No Holi for Ramesh

Published March 22, 2014

RAMESH has been cleaning my parents’ old house in Karachi for 25 years, and is a familiar, cheerful figure. However, when I wished him a happy Holi recently, he told me sadly that his community had not celebrated the Hindu festival because a mob had burned a dharamshala in Larkana.

Although this is part of a depressing pattern, the incident served to remind us yet again that Pakistan today is hardly a place for a non-Muslim. The grim truth is that if you are not a member of the mainstream faith and the ruling ethnic majority, you are living here on sufferance.

And it’s not just the state that turns a blind eye to the plight of the weak and the vulnerable: all too often, the media is complicit in this indifference. Consider the recently concluded march by members of the Voice of Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) as an example.

This was an epic campaign that saw a group of over 20 men, women and children walk well over 1,000 miles from Quetta to Karachi and then to Islamabad. They faced many hardships, including harassment from intelligence agencies. But they also encountered hospitality from people who could ill afford it.

Had a group of people from, say, Lahore, embarked on a similar journey to press their demand for the release of their loved ones from Pakistan’s Gulag, I am sure they would have received vastly greater media coverage. TV cameras would have accompanied them, and politicians would have climbed on the bandwagon.

One problem the Baloch face in their nationalist struggle is the official narrative that has branded them as terrorists. And it is true that organisations like the Baloch Liberation Army endeared themselves to some by killing innocent non-Baloch settlers, many of whom have lived in Balochistan for generations. Another deadly arrow in the security establishment’s quiver has been the charge that the nationalists are being aided by India.

However, had they been fighting for an Islamic state, would the federal government’s repression been as severe? The saga of the province’s missing persons is a dark stain on our claim to be a democratic state committed to human rights and the rule of law. And yet media coverage of the horrors ordinary people as well as rebels have been subjected to ranges from sparse to non-existent.The Baloch campaign suffers from the fact that it is widely seen as a secessionist movement backed by Pakistan’s enemies. But the Baloch themselves are not part of the mainstream, and so enjoy little sympathy among Pakistan’s civil society and the media. And to be fair, the province is a no-go area for most journalists.

But while the nationalists are being ruthlessly targeted by the Frontier Corps and sundry intelligence agencies, jihadis and elements of the Afghan Taliban called the Quetta Shura do not face the same level of state violence. In fact, the latter are reported to live in Quetta as welcome guests.

There are some unpleasant ethnic truths that we tend to sweep under the carpet. While the country’s ruling establishment is dominated by Punjabis, their junior partners, at least in the army, are Pakhtuns. So while the state can mount operations in Balochistan and Karachi, it thinks twice before launching troops against jihadis in Fata and southern Punjab.

In 1983, Zia had no compunctions against using the army to crush the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy in Sindh. But more than one military man resigned when asked to order troops to use force against anti-PPP demonstrators in Lahore in 1977. Would they have done the same had they been ordered to crack down in, say, Quetta? And although more than four decades have passed, the world has not forgotten the bloodbath our soldiers created in their vain effort to prevent the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.

This will not be a popular view as nobody likes to confront his own prejudices. But the fact is that the state is highly selective in its use of force: if you are a rebel in a cause seen as vaguely Islamic, there are fewer chances of being whisked off to detention or worse. However, if you demand your rights, things are apt to go badly, especially if you are from outside the mainstream.

The hardliners in the Baloch nationalist movement need to realise that they will never receive public support in the rest of Pakistan if they continue their violent insurrection.

The state will never agree to the secession of its biggest province. Saner elements need to seek a more moderate goal, and remember that politics is about compromise, not endless underground warfare.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

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