Burying Freedom of Expression
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
Following in the footsteps of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), the Karachi University (KU) too disallowed its faculty and students to hold a discussion titled ‘Baloch missing persons and the role of state and society’ last week. The event was a commemorative service for the fallen civil rights activist Sabeen Mahmud who was murdered right after hosting a panel discussion on Balochistan’s plight at her Karachi café, The Second Floor (T2F), on April 24, 2015.
KU apparently wrote to the organizers: “Seminars related to sensitive issues are not allowed in the university premises” and subsequently sealed shut the auditorium where the discussion was to be held. The defiant hosts went ahead with holding the event outside the auditorium and managed to surreptitiously bring in the elderly Baloch human rights campaigner Mama Qadeer Baloch whose nonviolent efforts to demand justice for thousands of Baloch missing persons have irked elements in Pakistan’s security establishment. Mama Qadeer was able to speak but the message from LUMS, T2F and KU is becoming increasingly clear: there is no room to discuss the Baloch question.
The reason for stifling any debate on Balochistan is as simple as it is gruesome: along with the killed and dumped young Baloch men, their nationalism is to be buried for good this time around. The state is coming down against the Baloch separatists with its full might not just in Baloch territory but also elsewhere in Pakistan, especially Karachi, which has been a hub of Baloch political activity for decades, to deny them any sympathetic forum or even an unsympathetic one for that matter. Almost 55 years ago, General Ayub Khan wrote in the US journal, Foreign Affairs, that in Pakistan, “There is diversity of languages, scripts and social customs. By the very nature of things, these factors are centrifugal and the call for a new and bold experiment with political and administrative science to weave unity out of diversity.” He was effectively justifying colonization — by force as it turned out to — of every nation and nationality that ended up being in Pakistan at the hands of what has since become the ‘core state’, i.e. Punjab. Anyone who veered from the narrow definitions of unity, patriotism and national interest that General Ayub Khan went on to lay down has been condemned to ‘traitor’ status. From the venerable Ms Fatima Jinnah and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who opposed the military’s political interventions, to Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), who actually allied with the praetorian guard, anyone who was perceived to not toe the line at any point faced its wrath. No one, however, seems to have been suppressed more brutally than the Baloch. And not a thing has changed for them.
Baloch activists recently released a heartrending video through social media that shows men and women wailing over the mutilated bodies of several young men who they claim were abducted from Gwajrak village in Mashkay, Balochistan on April 21, 2015. Among those abducted and killed, Basit, Aijaz and Aftab were said to be members of the Baloch National Movement (BNM) and Shahnawaz was a member of the Baloch Students Organisation-Azad (BSO-A). The apparent crime of the victims was not just their affiliation with nationalist political outfits BNM and BSO-A but also a family relationship to a separatist Baloch Liberation Front (BLF) leader, Akhtar Nadeem Baloch. Chances are that no inquiry will be conducted into the Mashkay incident or, if one indeed does take place, its findings might not be different than those of the judicial commission that probed the mass graves in Totak area of district Khuzdar, Balochistan and absolved those suspected. What is worse is that the recent official chorus alleging that the Indian intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), is sponsoring the Baloch nationalist insurgency will provide not just the pretext but also a virtual license to kill secular insurgents. The powerful Corps Commanders’ conference set the tone last week when it publicly blamed RAW for “whipping up terrorism in Pakistan”. Defense Minister Khwaja Muhammad Asif ratcheted it up a notch and asserted: “RAW has been formed to wipe Pakistan off the map of the world” and the Baloch insurgent leaders allegedly carried Indian passports. Despite the foreign office’s claim that proof of RAW’s subversive activities in Pakistan would be shared with India, none has come to the fore so far.
What is clear though is that the ‘foreign hand’, especially RAW’s label, ostensibly makes the Baloch insurgents a ‘legitimate’ target and also delegitimizes their cause. It is almost a throwback to February 1973 when Pakistani intelligence services claimed to have found a cache of weapons at the Iraqi embassy in Islamabad, which they claimed were destined for use by the Baloch insurgents. The weapons were ‘discovered’ on February 10, 1973 and, on February 15, the National Awami Party’s (NAP’s) elected government in Balochistan was dismissed on that pretext as well as a tribal uprising that had been orchestrated against that government. The allegations of foreign support, including from Afghanistan, were used to ban the NAP and persecute its leadership through the infamous Hyderabad Tribunal.
Despite years of political struggle, Baloch, and indeed Pashtun nationalism never did recover from that blow. Fastforward 42 years and the state is brandishing the exact same weapons to defang the Baloch nationalist struggle. With the Chinese keen on the dual civil-military use Gwadar deep seaport and apparently ready to open their cash-flushed coffers to Pakistan, the latter is gung-ho about routing Baloch nationalism decisively. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is designed to not just sap Balochistan’s resources but also wipe out any nationalist naysayers who oppose the interests of the ‘core state’ permanently. From being a prison house of nationalities like Tsarist Russia, Pakistan has become a slaughterhouse for some of them, like the Baloch. The shrinking political, social and academic space for dissenting voices suggests that those truly at the helm do not even want wailing voices to be heard as Baloch nationalism is forcibly buried deep.
(The writer can be reached at mazdaki@ me.com and he tweets @mazdaki)
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