. The whole show, however, whether in the Centre or Punjab, will be run benignly by Nawaz Sharif behind the screen, a novel experience for a country not short of novel experiences in its past.

Whoever the masterminds of the ‘plan’ for elections 2024 were, they could either be reduced to navel-gazing in embarrassment at the outcome, or rubbing their hands with glee at its success. The first could be induced by the universal rejection of the elections and their unbelievable results (with the prospective ruling coalition embarrassedly making efforts to defend it but succeeding only in confirming public perception of their lately-found role as establishment satraps). The second is more ominous, suggesting as it does the deliberate introduction of political instability as a handle to manipulate things from behind the curtain in favour of whatever the establishment’s goals may be and away from a credible democratic system, something the country has been yearning for but denied since its birth. In either case, a bigger crisis awaits just down the road, whose outline is reasonably clear, but whose consequences remain so far in the realm of the conjectural.

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

PIPFPD Conference on "Current Economic Situation in Pakistan" at RPC

The Pakistan India People's Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD) is holding a Conference on the "Current Economic Situation in Pakistan" on Friday, February 23, 2024 at 3:00 pm at the Research and Publication Centre (RPC), 2nd floor, 65 Main Boulevard Gulberg, Lahore (next to Standard Chartered Bank, above Indesign showroom).

Main Speakers:

Dr Qais Aslam.

Dr Taimur Rahman.

The Conference aims to delve into the pressing economic issues facing Pakistan today, exploring potential solutions and fostering dialogue among stakeholders. Special emphasis will be given to promote the agenda of peace between Pakistan and India through exploring economic openings and cooperation.

Tea will be served after the Conference. All are welcome.

Rashed Rahman

Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) (link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com)

Director, Research and Publication Centre (RPC) (on Facebook)

Business Recorder Column February 6, 2024

One, two, three knockout punch

 

Rashed Rahman

 

By the time these lines appear in print, the elections will be just two days away. However, what has emerged as one of the most lacklustre election campaigns in our chequered history, not the least because in public perception perhaps, the result is a foregone conclusion, any remaining doubts on this score can comfortably be laid to rest by the events of the last week or so. In quick succession, and in an unimaginable judicial hurry, a one, two, three knockout punch has been administered to Imran Khan. In the process, collateral damage of a similar kind has also been inflicted on Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Bushra Bibi. I refer of course to the three cases in which, respectively, Imran Khan and Shah Mahmood Qureshi were handed down jail sentences of 10 years and disqualification from participating in elections or holding public office each in the cipher case, the former premier and his wife were sentenced to 14 years imprisonment and a fine of Rs 0.5 million each in the Toshakhana case, and, in a first in our tainted judicial history, the couple were accorded seven years jail in the Iddat case. If all this is not enough to take your breath away, you are a better man than I, Gunga Din. The incredibly hurried (and therefore one-sided) proceedings in all these cases are a cause for shame even to our by now hardened hearts at judicial malfeasance. Experts and the Women’s Action Forum (WAF) amongst others have condemned this intrusion into personal marriage law.

Be all that as it may, the purpose behind all these courtroom (inside Adiala Jail) shenanigans is obvious. It is intended, on the very eve of the elections and within a hair’s breadth of the polls to deliver a decisive blow to the political functioning and electoral participation of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI). Although the party may be able to nevertheless mobilise its vote bank on February 8, 2024, reports of two instances of faults in the Election Management System (EMS) have raised hackles regarding the possibility of a rerun of the 2018 vote count in reverse to deny the PTI its place in the sun. The powers-that-be may be congratulating themselves on this ‘coup’ and complacent about knocking the PTI out of the electoral fray at the ballot box and, if even that fails, leaving the possibility of recourse to EMS manipulation as the fallback position, but all these manoeuvres are likely to achieve is a rise in sympathy for, and the popularity of, Imran Khan. That may well do him and his party not much good in the elections, but in the ensuing dawn after the polls…?

The apathy on display at the popular level regarding the elections may yield a low turnout. Those that do make the effort to cast their vote may be hoping against hope that the PTI’s electoral strength will be recognised and accepted on the one hand, and those who vote for the other parties in the hope of redress of their problems and difficulties on the other. However, both are likely to be disappointed, the former quicker, the latter with the passage of time.

