On 9 May, unidentified gunmen killed seven labourers from Punjab working in the city of Gwadar, on the coast of the Pakistani province of Balochistan. A month earlier, gunmen had boarded a bus in Balochistan’s Noshki district, identified nine residents of Punjab province by their documents, and shot them dead. Two other people were also killed on the Quetta–Noshki highway that day, possibly by the same gunmen. The Balochistan Liberation Army, a banned separatist group, claimed responsibility for the killings. These episodes recharged the national debate about the Baloch separatist movement, and set off fresh alarm over how it is becoming increasingly xenophobic. 

Of course, the xenophobia of the Baloch separatist movement is matched by the bigotry of the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan state, which, since it came into existence in 1947, has consistently failed to resolve the Baloch question by constitutional and political means. The state’s undue use of the military in Balochistan – as evident, for instance, in the enforced disappearances of thousands of Baloch people – has had a direct impact on the development of Baloch nationalism, turning it from a movement for provincial autonomy into a movement seeking separation from Pakistan. Now the powers that be, in all their wisdom, have decided to once again go down the same path by repackaging the old wine of military force in a new bottle. In June, with clamour growing over the recent attacks, they announced Azm-e-Istehkam – Resolve for Stability – a new anti-insurgency operation meant to bring the situation under control. Not having learnt lessons from the past military operations and frequent political interventions that have failed to quell the separatist insurgency in Balochistan, the Pakistan government is once again trying to find a military solution to a political problem.

The targeted killings of Punjabis in Balochistan is one of the many reasons that the Pakistan government has cited to justify the Azm-e-Istehkam operation. The operation’s official purpose is to reinvigorate the National Action Plan – an anti-terror plan conceived in 2015 following a terror attack on a school in Peshawar, in which 134 children were killed. However, this step goes directly against the Baloch demands for an end to the militarisation of the province and the recovery of the thousands of missing persons, for which the Baloch blame Pakistani military forces. The new operation not only ignores legitimate Baloch demands – besides those above, they include greater control over Balochistan’s rich natural resources – but also focuses the energies of the state entirely on the armed insurgency, without any parallel political effort to give the Baloch people a fair hearing and a fair deal. Ironically, ignoring these reasonable and crucial demands only fuels the insurgency. 

The establishment in Pakistan should have learnt its lesson from the fallout of the killing of Nawab Akbar Shahbaz Khan Bugti in 2006. Bugti was a moderate Baloch nationalist who supported neither insurgency nor separatism and was amenable to discussion with Islamabad. Even so, he was targeted and killed by the military under the rule of the general Pervez Musharraf as part of a strategy to quell growing unrest in Balochistan. Anger over Bugti’s killing spiralled into the fifth and most significant insurgency in the province to date. With this, separatism became the dominant objective of the Baloch movement, overshadowing any idea of resolving the Baloch question either by dialogue with Islamabad, or through electoral and parliamentary means, or both.

Bugti’s killing took place against the backdrop of the Pakistan state’s refusal to recognise Baloch grievances, including the right to control their natural resources and their demand for genuine political and institutional representation at the provincial and national levels. To address both these grievances, Islamabad would have to bestow recognition on the Baloch people as a separate ethno-national group. Such recognition runs counter to the establishment’s monolithic view of the country as a primarily Muslim state, with the unspoken and flawed assumption that religious unity overrides all ethnic identities and regional demands for rights.

Balochistan got limited recognition of its ethnic and provincial rights in 2010, when the Pakistan parliament unanimously passed the 18^th amendment to the country’s constitution. This granted provinces joint and equal rights with the federal government over natural resources, such as oil and gas. However, the federal government has since often failed to pay provinces as it should for the use and exploitation of their resources. For three years till February 2024, the federal government did not pay Balochistan its dues despite earning billions of rupees in royalties from natural gas extracted from the Uch gas field. The federal government also has other long-overdue debts to Balochistan, such as those related to the extraction and sale of oil.

These delays are not technical but political. Balochistan has never been a priority for governments in Islamabad, which would rather use the economic resources they can access to meet the desires of their own constituents and favoured interest groups instead of the needs of the province. Meanwhile, since Balochistan is on the political periphery and the military is the dominant power in the province, the federal government has been able to suppress protests and demands for timely payments.

Another reason for the launch of the new military operation is pressure from China. In 2013, China began its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative to develop infrastructure around the world so as to entend its economic linkages and power. Pakistan was its flagship site. In the recent past, Chinese personnel working on various projects of the multibillion-dollar China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – the Pakistan component of the initiative, which includes developing a deepwater port at Gwadar – have come under attack in Balochistan. For the Baloch, the CPEC is a manifestation of growing Chinese imperialism in the province with the connivance of the Pakistan state, further depriving the local people of their resources. 

