Daily Times

I was amused to see Saddruddin Hashwani, head of Hashoo Group, assume the role of a statesman advising all to become more responsible and mature. I would have been surprised had not his uttering come to notice before. In this recent wide-ranging preposterous statement he advised political parties to cooperate for formulation of strategy to resolve national issues. He opined that the proper usage of natural resources would stabilise the country’s economy and added, “Almighty Allah has gifted Pakistan with rich natural resources and our next 11 generations could benefit from the Reko Diq project as this project will save Pakistan’s future.” He, in my opinion, suggested rather ludicrously that the Reko Diq project should be run under the supervision of the country’s strategic institutions (read army) so that it could be protected from fraudulent practices. Angels incarnate they? He praised Nawaz Sharif’s initiatives on the Gwadar Port and Shahbaz Sharif’s hard work for stabilising the economy. He said Pakistan’s business community always sacrificed for the country and was ready to render more. Some sacrifices!

Hashwani has been at it quite long. He had staunchly defended the ‘deep state’ post-Osama bin Laden’s killing, claiming in a statement that the “Pakistani ISI and military are the finest and the best institutions of the world and it will be totally unfair for the international community to forget their services.” Hashwani had accused the CIA, RAW and Mossad of being the biggest terrorist organisations and behind the killings of many innocent Muslims. He certainly knows which side of the bread to butter. After the defeat of the previous government and his family’s return after five years, in his first statement he had praised Dr Abdul Malik’s appointment as Balochistan’s chief minister, extolled his own services, promised more hotels and investment in gas and oil and, above all, urged people to live by the ideals of the faith.

Apparently Hashwani takes a great deal of interest in Balochistan’s matters, and many mistakenly believe he is a Baloch. His interest in Balochistan has nothing to do with the Baloch rights or welfare; it is apparently the unlimited opportunities to exploit Balochistan’s resources that prompt Hashwani to come up with all this political rhetoric and a misleading Balochistan-friendly stance. To show his sincerity to the establishment he had even offered to rebuild the Ziarat Residency at his own cost. Shahid-ur-Rahman in his book Who Owns Pakistan has exposed the wheeling and dealing and the inordinate influence of the predatory business and political elite here, which would be better termed as ‘Carpetbaggers Inc’. Regarding the Hashwani family he says, “Hashwanis are Khoja Ismaeelis from Gujrat in India who migrated to Karachi in 1885 where Hussain Hashwani, father of Sadaruddin Hashwani, became partner in a company, representing Raleigh Brothers, one of the leading buyers of cotton worldwide. In 1947, when the two Hindu partners departed, Hussain Hashwani incorporated Hassan Ali and Company, in the name of his eldest son. The three Hashwani brothers were reigning as the Cotton King when cotton export business was nationalised in 1972 by Z A Bhutto. Sadaruddin Hashwani is Sadru to friends and a corporate raider and social climber to others. He had started as a small time trader in 1960, became a big name in the 1970 and 1980s and was ranked 20th in June 1990 list of Pakistan’s super rich by the monthly Herald.” There you have the background as to why Hashwani is what he is and why.

Jawed Naqvi is one of my favourite columnists as he understands the undercurrents and undertones of Indian politics and society — which naturally are very similar to the ones here — better than anyone else and he assesses and exposes Narendra Modi superbly. He says Modi is backed by the corporate lobby for his aggressive pro-business policies, which impoverish the people but immensely help the predatory businessmen, industrialists and investors. The predatory business ethos that Modi backs succeeds with a symbiotic relationship between the corporate world, communalism (sectarianism is also communalism and the other side of communalism’s coin), fascism, ethnic politics and organised crime like extortion and land-grab mafias. This symbiosis produces successful politicians like Modi there and Nawaz Sharif, not to mention Altaf Hussain here. Modi has continuously succeeded at the polls in Gujarat, the original home of the Hashwanis, not in spite of the 2002 Muslim pogroms but because of them, and he is being touted as a future prime minister of India because of his aggressive pro-business stance.

The case is not much different here; one could say that Nawaz Sharif is Pakistan’s Narendra Modi but so far minus pogroms. Sharif has the corporate world’s backing because he is aggressively pro-business and dreams up mega-projects that never benefit ordinary people but turn billionaires into trillionaires. There, Modi’s ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ has been meaningless for the ordinary people; a Gujarati lady Mallika Sarabhai wrote in an open letter to Amitabh Bachchan in 2010 after he endorsed Modi: “ In 2001, the state debt (Gujarat’s) was Rs14,000 crore. This was before the state became a multinational company. Today, it stands at Rs1,05,000 crore. And to service this debt we pay a whopping Rs7,000 crore a year, 25% of our annual budget.” It will not be different here because the predatory investors, businessmen and industrialists belong to a class and culture where only profits matter and people do not. The Gwadar-China corridor is nothing but a high-speed highway for enriching the already filthy rich Hashwanis and others like him.

The sudden transformation of Saddruddin Hashwani into a statesman is not surprising, especially after the installation of the Pakistani version of Narendra Modi as the prime minister here. Hashwani is a surrogate of the ‘deep state’ and his pronouncements serve their purposes and make it easy for them to implement their policies and also benefit them financially. His expressed concern for the development of Balochistan’s resources has nothing to do with the rights or welfare of the Baloch. Moreover, his sinister demand for the Baloch resources to be in the hands of the strategic institutions is nothing more than providing a fig leaf to ominous plans of permanently and completely depriving the Baloch of their rights and resources under flimsy pretexts. The Hashwanis of Gujarat and the Sharifs of Punjab, for all the billions they may have and their puppets like Dr Malik and company have no right to decide about the resources and future of the Baloch nation; it is for the Baloch to decide how their resources are best used.

The writer has an association with the Baloch rights movement going back to the early 1970s. He tweets at mmatalpur and can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com