BY far the most reassuring aspect of the current turmoil in Balochistan is the readiness of the people of the other provinces of Pakistan to reach out to the mainsprings of the Baloch grievances and understand them with gravitas and empathy. This is particularly true of Punjab which has wakened up at last to the new dangers to the federation and which is engaged in deep soul-searching as to what it should do to minimise them.

Political scientists often analyse internal conflicts that have a spatial concentration in terms of the ability of dissidents or insurgents to tap into local human and material resources to sustain an intense sub-national war. Either because the underlying cause is itself limited, as in the case of erstwhile East Pakistan, or the available means are inadequate, there is little resonance beyond a delimited geographical zone — the rest of the country beyond the area of spatial concentration hardly registers a seismic tremor.

Frequently enough, the authority that is challenged in that zone is able to convince the rest of the nation that it is a handful of miscreants that are undermining peace and development. The Bangladesh war was a particularly stark example of the state being able to lull almost the entire political class in West Pakistan into false complacency or worse, an unpardonable apathy towards the great national tragedy being enacted in the other half of the country.

Constituting almost 44 per cent of Pakistan’s landmass and a good part of its coastline, Balochistan cannot simply be relegated to similar oblivion. It is undoubtedly an existential situation too great for the spin doctors; without Balochistan there is no Pakistan. This does not, however, mean that efforts to obfuscate issues there will not be made. It is important to maintain a sharp focus by recalling historical, economic and political factors underlying the current disorder. In each case, it is of utmost importance that facts are not used selectively to reinforce preconceived notions and judgments.

If Balochistan’s history since 1947 is a narrative of neglect, which was the turning that the state missed and thus embarked upon a dictatorial approach to the province? An article published by this newspaper on September 6 wanted us to believe that in delivering his speech to the Sibi Darbar on February 14, 1948, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah was “laying the foundation of direct central authority over the province” as it led to the governor-general running the affairs of the province with only an advisory council representing the people. It is a classic case of ignoring the precise historical context of a decision and of applying a future framework of analysis retrospectively. In any case, no Baloch narrative begins with this dig at the Quaid. This is certainly not the fountainhead of the Baloch political struggle.

In fact, it is almost certain that without the iconic status that the Quaid enjoyed, Balochistan would not have “acceded” to Pakistan as smoothly as it did. On the eve of independence, the Khan of Kalat dreamt of restoring his sovereignty over the territory covered by the Mastung agreement and perhaps beyond. Afghanistan had revived revanchist claims on parts of Balochistan and Nawab Sahib Jogezai wondered what would be the best option for the Pushtuns. Addressing the Sibi Darbar on a mere 184th day of independence, the Quaid could hardly have brushed aside these cross-currents and pulled this sprawling province that still has 77 per cent rural population by the bootstrap to the complexities of the Government of India Act of 1935 with a single semantic jerk. This presumptuous power to solve extremely complicated problems by an overnight fiat of policy belonged to the later military rulers of Pakistan.

In any case, the political process snapped in 1958. For Balochistan, it had in any case languished once the fiction called a united province of West Pakistan was created to offset Bengali aspirations. In any honest comparative analysis, the roots of Baloch alienation and rage are to be found in the use of the Pakistan military in 1956, 1970 and 2004-06 to put down Baloch sub-national movements.

Balochistan is not only the largest province of Pakistan but also the one with the greatest natural resources. Pakistan’s elitism has left a large percentage of population in each and every province below the poverty line. In Balochistan’s case, the situation has always been particularly unpropitious as it was at a disadvantage when it came to asserting its needs. In Pakistan, needs have been asserted mostly through powerful civil and military bureaucracies and this is where Balochistan was least empowered to articulate itself.

It is not a case of Punjab throwing its weight around in a meeting or two of the Finance Commission; the injustice is inherent in the power structure of a state which can be differentiated from its civil bureaucracy or army only at peril. A cosmetic division of the Punjab into three Punjabs will not usher in a revolutionary change. The chances are that each new Punjab will employ available instruments of power to secure higher allocations and the aggregate allocation of the Punjabi provinces would end up even higher than at present. Meanwhile, consider how an analyst from Balochistan with a strong attachment to the idea of Pakistan regards the scene: “To a Baloch, development means dispossession — cattle never changing into motor cars, ‘gidans’ never changing into houses, and thumb impressions never into signatures. They have to remain content with crumbs like a job of a chowkidar, a peon and a mali.”

This deep distrust of development has played a major role in fuelling the present fires. In the best of circumstances, the opening up of tribal lands to a major developmental effort produces more heat than light at the beginning. The sardari system in Balochistan has always been alarmed by economic enterprises that would inevitably threaten their historic hold on the people. What is often not realised is that the people themselves experience modernity as a shock and that the resultant confusion can easily be exploited by interest groups. The year 2004 witnessed a wave of unrest in Balochistan brought about by these and other factors. This wave swept area after area as the state failed to explain the purpose of development programmes and mega projects. The pain of development quickly got transformed into resistance.

