“Pakistan is anything but isolated”: An interview with Awais Khan Leghari

India is involved in subversive activities inside Pakistan

The investments in Balochistan have already started while the work on the western route, the investments in Gwadar, are gearing up and the Chinese and Pakistani experts are taking measures in an efficient and economic manner

Awais Leghari, currently the chairman of the standing committee on foreign relations, is the son of former president Sardar Farooq Leghari. As former minister for information technology, he initiated and oversaw the robust telecom sector in the country flourish into the giant industry it is today.

Awais is also Chairman of the Forest Company of South Punjab and Chairman of the Fort Munroe Development Authority. His aim is to bring South Punjab to the forefront of development and envisage Fort Monroe as a clean and beautiful hill resort with botanical gardens and reasonable amenities.

In 1988, Farooq Leghari was made minister for water and power and although democracy was not yet stable on its feet and subsequently dismissal of his government took place; but at least there was an end to the kind of persecution that the family had suffered before. After completing his senior year at Cambridge, Awais tended to his farms for a year before enrolling in the University of Rochester (USA), where he experienced life on his own.

After returning, Awais got married at the age of twenty five and at his father’s insistence joined politics, winning the provincial seat from Jampur as an independent candidate in 1997 and entering the Punjab Assembly.

In 2002, he won a National Assembly seat under the tutelage of the Millat Party, which was led by his father and was a part of the Grand National Alliance. Tasked with the ministry of telecom and information technology, Awais shifted to Islamabad to fulfill his newfound duties and worked efficiently to deregulate the telecom sector and privatised Ufone and PTCL. Despite immense pressure that came with the decision, Awais stood tall and came up with alternatives such as ‘the voluntary separation scheme,’ to provide opportunity to staff that had to be laid off, which helped stem PTCL’s privatisation issues. Due to his active work, Mobile telephony increased from 2.8 million to over 65 million from 2002-2007; a manifold boost that had never been witnessed before.

Awais was nominated and selected as a Young Global Leader from the World Economic Forum, where his visits to Davos were used to highlight problems such as terrorism and poverty that Pakistan was facing.

He left PML-Q in 2010 when the party joined the PPP-led coalition government. There was talk of the group joining PTI, but ultimately nothing came about.

Awais contested and won the NA-172 seat as an independent candidate in the 2013 general elections, and later joined the ruling PML-N with his group of two MNAs and four MPAs.

He talked exclusively to DNA about the current diplomatic standoff with India, among other things.

Question: After collecting a regional grouping, informally, to pressure Pakistan on “simmering Baluchistan” India now seems bent upon taking the issue all the way to the UN if Pakistan should raise Kashmir there. This no longer seems a short-term policy to score points but rather an entrenched position that will stay till the duration of the BJP government at least. Do you agree?

Awais Leghari: I think India is following a strategy to just divert world attention from atrocities being committed by Indian forces in Indian Occupied Kashmir. The Indians, under the UN charter, are not allowed to raise the issue of Baluchistan at the United Nations in any case. Pakistan has never raise the issue of seventeen different independence movements going on in India right now. We only talk about Kashmir because Kashmir is a disputed territory. And the desire of the Indians to equate Baluchistan and Kashmir is a complete non-starter. The international community is responsible enough to pay any heed to the wish list Indians have over Baluchistan. So I think this Indian bid on Baluchistan is going to fail miserably.

Q: Critics say Pakistan was too weak and slow in rebutting the comparison with Kashmir since Baluchistan is not a disputed territory but rather a fully functioning province of a sovereign country. Do you also feel Pakistan was too slow on the draw diplomatically?

AL: Not at all. First of all nobody from the international community ever raised the issue of Baluchistan before me at the United Nations in Geneva. I met about 25 different permanent representatives and ambassadors who are representing their own countries. Those who I met included the Germans, the Italians, the Swiss, the Chinese and everybody else present at the UN. I also met with the representatives of twenty different countries of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC). Baluchistan was never even a part of any discussion, not even a single question was raised by them. So as far as the international community is concerned, we registered our protest with the world leaders about Indian role and Pakistan was aggressive enough in raising the issue of the speech the prime minister of India had made in Bangladesh regarding his admission of the role played by India in breakup of East Pakistan back in 1971. This was the issue we put up before the world community to recognise the Indian intervention into Pakistan’s internal affairs.

We reiterated to the international community how much India was again intervening to destabilise Pakistan yet again after the role they played in 1971. We raised serious objections and the same was very well received. Let me tell you that Baluchistan is a non-issue as far as the international community is concerned.

Q: Once again the military had to talk tough about foreign hands, especially in Baluchistan, while the foreign office was not distressed enough to issue relevant, quantifiable statements. Why this obvious difference in approach?

AL: Well I think that the foreign office has been responsible enough to state rebuttals to Indian statements on Baluchistan and as far as on ground operations are concerned, all security agencies including the home ministry of Baluchistan itself and the police force and the armed forces who are involved in Baluchistan are handling the situation. Yes, India is involved. Indian agents, including Kulbhushan Yadev, have made confessional statements, providing enough material and evidence of Indian involvement in subversive activities in not just Baluchistan but even places like Karachi where we at different occasions found some kind of connection between Altaf Hussain part of the MQM and the Indians. And we have seen the evidence and we can prove it. I think that the foreign office was clear enough and there was not any need to be clearer than that. So both the civil and the military side are completely clear and blunt about the Indian role inside Pakistan.

Q: The government has much to answer for on the foreign policy front. There’s been no good news from Washington or Kabul despite the urgency of the war effort. And ties with Iran were restored after being allowed to become unnecessarily strained. Is it because, in the absence of a full time foreign minister, the PM just cannot give too much attention to external affairs – not when he’s fighting for his political survival at home?

AL: I think the prime minister is giving enough attention to foreign policy as is required. He has got two very responsible people in the form of Sartaj Aziz who is a veteran on international affairs and Tariq Fatemi who is a former career diplomat. Both of them put together are feeding the prime minister’s office with adequate information.

Let’s now come to Iran’s relationship with Pakistan and the charge that Pakistan was in a state of isolation. Let me say that Pakistan is anything but isolated. The appreciation of Pakistan’s efforts by Richard Olson only the other day during a hearing at one of the parliamentary committees of the US does testify that. Moreover, the request coming from the president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, for a meeting with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif during the upcoming UN session at New York is also evident of the fact that we are in good contact of Iran. We have also signed an MoU for making Gwadar and Chabahar sister ports, so I think there is surely realignment in the international community. With the interests of the Chinese being heard on the South China Sea issue, and with the America cozying up to the Indians to strike a balance in this region, there are realignments and Pakistan getting much closer to Russia and the central Asian states. These are the areas where we have not been there in the past. So all these developments are leading towards an environment where Pakistan’s foreign policy has started to pay off.

Q: Could this Indian offensive work to Pakistan’s advantage in the end? There is, after all, a need to improve things in Baluchistan. And recent skewed CPEC project distribution only added to resentment there. Perhaps the government can use this moment to pay greater, result-oriented attention to problems in the south?

AL: Pakistan’s attention to the CPEC project is not going to be restricted in the first five years. CPEC is a much longer project. The investments in Baluchistan have already started while the work on the western route, the investments in Gwadar, are gearing up and the Chinese and Pakistani experts are taking measures in an efficient and economic manner.

Baluchistan, in my humble opinion, is being paid enough attention. It is just that this province have been so backward due to bad and imprudent policies of the past regimes that it would take some time for the Baluch people to actually realise and reap the benefits of the investments coming to the development sector under CPEC.

As far as India’s offensive is concerned, I believe India due to the irresponsible manner in which its leadership is behaving today is in a very unstable and erratic state. The Indian regime is being exposed to the world by each passing day.

It’s not just Pakistan and rather similar issues are being raised by the Indians themselves. Whether it is their civil society or their human rights organisations, they are raising the injustices being done there. You can see Amnesty International’s report on atrocities being committed in Indian Occupied Kashmir. Human Rights Watch has raised these issues as well. And even Kashmiri parliamentarians have started to resign from their seats while the civil society has actually gotten up against not just the Kashmir issue but also even on the way other minorities are being mistreated. The way Modi and the Indian government are disturbing the basic fabric of secularism in India is worrying.

I think all these things put together show India is being exposed to the world. Any kind of offensive that India has launched would fire back. Even the atrocities being committed against the people of IoK are being highlighted by the world itself. For the first time in diplomatic history, the human rights council’s High Commissioner in the UN, in his opening statement at the Human Rights Council’s meeting in front of the entire international community, recognised by name the human rights violations taking place in Indian Occupied Kashmir. So, this is something that is going to change the entire way the International Community looks at India. And I hope it awakens responsible states like the countries of the European Union, United States of America, Russia and others so they could actually put pressure on India to make Kashmir more transparent.

By refusing any fact finding mission to come to IoK, India is behaving the same way as Basharul Asad is behaving in Syria where fact finding missions are not allowed to go into Syria. So all these things put together are exposing India and I believe we are on the right track and we need to continue to extend our moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri people.