Why such pessimism, you may ask? Because if one is not purblind or wearing blinkers, it should be obvious to even the meanest intelligence that it is the establishment that is calling the shots and no one else, certainly not the electorate. But the establishment, as the track record shows, is only able to play its dominant role thanks to the by now firmly entrenched willingness of the political class as a whole to act as collaborators with the anti-democratic plans of the establishment, in the hope of crumbs from its table. Of course what the political class loses sight of again and again is the inherent contradiction at the heart of all such efforts. That contradiction is squarely located in the conundrum that even the most willing collaborator, once ensconced in high office, demands power, not merely office, since this is the necessary condition for delivery. If such demands intrude onto the hallowed space occupied since long by our ubiquitous establishment, including foreign and security policies, the result is a quick shuttle to the revolving door of both entry and exit from office. The irony in all this of course is that the collaborator of yesterday is overnight turned into the ‘enemy’ today, while the ‘enemy’ till yesterday is shown the paved path to the hallowed halls of power.

This repeated (by now ad nauseam) exercise has produced a so far silent state crisis that may well explode in our faces sooner or later. Essentially, all these manipulative manoeuvres of the establishment have contributed principally to the fraying if not disintegration and future collapse of state institutions and their credibility. Hardly any state institution is unaffected by these unwise moves in the interest of maintaining the hold of the establishment, whether it be the judiciary, bureaucracy and, if one may say it without fear of retaliation, the military. Until and unless the establishment, with the military at its heart, lets go of its malign grip on the political process in the interests, at a minimum, of a credible, genuine parliamentary democracy in which the vote of the citizen is the only deciding factor, Pakistan’s future is, to say the least, gloomy beyond description.

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

The February 2024 issue of Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) is out

The February 2024 issue of Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) is out. Link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com

Contents:

1. Rafi Pervaiz Bhatti: The Muslim Identity in India – III: The origin of the Establishment and decay of the Pakistan Movement.

2. Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur: The Rise of Baloch Nationalism and Resistance – VI.

3. Dr Farooq Bajwa: Book Review: Professor Tariq Rahman: Pakistan’s Wars: An Alternative History.

4. Dr Maqsudul Hasan Nuri: Coping with Populism: some policy guidelines.

5. Jehangir Ashraf Qazi: Pakistan Paindabad?

Rashed Rahman

Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) (link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com)

Director, Research and Publication Centre (RPC) (on Facebook)

Business Recorder Column January 30, 2024

Elections and prospects

 

Rashed Rahman

 

As the date for general elections, February 8, 2024, looms, the election campaign scene exhibits some troubling tendencies. First and foremost, the lack of the traditional excitement and activity by the contending political parties is conspicuous by its absence. This malaise appears to have affected not only those vying for electoral success, but even those expected to elect them by casting their vote on the day. This apathy could be ascribed to a number of causes, but two or three appear to stand out. The political parties in the field can be neatly divided between those ‘acceptable’ to the present power structure, and one party in particular that is not. The ‘acceptable’ parties are all those that were part of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) coalition government constituted after the ouster of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government through a no-confidence motion in 2022. To these could be added parties such as the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, and a few minor contenders on the margins. The ‘pariah’ party in this polarised political environment is only the PTI. If it can be assumed then that the result of the election is a foregone conclusion, what does this say about the legitimacy of the regime to follow, and what effect will it have on its ability to tackle the imposing mountain of troubles the country faces, first and foremost the economic meltdown?

As described by one analyst, the journey of the PTI since its formation in 1996 may be described as one “from partner to pariah”. This is a fairly accurate description of the process whereby the PTI was belatedly ‘picked up’ by the establishment despite it being ignored by General Pervez Musharraf after the 2002 elections held by him, which have joined the growing list of elections in our history either answering to the description ‘manipulated’ (most of them) or whose results were ignored (1970, perhaps the fairest and freest of them all, the brushing aside of whose results by Yahya Khan’s military regime led to the loss of half the country, East Pakistan). Imran Khan expected to be made prime minister (PM) by Musharraf despite winning a sole seat. Musharraf’s refusal to contemplate the same in favour instead of adorning his new King’s Party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) of the Gujrat Chaudries with the crown, proved too bitter a pill for Imran Khan to swallow and at the same time betrayed his egotistical belief that he deserved the coveted prize irrespective of the rules governing the formation of governments that enjoy a parliamentary majority (whether genuine or not). That changed after the establishment (post-Musharraf) decided the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government led by Asif Zardari after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in 2007 and the returned-from-exile Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) were too ‘chummy’ despite their early falling out and PML-N going into opposition because in the background lurked the Charter of Democracy signed by Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in exile in London in 2006, in which they committed to forego playing the role of the establishment’s plaything against each other, which had been characteristic of the 1990s. A government and government-in-waiting (the opposition) united in resisting manipulation against each other was too much for the establishment to stomach. Hence came the change of heart and preferred satrap in 2011 when the PTI burst upon the scene through its rally at Minar-i-Pakistan, Lahore, aided, abetted, mentored and allegedly secured by then ISI chief General Pasha.

