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No talks for Baloch
THE timing of the call could not have been worse. It was the last 30 minutes before iftar, when there’s no juice left in the grey cells. On top of that, it caught me bang in the middle of a delicate operation — the cream cheese frosting was simply refusing to swirl and swish.
But when Azeema’s drawn-out “hello” was followed by “Balochistan”, I put down the knife. This was going to be no short call; would I be able to focus, though? This was the time when the brain is geared towards pakoras, not politics. The friend at the other end didn’t care. But then, Azeema has a knack for asking difficult questions that can force one to think even when the brain is in slumber.
She wanted to know whether the state had ever reached out to the naraz Baloch. “Of course, they had,” I explained; it was during the previous PML-N government that Abdul Malik Baloch was Balochistan chief minister.
He had been tasked with reaching out to some of the Baloch in exile, and more than once he had narrated how he had made considerable progress, to the extent of getting them to put forward concrete demands, which were also doable in his view. But the establishment made it clear it was neither interested in meeting the demands nor in continuing to talk.
“But these were not direct talks,” she shot back, unlike the ones that had happened with the TTP, where even ceasefires had been negotiated and held — however briefly. But not with the Baloch.
Few of the Baloch ‘politicians’ in the provincial and federal legislatures advocate dialogue.
She had a point. And once the comparison was made with the TTP, the difference was stark. There had been many moments when the TTP had been engaged. During the Musharraf years, there was agreement after agreement at a point when the state had not figured out the threat, let alone how to deal with it. And that image of a general garlanding Nek Mohammad is perhaps one that defines that era.
But even later, when the threat assessment was taking shape, there were efforts to engage with them — the agreement which led to the release of Sufi Mohammad in Swat is an example. Later, during the Nawaz Sharif-led PML-N government, a committee was formed and sent off to talk to them. Far more recently, negotiations were held when Gen Bajwa was chief of army staff.
But in Balochistan, other than the talks by Dr Malik, which fell through before they led anywhere, the state has done little in comparison except to stamp out the insurgency. Not since Akbar Bugti — with whom talks were held and points agreed upon, only to be scuttled by a dictator who himself was fading away; he was then willing to talk to the PPP, his generals with the TTP, but talks with Bugti were a negotiation too far. (And since the tribal leaders have been replaced by the middle-class leadership, aversion to any kind of engagement has grown.)
On more occasion than one, the state has seen the TTP as an actor that can be spoken to and negotiated with, despite the organisation’s lack of support in the areas it operates in, but in Balochistan, this option is rarely ever seriously discussed, let alone exercised. In fact, as the political engineering in the province has grown, this idea has been further delegitimised.
Other than some such as Dr Baloch and BNP-Mengal, few of the Baloch ‘politicians’ in the provincial and federal legislatures advocate dialogue. In fact, those in power expend all their energies arguing against it, because, it seems, their entire presence and importance is dependent on the naraz Baloch remaining naraz.
Most of those we see on our screens would not be seen or given the time of day if elections were even relatively free and fair in Balochistan. This in itself is different from the approach in KP where despite the hostile relationship with the PTI, election results are not upended the way they are in Balochistan.
But I digress. For this divergence in approach to the two insurgencies has existed even when the leadership in Balochistan was not compromised.
And before the dreaded R[AW] word is brought in, let us not forget how the Indian hand was also said to be behind the TTP in the early years. Long before Kulbhushan Jadhav, there was constant lament about Indian consulates in Afghanistan and what that meant for violence in Pakistan. In off-the-record conversations, it was said the TTP and others were supported by many an intelligence agency. The Great Game was well and truly alive and Pakistan its primary target. Later, even the emergence of PTM was put down to the dreaded ‘foreign’ hand or hands. But despite this meddling, the TTP was worth a gupshup with.
Neither did the level of violence ever prove reason enough to stop the engagement with the TTP. According to a BBC story, when the PML-N government formed a committee to engage them in February 2014, more than a 100 people had been killed in the previous month. But bring up the idea of negotiating with the Baloch, and we are told the hijacking of the train shows that the state cannot afford to show any weakness. As if before this incident the mood was different.
Somehow in Balochistan, violence and external meddling are reason enough for the state and others to conclude that force is the only answer. Even the fact that the insurgents in Balochistan have popular support, unlike the TTP, has not allowed for any exploration of engagement.
This is not to say that the Pakistani state, or for that matter any state, cannot respond to those using violence, but just that in most insurgencies resolution is usually a result of both negotiations and kinetic operations, as they are called in our neck of the woods.
But in Balochistan, we defy not just common wisdom but also what has been practised elsewhere in Pakistan. Why? Azeema had the answer. But it is best not to express opinions publicly these days. It is, hence, best to end with the question.
The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2025
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