China has expressed its concerns vis-à-vis the security of Chinese nationals working in Pakistan on several occasions – many news reports indicate that China wants Pakistan to ensure security as a prerequisite for the CPEC to proceed. Islamabad is also eager to protect CPEC projects as China’s investments have become crucial to Pakistan amid its chronic economic precarity, especially since the United States scaled down investments in the region after its withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2022.

In 2015, Pakistan formally handed over the Gwadar Port to China on a 40-year lease. Since then, the port has been sealed off to locals who have been involved in the fishing in the area for decades, if not centuries. For the Baloch, Chinese control of the port is an exemplification of their dispossession. Baloch separatist groups have frequently attacked the port with the objective of driving the Chinese out and reclaiming the port for the people of Balochistan. The Gwadar Port, which is the mainstay of the CPEC, has also become the centrepiece of the Gwadar Rights Movement, a protest movement that began in November 2021. Protesters have been asking for a reduction in the number of security checkpoints in the area and a ban on deep-sea trawling, which reduces the local catch. Although Islamabad promised abundant development via the port, reports suggest that it has been performing dismally, with no prospects of improvement in the immediate future.

Civilian protests and attacks by armed groups in Balochistan reflect the lack of genuine representation of the local people’s interests in its governance. The provincial government owes its existence to the military and so does not serve provincial interests. In 2018, for instance, the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP), which was established only months before that year’s general election, ended up becoming the largest party in the province, defeating moderate nationalist parties such as the Balochistan Awami Party-Mengal (BNP-M). Although the current provincial government, elected in 2024, is led by the Pakistan People’s Party, it includes key BAP leaders such as Sarfraz Bugti, the chief minister of Balochistan.

Bugti symbolises the actual control of Balochistan by the federal government and establishment in Pakistan’s purportedly constitutionally devolved political system. With his pro-military politics, Bugti openly criticises proponents of Baloch nationalism as being regressive. His pro-establishment conduct became abundantly clear when he deployed police to violently disperse peaceful protestors in late 2023. In December that year, the Baloch Long March, a demonstration led by the doctor and activist Mahrang Baloch, entered Islamabad. Bugti was the interior minister in the caretaker government in federal power at the time, and it was he who gave orders for the marchers to be confronted with force and refused to engage with them in any meaningful way. The caretaker government was led by the former BAP member Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar, who did not hesitate to acknowledge the overwhelming influence of the military over his government. 

Although the march was peaceful and expressed in a genuinely democratic way Balochistan’s most pressing demand – that is, an end to enforced disappearances and extra-judicial killings – the government saw it as a challenge to its way of managing the polity, which is to hold the federation together by force. The participants of the Long March did not publicly support or oppose the armed insurgency, yet the Pakistan state deliberately framed them as an extension of armed Baloch groups.

Such treatment meted out to peaceful protesters tends only to reinforce ideas of separatist armed struggle, even as that struggle has undoubtedly become more ugly. I have spoken with Baloch activists who have condemned the recent killings of labourers from Punjab, but also some who have justified the incidents. Those who justify the killings often argue that the labourers targeted were actually “Punjabi agents” working for the military establishment. The truth or falsehood of this might not be provable, but the rising number of targeted civilian killings by Baloch militant groups serves various tactical objectives. 

First, it allows these groups to discredit the military’s claim to have comprehensively defeated separatist forces. Second, killing soft targets allows separatists to amplify their strength vis-à-vis the Pakistani military both in the eyes of Baloch society and internationally. Third, such attacks on civilians, including Chinese personnel, have been partly successful in hampering the CPEC. 

Time and again, Pakistan’s sole reliance on military tactics has proven insufficient to securing peace in Balochistan. In addition, the armed insurgency has become a lot more sophisticated in terms of its planning and coordination of large-scale attacks, as well as in terms of the reported alliances between Baloch militant groups and other outfits ranged against the military in other parts of the country, such as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). In 2018, several Baloch militant groups came together to form the Baloch National Freedom Front. Numerous journalists working in and on Balochistan speak of an emerging nexus between the TTP and the proponents of the Baloch cause, with the TTP infiltrating Baloch society by sympathising with it on the issue of missing persons.

The Pakistan government can erode Baloch support for militant and religious extremist groups by meaningfully addressing key Baloch grievances. But Islamabad remains singularly focussed on the military option. The Azm-e-Istehkam’s chances of success, like with previous such operations in Balochistan, remain weak. Instead, it is more likely to exacerbate the extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of Baloch activists. If the past is any guide to the future, further militarisation will only drive more activists towards armed struggle.

Salman Rafi Sheikh

Salman Rafi Sheikh is an assistant professor of politics at Lahore University of Management Sciences. He can be reached at: salmansheikh.ss11.sr gmail.com

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