Meeting Balochistan’s needs
By Shahid Javed Burki
THE accession of Balochistan was treated in yet another way. What goes today by the name of that province did not exist in 1947. The British administered the area lightly. A few urban municipalities were governed by political agents — officials who belonged to a central service. The administration of the land owned by various tribes was left to the tribal leaders. Accountability to the central authority (for mostly law and order) was assigned to a ‘shahi jirga’.
Several states — Kalat and Lasbela being the largest — were ruled by provinces as were more than 500 other states in the British domain in India. How were the wishes of such a diverse community of people to be ascertained? Again, to go back to Muhammad Ali’s account: “For Balochistan, the viceroy decided to entrust the responsibility to the shahi jirga and the non-official members of the Quetta municipality. They voted unanimously to join the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan.” But the political future of what was to become Balochistan did not end with this action. There remained the matter of the states and that proved not to be easy. One of the states, Kalat, proved difficult to absorb into Pakistan. It took military action to finally convince the Khan, the ruler of Kalat, to throw in his lot with Pakistan.
The way Pakistan was assembled into a state did not lead to the creation of a nation. The country that came into existence in August 1947 was a collection of a number of diverse geographical entities. Each unit had its own history, language, culture and — most importantly — its own form of governance. Of the four provinces that are now Pakistan, Punjab to some extent and Sindh to a lesser extent had some experience of democracy. Even in these, the landed aristocracy wielded enormous power over the people. In the Frontier Province and Balochistan, tribal chiefs and sardars had monopoly over political power. A sense of nationhood did not develop. Once the excitement of having gained a country wore off, nation-building made little progress.
This then was an inauspicious beginning; it became even more troubling once the issue of governance came to be tackled. This was the case in particular with Balochistan. Once again, the question came to be addressed in Pakistan’s formative years. The first participant in the debate was Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father.
As the political scientist Khalid bin Sayeed points out in his book, Pakistan: The Formative Phase, Balochistan, at the time of Pakistan’s birth, was politically very backward as compared with other directly administered provinces of British India which had gone through constitutional changes in 1910, 1921, 1930 and 1935. “Balochistan, on the other hand, had not gone through these various stages of a parliamentary form of government.”
How to govern this area became an issue very soon after the birth of Pakistan. It was addressed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah in a speech at the Sibi Darbar on February 14, 1948. “I have come to the conclusion that our immediate object can be best achieved by making the governance and administration of Balochistan more directly the concern of the governor-general himself acting in close collaboration with the acknowledged representation of the people. For this purpose, I have decided to constitute a governor-general’s advisory council, a body which will enable the people to play their full part in the administration and governance of their province. Thus, gentlemen, in some ways you will be better off than the other provinces of Pakistan. Here you will have a governor-general’s province and you will become my special responsibility and care, and let me assure you that in this sphere of activities, the governor-general will adopt such measures as may be necessary, in consultation with the advisory council from time to time.”
Jinnah, in other words, was laying the foundation of direct central authority over the province, an issue that was to acquire enormous importance in later years. In fact, the governor-general was questioned by the press a day after the speech at the Sibi Darbar whether his suggestion that a province directly administered by the chief executive would be in a better situation than other provinces did not amount to his preference for a dictatorial rather than a democratic form of government.
That certainly was not the case, he replied. “I was thinking of provisional measures which would help in getting things done, rather than lengthy processes involved in full-fledged parliamentary discussions.” That impulse to trust central authority over the will of the people can, therefore, be traced back to the Quaid-i-Azam.
Governance in Balochistan was dealt another blow in 1955 when the leadership finally agreed to provide a governing framework for Pakistan. In doing so it decided to reinvent the country’s geography. The four provinces of the country’s western wing were merged to form the One Unit of West Pakistan. The objective was to balance the eastern wing, today’s Bangladesh. At that time the eastern wing had more people than the combined provinces in the western wing. A democratic system based on one person one vote would have tilted the political power towards Dhaka. This the elite-dominated western wing was not prepared to countenance. The solution was to create two provinces, one in the country’s west and the other in the east and give equal representation to the two in the national legislature.