This change in the PTI’s fortunes fed into the disqualification of incumbent PM Nawaz Sharif in 2017 and the allegedly manipulated result in favour of the PTI in the 2018 general elections that followed. Much to the horror and disappointment of his mentors and supporters in the military establishment, Imran Khan proved hopeless as a PM, failing to produce a single success in the exaggerated programme of development he had announced, and only keeping his government afloat (at the cost of the country) by borrowing in his four and a quarter years’ incumbency 71 percent of all the loans Pakistan had incurred from 1947 to 2018. It is no accident then that the PDM government that followed his ouster was hamstrung by the threat of the country defaulting on its ballooning debt burden.

Having lost the confidence and support of the military establishment that had brought him to power, Imran Khan foolishly believed that he had such overwhelming support within the military that a confident ‘strike’ would produce a mutiny against the successors of COAS Genera Bajwa (his main supporter), i.e. the top command under General Asim Munir. Nothing else explains the adventure of May 9 when military installations and monuments were attacked and mutilated by the PTI’s leaders and workers. What Imran Khan failed to appreciate was the discipline and unity of command of the military, which was intact. In the aftermath of the May 9 chaos, those in the upper echelons of the military suspected of sympathy for the PTI were summarily purged, a stampede of PTI leaders of all shapes, sizes and hues were seen recanting on television, and those who refused are to this day being given the run around of cases after cases at which our establishment has proved throughout our history to be extraordinarily adept.

Now, when Imran Khan is in jail and until recently was unable to communicate with his party people, we hear of ‘election’ rallies all over the country by the PTI workers, ostensibly on the call of Imran Khan. If true, this suggests Imran and the PTI have found a way around the wall of silence erected around him since his arrest. Be that as it may, the attempt was met with the usual tender ministrations of the police, resulting in injuries, arrests and justificatory statements of all kinds from the police and authorities why the baton, water cannon, arrests, etc, were unleashed against the PTI. Unfortunately, our establishment has proved incapable of learning anything from the past. It is arguable that such repressive tactics merely increase sympathy and support for the perceived underdog, and in our political culture, where the people are still searching for a way out of the quagmire of inflation and unemployment in which they have been trapped for decades and into which they slip further and further day by day, sentiment veers towards support for the victim/s of the establishment, whether deserved or not.

If further proof of this argument is needed, we may glance at the reception Dr Mahrang Baloch and her Baloch Yakjehti Committee have garnered in a massive rally in Quetta after their return from the long march from Turbat to Islamabad in support of their missing persons. One look at the proceedings of that rally and the speech by Dr Mahrang Baloch should clinch the argument that repression beyond reason begets the opposite effect of what was intended.

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

Business Recorder Column January 23, 2024

Back from the brink

 

Rashed Rahman

 

After an exchange of missile attacks on alleged Baloch subversive elements in each other’s territory, Pakistan and Iran have been quietly rowing back from the brink of a breakdown in the longstanding friendly relations between the two neighbouring countries. Although both Islamabad and Tehran have longstanding complaints against each other about Baloch militants fighting their respective governments in both countries enjoying safe havens across their mutual border, Iran’s decision to strike an alleged Jaish al-Adl presence in Panjgur district in Pakistani Balochistan bordering Iran’s Seistan Baluchistan province took most observers by surprise. Not the least amongst these was Pakistan’s military and security establishment. Although few have raised the issue in Pakistan, questions do arise about a possible vulnerability to surprise aerial attacks on Pakistan. An accompanying worry must be possible holes in the country’s air defence system. Pakistan’s military felt compelled to retaliate for the unprovoked attack so as to send a message not only to Iran, but to all its neighbours with whom it has problems that any infringement of Pakistan’s aerial or territorial integrity would be responded to in equal measure. Although Pakistan has a troubled relationship with Afghanistan over the presence of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) elements carrying out terrorist attacks in Pakistan from Afghan soil, the real message was intended for India that any notion of such adventurism should not even be considered. It goes without saying that Pakistan-India confrontations are highly dangerous because of the nuclear weapons factor.