The Baloch could not find much in the history of Pakistan to reassure them that this sudden upsurge in the development of their province was meant to improve their lot. It seemed to them that the state was once again advancing into their impoverished sanctuaries on behalf of interest groups and potential colonists. It was not difficult to misrepresent the mega projects as the final bid to convert the Baloch into a hapless minority in their own homeland.

There is nothing unique about this kind of resistance; it has surfaced in numerous other cases in similar interventions by a modernising, centralising state. What has clearly aggravated the situation in our case is the unshakeable faith in the application of brute force. Our inability to live with a problem while political processes smooth the rough edges goes far back into time. In 1969-70, the most liberal of the civil and military managers of East Pakistan sat in Dhaka and debated the number of Awami Leaguers whose purge in one form or another would bring about a collapse of the populist agitation against the centre. In the end, the hardliners terminated the debate by launching a massive assault on Pakistan’s own people.

Before we go to the drawing board for a poor man’s Marshall Plan to resolve the Balochistan crisis, we need a change in our mindset. The armed forces have been repeatedly entrusted with unfair tasks in Balochistan. The result is that the establishment of cantonments in that highly sensitive province has become a controversial issue. The state must do sufficient introspection to find out ways and means to convince our own people that it is not a predatory animal. Economic plans will have a much better chance of success if people are persuaded that they are for their good. To do that, the country needs an easily discernible shift from military policy to constructive politics.

We do not have limitless time. Apart from internal dynamics, there are external factors now at play. The peace process with India has been reduced in the words of an Indian friend with whom I have just shared a regional workshop in Sri Lanka, to a cumbersome, slow glacial movement. Islamabad is repeatedly talking of Indian involvement in Balochistan. If centrifugal forces develop momentum, they will pose a problem even for friends like Iran and the United States. The potential of Gwadar is large enough to generate an equal measure of hopes and fears in the world beyond. There is a great game afoot and it will be yet another crime in our chequered history if we do not read it accurately.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

HISTORY is full of heroes. They come in all shapes and sizes and colours. How one admired people like Robin Hood, Joan of Arc and Salahuddin Ayubi. Sometimes other names pop up in people’s minds when they are fantasising, like the German flying ace Manfred von Richthofen in the First World War, the Rajput warrior Prithviraj in the wars of the Indian princes; and Horatius in the Lays of Ancient Rome.

And now, closer to home, the Baloch have added the name of Nawab Akbar Bugti to their list of heroes — a violent man whose death endorsed the saying that those who live by the sword die by the sword.

Bugti didn’t strafe enemy soldiers from a Tiger Moth, or wield a wicked sword while on horseback, or hold the narrow bridge against a much larger and better equipped fighting force. But he became a legend in his lifetime and a martyr after his death.

Though the dust has now started to settle on the blighted landscape of Balochistan, amid government promises to turn the province into a model of development and progress, there’s hardly a person in this country that hasn’t formed an opinion on what happened during the fierce battle near the mountain hideout that killed the tribal leader and more than 50 tribesmen and soldiers.

It’s a subject that has nicked the collective national nerve and has sent shock waves throughout the country. Many writers, especially those that belong to the upper class and enjoy the eunuchoid cosiness of a leather armchair, regarded the Oxford- educated septuagenarian as the last of the rebel Mohicans — a leader who, though full of bluff and bluster, was essentially an affable person who enjoyed a droll story and occasionally delighted in focusing his attention on some poor unfortunate wretch and making him the target of his rebukes.

Others regarded him as a patriot and a true nationalist, as head of a tribal campaign to win political autonomy and a greater share of revenue from Balochistan’s gas reserves, and who at various points in his life butted heads with just about all major leaders in Pakistan, and managed to get away with it.

He was no Che Guevara or Charu Majumdar, or even Emiliano Zapata, whose causes were vastly different from those of the Baloch sardars whose politics are reactionary and totally out of tune with developments in the Third World. But there is something essentially romantic about the picture of a rebel hiding out in the mountains defying capture.

As often happens when a prominent person dies in this country, eulogies pop up like sprinklers on a lawn. And one learns that in spite of what the bard once wrote about the evil that men do living after them, in Pakistan the good is apparently not always interred in their bones.

After reading some of the tributes that have been paid, one gets the impression that the late Bugti chief was a jolly old soul who though he broke bread with his bearded warriors when hiding out in the mountains, was equally at home in the drawing room admiring a Matisse or a Dufy.

