Tolling bells fall on deaf ears
It’s only so long you can keep a lid on a simmering pot. There will come a time when it will boil over. The problem in Balochistan has been deteriorating for a while and its deterioration has been escalated by the callous mishandling of the situation. The suicide bombing that has taken place in Quetta is a testament to the fact that the people over there no longer have faith in the system. That they have resorted to such extreme measures should be a wake-up call for our state, nay deep state, but hopes of that remain bleak.
While no elements can be allowed to take up arms against the state and erode its writ, it must also be analysed why these elements have taken up arms against the state. We must discard conspiratorial notions of ‘foreign hands’ and ‘trouble-making elements’ and look at the gripes of a people that feel colonised by its own state. Our heavy-handed conflation of genuine grievances with militant separatism has proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and this has to stop.
With the advent of this democratic dispensation, many thought that the situation would improve – even if slightly. The government announced the Aghaz-e-Haqooq-e-Balochistan package and extended an olive branch to the extremely disgruntled Baloch leadership. But since the military footprint in the province has not decreased, people and activists still continue to disappear and be killed ruthlessly, the aforementioned measures have amounted to naught. It is the peculiar nature of our state that the civilian government, even though it had its heart in the right place, could not do anything, much because of the fact that the handling of this situation is not its preserve to begin with (but this does not mean that it can be exonerated completely – especially on counts of inaction and docility).
Law and order has now become an untenable thing in the restive province. Despite claims by the authorities that the situation is under control, it is apparent that fissures of discontent (be it sectarian, separatist or others) are deepening with each passing day. Advising the powers that be to reach out to the Baloch now seems to be an exercise in futility. Once it was a situation that could’ve been dealt through dialogue but wasn’t. Why? If we can talk to the other terrorist elements that bomb us, why can’t we talk to our own aggrieved people? Reaching out purposefully to the Baloch remains the only option.
