Rebels Out To Divide Pakistan

Various groups in Pakistan, including the Pashtuns, the Baloch, the Mohajirs and the Sindhis, are fighting the national government for their rights and freedom

- Namrata Biji Ahuja

In late September, as Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan breathed fire and brimstone at the United Nations General Assembly over India’s alleged human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir, hundreds of protesters outside the New York building were blaming Khan for something similar. These were his own tribesmen—the Pashtuns from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Lending support to the Pashtuns— who held aloft the banner of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement—were men and women from Pakistan’s Balochistan and Sindh provinces. Most of them were from the Baloch Republican Party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the Jeay Sindh Muttahida Mahaz.

Their slogans echoed the sentiments of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi, who had decried the 1947 partition with the words: “You have thrown us to the wolves.”

To most Pashtuns, Baloch, people of Gilgit-Baltistan and even the Sindhis, the military-controlled Pakistan state is that wolf; it has been fattening itself at the expense of the tribesmen and the peripheral provinces for years.

At the time of partition, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had justified the creation of Pakistan by pointing to the identity crisis Muslims were facing at the time. However, in the 1970s, problems in the faith-based two-nation theory were exposed. Bangladesh was created based not on religion, but ethnicity and language. And, since then, newer fault lines have appeared on the body politic of Pakistan.

Chief among them is the Baloch movement, spearheaded by the Baloch Republican Party. “The situation in Balochistan is critical,” BRP president Brahumdagh Bugti, living in exile in Geneva for nine years, told THE WEEK. “No day passes without a village being attacked, civilians being harassed or a bullet-riddled body of previously abducted Baloch political activists being dumped in deserted places.”