What happened to the famed Indian hospitality?” asked my guest, a Baloch political leader who had come to see me in my hotel room in Islamabad in 2008. “Aren’t you offering me even a cup of tea?”
I was flummoxed. It was Ramzan; the restaurant in the hotel was closed. Room service was available to non-Muslim guests; so I wasn’t starving.
“Why? Aren’t you fasting?” I asked.
“Fasting is for Muslims. I am a Baloch. Give me some tea.”
After half-an-hour of chai pe charcha, he concluded, “You are like most Indians. You offer us hospitality, and listen to us patiently. Nothing more.”
The brief exchange opened my eyes to two realities. One, contrary to what Pakistan alleges, India gives only moral support—no material—to the Balochis’ struggle against the Pakistan state. Two, most Balochi leaders are or have been secular, and are prouder of their clans than of their faith. “We are the most secular people in the region,” Noordin Mengal, one of the tallest Baloch leaders, had once claimed at the UN Human Rights Council.
The Balochis are of different tribes (one speaks a Dravidian tongue that sounds a bit like Tamil; Stalin, please note!), each governed by a hereditary sardar who swore a notional allegiance to the Khan of Kalat. The British, who expanded their sway after Charles Napier confessed to have ‘Sind’ in 1843, let the Balochis rule themselves as they wished, so long as they kept their Russian rivals several cannon shots away. Three decades later, they drew the Goldsmith Line, leaving part of the Baloch land to Iran. Early last century they set up their military staff college in Quetta.
That perhaps was the last major infrastructure, save a couple of universities, built in Balochistan which comprises nearly half of the Pak land, and populates just five per cent of the Pak people. The college would turn out some of the subcontinent’s finest generals like Cariappa, Thimayya and Manekshaw who, after Partition, would have to wage wars against their collegemates and coursemates like Ayub, Yahya and Tikka Khans.
During Partition, the Khan of Kalat resisted merger with Pakistan, but Mountbatten hoodwinked him to sign the instrument of accession. There started the first insurgency. Then came the discovery of hydrocarbons in Sui in the 1950s. There started a fresh round of insurgency aimed at preventing the looting of the Baloch’s riches by the Punjabi elite of Pakistan. There have been several since, one after Z.A. Bhutto dismissed their elected government, another after Pervez Musharraf got their revered former governor Akbar Bugti shot dead in his cave.
In between, Zia-ul Haq had sent his radical mullahs to try if Islamic brotherhood would bond the Balochis better with the rest of Pakistan. The cocktail of religion and tribalism, stirred with barrels of Kalashnikov, is now proving lethal not only to Balochistan, but to Pakistan itself. Old clannish blood feuds have acquired a religious fervour that might have inspired last week’s train hijackers and tunnel bombers. Yet a good section of the Balochi elite remains secular and liberal in matters of faith, like my guest who asked for tea on a day he should have been fasting.
The current insurgency has been kindled by a new bogey—the Chinaman. At stake is the huge mineral wealth of Balochistan, guess-valued at one trillion dollars. All its natural gas is pumped out to sell cheap to the Punjabis, Sindhis and the Pakhtoons, and now the Chinese are driving down the belt-road to their Gwadar port to join the loot.
prasannan@theweek.in