Given the longstanding good relations between Pakistan and Iran despite the latter being on the US-led west’s hostile radar since the 1979 revolution, why Tehran chose to include Pakistan in its list of targets (the other two, just before, being Syria and Iraq) for such attacks begs an explanation. Jaish al-Adl is a Sunni Islamist Baloch militant group seeking greater rights for Seistan Baluchistan if not separation. It has been carrying out attacks against Iranian military and security forces targets in that province for over a decade, allegedly from bases in Pakistani Balochistan. On December 15, 2023, it conducted an attack on a police station in Rask killing 11 police officers. On January 17, 2024, just a day after Iran’s missile attack on Pakistan, Jaish al-Adl claimed it had assassinated three Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officials.

Although Iran claimed it had struck a Jaish al-Adl ‘base’ in Pakistan, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said the dead included two children, while wounding three girls. As a comparison, Pakistan’s retaliatory strike on alleged Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF) ‘bases’ in Iran yielded amongst the dead three women, four children and two men. The casualty list suggests the targets were families on either side. It could of course be assumed that the Baloch militants in both cases had their families living with them, but it does undercut Pakistan’s claim that it struck these targets because it had information of an impending ‘big terrorist’ action by the BLA and BLF. In passing, it is not irrelevant to mention that although (since 9/11) all armed groups challenging state authority in any part of the world have been dumped in the basket of ‘terrorism’, this catch-all usage obliterates the distinction between terrorism and nationalist (and revolutionary) insurgencies.

The fact of the matter is that Iran struck out at a claimed Islamic State (IS) target in Syria and an Israeli secret service Mossad centre in Iraq in retaliation for the assassinations of its top IRGC commanders and the horrendous bomb attack in Kerman, Iran, at the commemoration of General Suleimani’s assassination. To that extent Tehran’s actions betray some logic, since the exchanges of assassinations and missile attacks are part of the spreading regional conflict sparked by the Gaza war. But bracketing the attack on Pakistan with these retaliatory actions defies logic. Particularly since after Pakistan’s measured response, both sides decided to come together to diplomatically defuse the crisis. Iran, besieged by the US-led west and Israel’s hostility, needs all the friends it can get in the region and beyond. It makes little sense therefore to attack Pakistan in the same breath as Syria and Iraq, neither of which are capable at present of retaliating. But to launch against friendly, nuclear-armed Pakistan defies sense, unless it can be put down to a rush of blood by the IRGC. Be that as it may, it seems irrefutable that Tehran’s concerns about Jaish al-Adl would have been (as they now, post facto, are) better addressed through diplomacy than missile fire.

While one welcomes the turn from potential hostility to the traditional friendly ties between Pakistan and Iran after the kerfuffle of missile exchanges, one cannot but be both bewildered and amused in equal measure at the extremes of bending over backwards to justify his deserved elevation of our Balochistan’s caretaker Information Minister Jan Achakzai, which is leading one to fear for the health of his spine. Achakzai has earlier been railing against the families of missing persons, led by women, holding a sit-in before the National Press Club, Islamabad after marching all the way from Balochistan. Now he has enlightened us (further) regarding the ‘nexus’ between the missing persons protestors and those killed by Pakistani missiles in Iran. The thrust of his new truth is that those killed are claimed by the protestors as ‘missing’, thereby demonstrating that the whole myth of missing persons is nothing but a conspiracy to malign Pakistan, blah, blah, blah…

Sometimes, in our benighted land, it is moments like this that one is left wondering whether to laugh or to cry.

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

Business Recorder Column January 9, 2024

Balochistan: engagement or suppression?

 

Rashed Rahman

 

The rough treatment meted out to peaceful families of Baloch missing persons by the Islamabad police has placed this and all the related issues regarding Balochistan centre-stage (once again), not the least because Pakistanis have woken up and responded to the role of women in these protests. By and large, Balochistan has been viewed as a backward tribal society. But this ‘frozen’ perception is clearly out of date. Education has spread throughout Balochistan in recent decades, contributing to the emergence of a significant middle class. The women, young and old, who have led the march from Turbat to Islamabad against the custodial killing of a young man, on the one hand would be considered the natural takers up of the issue of their missing loved ones (men only), but on the other may come as a surprise to those in Pakistan still mired in the traditional view of Balochistan as a backward, undeveloped part of the country.