However, not everybody sees the late tribal chief in quite the same way, and believes there is also a flipside to the coin that in the heat of the moment writers cheerfully ignore — life in the tribal gulag — where some chieftains employ the full despotic apparatus — private army, prisoners, executions, centralised administration and absolute and capricious power. What is truly astonishing is that in the 21st century with human rights activists clamouring for justice, a tribe can turn into an icon a man who boasted that he killed his first victim when he was 12.

While one admires the late leader’s audacity and boldness, one cannot ignore the fact that on his instructions tribesmen had been carrying out a regular campaign of destruction. Every time the warriors blew up a gas pipeline, some family in Mayo Gardens or Gulberg II in Lahore discovered halfway through the day that they weren’t able to cook their food or warm the hearth. No matter what one’s political views or beliefs might be, one just doesn’t go around blowing up national assets. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the central government is right. It suggests that there are other avenues of communication that were not properly explored.

Bugti’s supporters will continue to see him as the rebel who single-handedly defied the might of an oppressive power and who was martyred in the process. However, in spite of government assurances that the leader’s body will be exhumed and a DNA test carried out, it is the manner in which he was killed and the mystery shrouding his death that has greatly irked the tribesmen. The incident is calculated to worsen the security situation in Balochistan and exacerbate the feeling of marginalisation amongst the Baloch.

Nawab Bugti’s recent standoff with the Musharraf government was not the highpoint of his own political career but it may well be the lowest point of President Musharraf’s rule. However, more than the implications on immediate politics — which will become clearer and more pronounced over the next few weeks — nobody can deny the fact that this has been a great tragedy.

If the government is at all serious about tackling the grievances of the Baloch people, they should try to bury the past and turn over a new leaf. They should start an immediate dialogue with the sardars and representatives of a cross section of the population. The grievances of the Baloch are many and varied, ranging from massive unemployment and gross underdevelopment to not receiving an adequate share of the revenues generated by the gas that’s pumped out of their territory.

It is time somebody in Islamabad took the initiative and tried to redress the grievances of the Baloch in a meaningful way. There are already signs that the grip of the sardars on their tribesmen is not as strong as it used to be and that tribal culture is undergoing a change.

Perhaps the time has come for the prime minister to convert his four-nation whistle-stop tours to four-city whistle-stop tours to the trouble spots of Balochistan. Quetta and Zhob might not be as exciting as Oslo and Beirut, but then Oslo and Beirut do not threaten to destroy the federation of Pakistan. It’s a question of getting one’s priorities right.

IN the vision of a prime-ministerial farewell tour mapped out in the now legendary Downing Street memo — the prime minister using transport, architecture, children’s TV and Chris Evans to lock down “the triumph of Blairism” — there lurked a very specific aim. As borderline lunatic as the plans seemed, they were at least partly based on the idea of reviving something that had already happened.

“He needs to embrace open spaces, the arts and businesses,” said the memo. “He needs to be seen with people who will raise eyebrows ... he needs to be carefully positioned as someone who, who while not above politics, is certainly distancing himself from the political village.” The spurt of media mirth that followed the leak rather missed the fact that we had been here before - and it had actually worked: in 1997, when Blair built himself into the mirage of Cool Britannia, and was so brimming with his own magic as to have made the wonderfully hubristic claim that “New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole.”

That dreamy contention was expressed in that year’s Labour manifesto, a lightweight document festooned with photographs of the Great Leader in all kinds of high-profile company: Blair with Mandela, Blair with Clinton, Blair with Alex Ferguson, Blair with - and in those days, it was a good idea - John Prescott. By way of fleshing out the picture of someone so attuned to the national mood that he was even on the way to snuffing out politics, it expressed the hope that Britons might “put behind us the bitter political struggles of left and right that have torn our country apart for too many decades”.

Of course, political rhetoric this overblown very rarely comes true. Indeed, reality often delivers the opposite — consider Margaret Thatcher’s initial aspirations to imitate St Francis of Assisi’s brand of emollience and her subsequent brutal pursuit of the enemy within. And so it has proved with Blair, though he could conceivably make the claim that much of what has subsequently materialised has been beyond his control. Left and right may no longer tear the country apart, but ambition, idealism and national unity look like a forlorn hope.

Terrorism barely needs mentioning, nor the associated fraying of the multiculturalism that once informed Cool Britannia’s garish dazzle. Then there are the other ghoulish threats that, partly thanks to the government’s own rhetoric, are said to lurk round every corner: illegal immigrants, feral youths, the single mothers whose pushchairs, we are now told, may well contain thugs-in-waiting. Flick through the pages of the tabloids, and Britain does not look young: it seems old and crabby, shot through with tensions that the mid-90s burst of feel-good politics might simply have glossed over.

