Daily Times

In the aftermath of Quetta attack there have been comments galore about the failure of intelligence agencies, and chickens of strategic policies having come home to roost, albeit in a macabre way. In a state such as Pakistan where a condition of anomie exists despite the presence of an interventionist Leviathan the solution may readily be found in a post-structuralism model. According to writers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, the binary oppositions of the social, economic, and political structure of a state and society have given way to a deconstructed reality of such assumptions where the new truths and assumptions create their own reality. The present Pakistani state also resembles a post-modern construct where the old leaven of common ethnicity, linguistics, and religion that bound state and society have been taken over by emerging realities and new truths.

For far too long we have been the captives of binaries like collectivism-individualism, moral-amoral, historical-ahistorical, religious-secular, nation-tribe and democracy-despotism. These structural constraints have now come to asphyxiate our national response to a fifth generation warfare imposed upon us by our own incompetence as well as the machinations of our enemies. We need to break the stultifying inaction bred as a consequence of our capitulation to such structures of thought and action. The criticism of civil-military imbalance and the failure of state’s intelligence apparatus is what I call the curse of the scepticism to which have yielded some of our leading intellectuals and opinion makers. The curse of resilience highlighted so ably by Babar Sattar in his recent article pales in comparison to this curse of scepticism.

Now what is this curse of scepticism? This curse is being unable to break free from the shackles of a structural violence imposed upon itself by the state. It is the inability of the state’s de jure authority to seize its rightful constitutional powers of policy formulation and oversight from a de facto authority of a state institution. It is the failure of state to liberate its people from the fears of exploitation at the hands of a feudal coterie. It is begotten of a cultural violence that lends legitimacy to exclusion and injustice through lionisation of the divinely ordained powers of tribal sardars, tamandars, maliks, chaudries and waderas.

One is amazed to hear several learned observers of Balochistan speaking about the pragmatic need of placating the hegemonistic proclivities of the Baloch Sardars. Pragmatism thus trumps the Good Samaritan instincts of our Balochistan experts when it comes to taking up cudgels for the poor and dispossessed of the deprived province.

What else for instance would explain the preposterous decision of depriving 95 percent of the province of a police force? Is keeping most of the Sardars in pocket and hounding a few renegades who do not play ball the only trick up the sleeve of the state when it comes to governing Balochistan? A sort of Machiavellianism was imputed by a writer while excoriating civil-military governing clique over its failure to go for the real causes of terrorism wreaking havoc in the province. The real Machiavellianism is, in fact, an inability to address the structural violence stalking the province. It is this violence in the words of eminent peace activist and social scientist Johan Galtung that feeds inequities and results in a vicious cycle of social deprivation and poverty. Without breaking the structure of that inequity the elusive dawn of peace, development, and political stability will remain a pipe dream in Balochistan.

Balochistan might be paying the price of our strategic follies or myopia but these follies can be remedied through an assault on the structure of inequity, exclusion, and injustice being imposed on the province due to expedient policies of the state apparatus. The spectre of terrorism stalking the province will not be countered through placebo solutions and anodyne measures. We need fundamental policy shift away from comfort of the expedient policies sans which our CPEC dream will wither on its own vine. The province will not accept CPEC unless the people living in remote hamlets are not connected with the goodies being promised as spinoffs of CPEC. Till the time the state writ and benefaction is seen to be extending down to remote settlements where the recruits for the expansionist and irredentist dreams of enemies of Pakistan are readily available the province will remain on the boil.

Today in Balochistan despite the newly raised security division and enhanced FC presence the cost of oil and gas exploration has become prohibitively high. Several foreign E&P companies like Hugh Bakers, Tullow, BHP Billiton, OMV, and Premier Oil are planning to relocate out of Pakistan due to unsuitable exploration climate in the country. Even the local E&P companies have to employ high cost security measures raising the cost of exploration to uneconomic levels. Time has come for some tough measures and a fundamental paradigm shift in how we govern as well as protect the people of Balochistan. The province needs to be purged of external presence including Afghan refugees as well as the sectarian outfits, which might have evaded the wrath of state for expedient reasons so far.

Some of the anti-anodyne measures include immediate revocation of B areas concept, and the extension of the state writ to hundred percent area of the province, provision of electricity and locally available gas to rural populace, establishment of schools and health facilities in rural hinterland, roll back of appeasement of Sardars, and provision of jobs to the educated youth of the province. The fruits of CPEC and Gwadar development should be liberally shared with the denizens of the province in terms of jobs and provision of public goods like health, education, and civic infrastructure as a part of corporate social responsibility of public as well as private developers.

It is time the province is weaned off the ethnic as well as sectarian particularism through strong administrative as well as political measures. That is the only way to exorcise the curse of scepticism

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST, and he can be reached at rwjanj@hotmail.com