Daily Times

Sabeen Mahmud, the founder of The Second Floor (T2F) – a platform for dialogue — was murdered in cold blood minutes after her establishment had hosted a panel discussion called ‘Un-silencing Balochistan –Take 2’. According to her mother, Mehnaz Mahmud, who was also injured in the attack, two unknown assailants pumped five bullets into Sabeen when their car stopped at a traffic signal near the Defence Library, Karachi. Sabeen, an enlightened activist who stood for an array of progressive causes, paid the ultimate price for upholding the citizens’ right to free speech. The grief among her friends from Karachi to Khyber was immediate and immense. Grown men and women wept while mourning her. The initial grief gave way to anxiety and then set in the most gruesome of all feelings: fear. Fear was not just out of the grim certainty of what had happened but also due to the uncertainty of what lies ahead for Sabeen’s fellow travellers.
The finger of blame was pointed immediately towards elements in the state’s security apparatus. It was, after all, the state’s security agencies that had induced, earlier this month, the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) to cancel that fateful seminar, which Sabeen and the T2F ultimately ended up hosting on the same subject and three of the intended panelists of the cancelled LUMS seminar. One participant of the seminar, Mama (honorific for uncle or elder) Qadeer Baloch, had been stopped last month from boarding a plane to New York where he was supposed to address a human rights seminar to highlight the issue of thousands of Baloch missing persons. The T2F had apparently hosted a series of lectures on Balochistan last year as well, after which the spooks had come probing. Not too long ago, Sabeen had told the BBC’s Fifi Haroon in an interview: “There are some issues that you have to be very careful about that are safer not to touch. I mean, you have to be prudent. We have done a lecture series on Balochistan that resulted in some visits by the agencies. They have come and they have taken all our information, our bank statements, lists of employees; they wanted everyone’s home addresses and phone numbers. Not quite sure what triggered that but we think it is probably the Balochistan work that we did, something that you really cannot talk about in Pakistan.”
In the most ironic of twists, a coterie of television anchors that dutifully echo the security establishment’s views, shot back, blaming the Indian intelligence agency RAW for Sabeen’s murder, ostensibly to “malign this country’s intelligence services”. This sordid chorus, led by a certain Ahmed Quraishi, even blamed the Baloch human rights activists, including Mama Qadeer and others like LUMS professor Dr Taimur Rahman who was not amongst the organisers of the cancelled seminar at that university, for somehow orchestrating the grisly act. These same anchors have gone blue in the face portraying every secular-liberal voice in Pakistan as a paid stooge of RAW but now want the people to believe that liberals plotted the murder of another liberal person and that too at the hands of RAW! The ‘logic’ put forth was that it would have been silly of the elements within the domestic spy world to eliminate a dissident for which they could so obviously be blamed. Last April, when the prominent journalist and television anchor Hamid Mir was shot shortly after he had hosted Mama Qadeer, the same individuals had ranted that the perpetrator(s) could not have been anyone from the security agencies since “the professionals finish their job” while Mir was still alive! A commission was formed by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to investigate the attack on Hamid Mir and submit its report within three weeks.
That report never came through and neither will the one determining who killed Sabeen Mahmud, a pledge by the military’s spokesman to help investigate the latter notwithstanding. What is clear though is that the space for dissenting voices that was already shrinking has virtually disappeared with this latest atrocity. The drastic impact of Sabeen’s brutal assassination will be twofold: a) it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to challenge the obscurantist discourse that is endemic in Pakistan and b) debate over the state’s highhandedness in Balochistan even at small, private forums like the T2F, will be smothered. The latter helps gung-ho elements in the security establishment to effectively draw a red line vis-à-vis the hapless Baloch land, which if crossed could have lethal consequences. The re-establishing of this threshold coincides with the revived Chinese pledge to complete building and then running the multipurpose — military listening post, naval base and the southern pier of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – Gwadar deep sea port on Balochistan’s Makran coast.
The Baloch nationalists, especially the militant ones, view the CPEC with deep suspicion. While the Pashtun nationalists are concerned about the economic fruits of the CPEC, many Baloch consider it a poisoned fruit. The Pashtun political parties are protesting a potential diversion to Punjab of the western tributary of the CPEC route(s) but the Baloch consider the whole project an existential threat to their national identity and autonomy. The Baloch have historically viewed the ostensibly developmental schemes commissioned by the federal government in their territory as exploitative in character but in the case of Gwadar, that grievance has become more acute and the proposed economic intervention is considered frank colonisation. The Baloch had resisted Sino-Pak ventures in the mid-2000s, leading to the Chinese backing off temporarily. The current militant Baloch resistance, which in many ways grew out of the last decade’s defiance, considers the potential influx of over two million non-Baloch that the Gwadar megaproject would likely entail, as a conclusive demographic change that will turn them into a minority in their own homeland.
The Baloch militancy, which is marred by internecine bickering at times, may not be able to take on the might of the state that is backed by a global economic power but still has the potential and intent to throw a spanner into the CPEC works if it would keep them from meeting the fate of the Native Americans. The state, of course, wants to have none of it and seems bent on sticking to its near-colonial trajectory complete with stifling debate, decimating dissent and instilling fear lest anyone challenges its grand designs to obliterate the Baloch national identity or the atrocities committed along such a path.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki