- Not enough homework
Surely Balochistan Chief Minister Jam Kamal Khan Alyani’s decision to opt out of the 8th meeting of the Joint Coordination Committee in China, over reservations about CPEC, is going to send all the wrong signals to the ‘all weather friend’. Wasn’t it only last month that Prime Minister Imran Khan was in China, personally, requesting Beijing to go out of the way to literally bail us out? And let’s not forget that failure to secure necessary funds will mean nothing less than outright default. How good does the PM look now, since the dissenting chief minister is counted among the ruling party’s allies?
This is not the first time that the government has found itself on the back foot, somewhat, because of CPEC. If the good minister has genuine grievances, which certainly seems the case, would it not have been more prudent to raise them first with Islamabad and then, diplomatically, with Beijing? Balochistan is, after all, the lynchpin of the whole project not the least because of Gwadar port. And unless he expects everybody to revise the whole plan just because he did not go, it’s hard to ascertain just what he has achieved by staying away and embarrassing the government.
Let’s count, once again, what CPEC is going to deliver before finding faults with everything. It is bringing in excess of $50 billion worth of investment and grants to the country. And, what is more, it is also going to overhaul the country’s infrastructure from one end to the other. Without CPEC, there’s no telling how many centuries it would have taken us to upgrade it. Already the web of roads and tracks, all the way form Balochistan, provides a good enough blueprint of what is to come. Why jeopardise such a windfall because of differences over routes? It seems that the government has not done its homework again. It is not only raising concern with its handling of the economy, but allies too are now causing a bit of strain.