It is doubly unfortunate that first the caretaker government’s committee set up to deal with the arrests and rough treatment of the peaceful protestors obfuscated the whole issue to let the Islamabad administration and police off the hook. Then caretaker Prime Minister (PM) Anwaarul Haq Kakar whaled in with his two cents worth, part of which he repeated in a TV interview on January 7, 2024. If the Islamabad police inflicted wounds on the bodies of the peaceful protestors, not sparing even women or the elderly, the committee sprinkled the first batch of salt on those wounds, and whatever was left was delivered by the caretaker PM’s broadside. While arguing that the state could not tolerate armed rebellion, he failed to put the issue in any kind of context or perspective. The fact is that Balochistan has been restive ever since Pakistan came into being, first over the issue of accession to the new state versus the possibility of independence, later over the deprivation of the rights of the people of Balochistan, whether on the touchstone of control over and benefit from their natural resources or other democratic rights that have been conspicuous by their absence from day one. No people takes to armed struggle lightly or without reason. Kakar is either ignorant of the fact or has deliberately omitted any mention of the 25 years that separate the end of the fourth nationalist insurgency in Balochistan (1977) and the beginning of the fifth (2002). When he speaks fondly of Mir Ghaus Buksh Bizenjo as a close family friend, perhaps he should also have reflected on and voiced the fact that the Baloch people, when their armed struggle against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1973-77) imploded in the aftermath of his overthrow by General Ziaul Haq, bought into Bizenjo’s line of adhering to peaceful parliamentary politics in the struggle for their long denied rights. It is only when 25 years of this political path failed to move things even an inch that a new generation of Baloch youth took to the mountains once again to seek justice through the barrel of a gun when it was not available through any other means. The state during these 25 years continued playing its traditional games in denying the Baloch democratic representation, and through it, at least theoretically, their denied rights and redressal of their mounting grievances. I am not listing these in detail since they are well known, starting from the accession issue in 1947-48 to Sui gas being plundered to fuel the rest of the country’s development since 1952 without any meaningful share or compensation to the Baloch to the copper-gold treasure flowing to foreign companies without changing the lives of the locals where these mines are located or, indeed, Balochistan as a whole.

This history, when appended to the practice of enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings of young Baloch men suspected of being sympathetic to the fifth nationalist insurgency, has added more fuel to the fire of indignation burning brighter and fiercer than ever against the state’s blatant, long standing practices of brutal suppression. This indignation is now spreading beyond the expected protest in Quetta to other parts of Pakistan and even abroad. A missing person’s case attracted such a protest rally in London on January 7, 2024. When Kakar or any other representative of the state argues in favour of adherence to the law by even aggrieved people, why does he fail to extend that same principle even more forcefully to the approach and practices of the state’s institutions themselves? Are they above the law? A law unto themselves? Not answerable to anyone or any forum for their blatant breach of what our laws and Constitution lay down? If anything, in the case of Balochistan, all the state has ever done is failed to engage the alienated Baloch in a dialogue about their grievances, failed to redress these grievances, and relied wholly on force to suppress even their genuine, acceptable demands within the parameters of our Constitution and laws. Why then should we be surprised that each succeeding generation of the Baloch since 1947 has seen no way forward except to pick up the gun to fight for their rights?

Mr Kakar claims 90,000 innocent people have been killed in Balochistan. But he fails to indicate over what period, who these 90,000 victims are, who killed them and why. In the absence of any factual basis to the claim, Mr Kakar may forgive us our scepticism. Quoting this figure smacks more of a propaganda gambit than a verifiable fact. He also makes the incredible claim that there is no law to punish terrorists in Pakistan, citing the ‘fact’ that despite the loss of 90,000 lives, not even nine people have been convicted for such crimes. Perhaps he should have added that they might have been had they been presented in a court of law, not forcibly disappeared or extra-judicially killed. Are they too part of this 90,000 figure?

Caretaker PM Kakar owes his rise to services rendered to our establishment, first by creating the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP) and then having the satisfaction of seeing it crowned (by hook or by crook) as the Balochistan provincial government. But perhaps his elevation as caretaker PM promises to be his last hurrah. Unless Mr Kakar can pull one more rabbit out of his overflowing hat full of tricks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com