NOTHING ever changes in Balochistan it seems. On Sunday, Sanaullah Zehri, senior provincial minister, expanded on what he believes to be the real causes of violence and unrest in Balochistan: India. Furthermore, if the port in Gwadar were to become a regional trading hub, an unnamed superpower — how many of them are left anyway? — and sundry unnamed regional countries would do their best to destabilise the entire country simply to cause the port to fail. There was nothing new in what Mr Zehri said. Theories and conspiracies along the same lines have been peddled for years now. Nevertheless, the minister’s words are cause for dismay — because the provincial government he is a part of and the prime minister whose party he is a member of both have long assessed the problems in Balochistan very differently, and correctly: the long-running, low-level insurgency in the province that has all but cut off the Baloch areas from the rest of the country for years now is the result of alienation felt by the Baloch and a security-centric policy towards the province by the security establishment.
The problem with Mr Zehri’s analysis is that it misses the point altogether. For years now, Pakistani authorities have routinely complained of Indian interference in Balochistan — and yet never once publicly produced evidence of the so-called interference. But even if the euphemistically referred to interference is real, is that really a symptom or cause of the real problem in Balochistan? While India is hardly to be taken lightly or its intentions always assumed to be the best, tarring the security crisis in Balochistan with the India brush makes the resolution of the real problem that much more difficult. If “progress and prosperity cannot be achieved until peace is restored in Balochistan” in Mr Zehri’s own words, then how is that peace to be achieved if a peripheral issue is given centre stage and little is said about why Balochistan is still in a world of trouble?
Yet, the conspiratorial worldview does not stop at India. The senior minister from Balochistan decided to roll out the conspiracy theorists’ other favourite game, ie the phantom war between China and the US over the Gwadar port. Somehow, despite bilateral trade between the US and China growing to more than half a trillion US dollars last year and the US policy towards Pakistan focused on expanding trade opportunities regionally and globally, the port in Gwadar — one of many in the region — is seen to be crossing some strategic red line that is all too obvious to the chosen few. Gwadar has not taken off for many reasons, not least opposition in some Baloch quarters itself. Surely, the problems of Balochistan will never be resolved if its leadership keeps getting the diagnosis wrong.