Factor in the fog of Blair’s wars, and you start to understand why that search for a legacy has often seemed so desperate. In Downing Street, the results of a BBC poll published last week must have caused Blair’s staff no little frustration. Thanks to such concerns as “a lack of respect” and the supposed threat from crime, 47 per cent of the respondents thought Britain was “a worse place to live in than 20 years ago” - when, lest we forget, unemployment stood at 3 million, the miners’ strike had not long finished, and life at my comprehensive school revolved around classrooms in Portakabins and 1950s textbooks. Since then, however, a mere 24 per cent agreed with the idea that life had got better.

Against that backdrop, you begin to see why the prime minister wants one last PR heave. He must, after all, be tortured by the yawning gap between popular perception, and the fact that almost self-evidently, for the millions who have reaped the benefits, Blair’s Britain is a nice enough place to live. To quote Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s pre-election primer Better or Worse?, by 2005, “many fewer people - children and pensioners especially — lived in dire hardship. Most people felt the warm glow of growing income and wealth. Cranes on every city horizon attested to growth, both public and private. Crime kept falling, schools and hospitals improving, work was plentiful ... Blair’s era was a better time to be British than for many decades.”

It is perhaps appropriate that Manchester will be the location for Blair’s last Labour conference. A model of regeneration and revived civic pride, the city is ruled by a Labour council that also sets great store by its pioneering work on what is these days known as “the respect agenda”; thanks to its prodigious use of antisocial behaviour orders, Manchester is the “Asbo capital of Britain”.

To hear some local Labour activists talk, at least part of this renaissance has been secured by following Blair’s spurning of leftwing piety - as one city councillor told me earlier this year: “We were hijacked by some sort of liberal intellectualism that Blair has absolutely smashed. And I’m unbelievably grateful for that. It used to be, ‘Oh, these poor people, they live in awful council houses, and they wreck the place. We must help them.’ Well, we won’t any more.”

Compare Blair with Thatcher, and it all starts to become that bit clearer. Once her project had bedded in, her supposed achievements were loudly trumpeted, bundled up in an incisive narrative — in essence, the rolling back of the sclerotic state — and stitched into millions of ordinary lives. Rumours of a Hurricane, Tim Lott’s brilliant evocation of the period, is based on the thread that ran from Downing Street to Acacia Avenue: before things go horribly belly-up, the central character, a one-time loyal Labour voter named Charlie Buck, buys his council flat, sells it for a “quick profit” and doubles his savings, relishing the fact that he “is not to be left behind, not here at the crest of the 1980s”.

His younger brother Tommy “had never had so much work - had bought himself a BMW, could you believe it? He said there were good times ahead for property. They could move up and up.” And that kind of popular affluence was new back then; those who were ushered into the Thatcherite idyll were correspondingly grateful. These days, stability and prosperity are often a given: to quote another recent poll, only 49 per ent of people credit Labour

for the prosperity of the past eight years, compared with 41 per cent who believe - somewhat bizarrely - that their policies have made “little difference”.

Still, one could quite easily sketch out the basis of a novelistic portrait of a wonderful New Labour life. It might include a souped-up local secondary school, a hip replacement for grandma at a new treatment centre; young cousins, despite their fear of debt, rising to the promise of opportunity for all and joining the millions going to university, or a single mother pushed out of the poverty trap by the working families’ tax credit, and then blessed with a local SureStart centre.

So why the disconnection? Some of it, undoubtedly, is down to a modern culture of snarling media cynicism, made worse by the reluctance of a rightwing press to acknowledge social-democratic achievements. But Blair has played his own part in undermining his government’s record. In 2003, the academic Stuart Hall came up with the idea of New Labour’s “double shuffle”. As he saw it, “its grim alignment with ... corporate capital and power ... is paralleled by another, subaltern programme, of a more social-democratic kind, running alongside.”

The first, free-market bit has long been dominant; the parts that might more easily gladden our hearts will always be subordinate. And there is no doubt which side the prime minister usually wants to emphasise.

There is an apocryphal Blair anecdote that captures this perfectly. At the 1999 Labour conference, he piled through a long list of his government’s more social-democratic achievements: “All employees with the right to a paid holiday, leave for parents to take time off work for a family crisis ... maternity grant doubled ... seven million families with the largest ever rise in child benefit Britain has seen.” After each one, a stoic Gordon Brown quietly turned to the person next to him and said, “He opposed that.”

Moreover, whereas one half has seen a fair degree of success, the other is still clouded in doubt. Thus, we have much better hospitals, but there are credible complaints that the NHS is now being broken-up and marketised, and that these moves play a large role in its current financial woes. Schools are prospering, but the recent education bill was built on the idea of a system characterised by failure.—Dawn/Guardian Service