This was the “principle of parity” that became the foundation of the short-lived constitution of Pakistan. It was adopted in 1956 and abrogated in 1958 when the military intervened in politics for the first but not the last time in the country’s history. The One Unit scheme made Balochistan’s common people lose their cultural and historical identity. The stage was set for the mounting grievances on the part of the people of the province. Lahore, the capital of West Pakistan, was too distant from Quetta to be of much use to the people of the province to redress their problems.
The discovery in the 1950s of vast deposits of natural gas in Sui, in the southern part of the province, provided Pakistan with a tremendously rich source of energy. Beginning with the period of Ayub Khan and continuing to the present, a vast network of gas pipelines was laid to bring Balochistan’s gas to consumers across the country. Today, Pakistan has one of the most extensive gas pipeline networks in the world. However, there is an irony in that Balochistan is the least covered area by the pipeline. While consumers in other parts of the country have benefited by gaining access to a relatively cheap source of energy no such accommodation was made for the province’s people. This was to become a major source of irritation for the people of the province, a grievance that was successfully exploited by some of the tribal leaders, most notably Sardar Akbar Khan Bugti.
That notwithstanding, the central authority could have shown some sensitivity to the mounting frustrations of the people of Balochistan and their leaders by doing two things. One, the province could have been given a more generous royalty for the exploitation of gas and other minerals that constitute a rich resource for the province. That could have been done within the framework of the National Finance Commissions that are supposed to agree on formula for the sharing of federal resources, the so-called “common pool”.
The Constitution requires this exercise to be carried out every five years. The last time it was done successfully was in 1996 when I chaired the NFC. My experience left me with one strong impression. Punjab is too large a unit within the Pakistani federation to allow other provinces to flourish. In the commission I headed, Punjab was represented by reasonable people but once they put on their provincial garb they sidestepped the national interest. They fought hard to preserve the provincial interest which could not accommodate large natural resource-based royalties to the provinces that possessed them. All provinces other than Punjab have natural resources vital for economic development. Balochistan has gas, copper, gold and granite. Sindh has gas and coal. The NWFP has gems and hydro-power. Given the stage of development of the various provinces, Punjab is by far the largest user of these resources. It should be prepared to pay for them.
The only way to preserve the Pakistani federation is to break up Punjab into three provinces, southern Punjab headquartered in Multan, central Punjab with its capital in Lahore, and northern Punjab with Jhelum as its capital. With an enormous increase in tensions in Balochistan, what is required is a radical solution which will also give the signal to the people of the province that those currently in power are determined to find a way to accommodate the interests of the smaller provinces.
The second way of keeping the provinces fully involved in national affairs and becoming working components of the Pakistani nation is to devolve power to them. That was the intent of the Constitution of 1973. However, none of the administrations that took office since the Constitution was adopted, operated the federal system as envisaged by the framers. In fact, the Constitution was subverted by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the man responsible for obtaining consensus among the many groups trying to make the Pakistani nation.
One accomplishment of the regime headed by General Pervez Musharraf is the creation of a system of local government where power vests in the elected representatives of the people. The system, however, has its opponents, in particular the members of the national and provincial legislatures who must surrender some of their power to elected nazims and deputy nazims. The regime must not give up on the system.
These two systems are already in place and they can be worked on to lessen the growing frustrations of the people of Balochistan. In addition, the government also needs to rethink its development strategy in order to address the problems faced by the rapidly growing population of the province.
Something like the Marshall Plan needs to be launched that would carefully analyse the problems and prospects of the province, determine how the economic rate of growth could be accelerated, and benefits delivered directly to the people, in particular the young.
The tragic death of Sardar Bugti could become a tragedy for the nation, for national integration and for the survival of the Pakistani nation-state. Or it could be an opportunity for the leadership to take the country towards the type of fully representative federal system that was the foundation of the Constitution of 1973. In addition, a large development plan needs to be put in place; it would not be cynical to call it the Bugti Plan for Balochistan Development. It could honour a man who has become a martyr in the eyes of many because of the manner of his death.
Concluded
Reference: Opinion, DAWN. 06/09/2006