QUETTA: Sardar Akhtar Jan Mengal, president of the Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M), has alleged that Islamabad is getting funds from Beijing under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor in the name of Gwadar but they are being spent on one province.

Speaking on the second death anniversary of Mir Inayatullah Langove here on Tuesday, he said that people of Balochistan were neither consulted nor taken into confidence on CPEC projects.

Senior vice president of the BNP-M Abdul Wali Kakar, ex-senator Sanaullah Baloch, Akhtar Hussain Langove, Sajid Tareen, former MNA Syed Nasir Ali Shah, Agha Hassan, Ghulam Nabi Marri and BSO chairman Nazeer Baloch also spoke on the occasion.

Sardar Mengal said the federal government was spending a major portion of the funds to develop Punjab while the people of Gwadar were not getting basic facilities. He claimed that the Gwadar to Surab road, which had been inaugurated on a number of occasions under the CPEC, had been financed by the Asian Development Bank and World Bank and not under the CPEC. He invited national media and senior journalists and anchorpersons to vist Balochistan and said that they themselves would see what development was taking place in Balochistan under the CPEC.

Mr Mengal said that despite a 12-year-old unannounced ban on political activities of the BNP in Balochistan, his party still managed to pull crowds of hundreds of thousands in gatherings which were never highlighted by media.

He lamented that the “electronic media in Pakistan is doing the same thing with Balochistan which the Centre has been doing — that is to ignore Balochistan”. Former senator Sanaullah Baloch said that unfortunately the rulers of the country had always employed a systematic policy to sideline the genuine leaders of the people of Balochistan which had resulted in shortage of true leadership. “This vacuum of leadership has created problems of bad governance, corruption and led the province to anarchy.”

Abdul Wali Kakar criticised the electronic media for ignoring the political activities of the BNP-M and problems being faced by Balochistan.

Referring to recent media reports of racial profiling of Pakhtuns in Punjab, Mr Kakar asked why the so-called Pakhtun nationalists who were part of Balochistan’s coalition government did not resign in protest over this issue.

Published in Dawn, March 1st, 2017