Daily Times

The August 8 harrowing terrorist attack in Quetta has yet again brought to the fore the misery and mayhem in Balochistan. The Islamic State and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a splinter group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, claimed responsibility for the gruesome attack that killed at least 75 people and maimed hundreds. This was a premeditated attack on Quetta lawyers, the most vocal segment of Balochistan’s intelligentsia, leading protests for the recovery of region’s “missing persons.”

However, the Pakistani regime and right wing corporate media have been pointing fingers across the Radcliffe line. Their vociferous chauvinist propaganda seemed to exonerate the religious fundamentalism from this horrendous atrocity. Chief Minister of Balochistan Sanaullah Zehri immediately accused the Indian intelligence agency, RAW, of being behind the attack.

Intelligence agencies of the belligerent Pakistani and Indian states have been involved in attacks, but are used more in the blame game than actual sabotage. The former president of Pakistan and chief of army staff, General Pervez Musharraf, in an interview with The Guardian confessed: “Pakistan had its own proxies; India had its proxies… the RAW of India, the ISI of Pakistan have always been fighting against each other since our independence. That is how it continued, and also it continues now.”

Since the discovery of large deposits of precious mineral and hydrocarbon resources in Balochistan, imperialist corporations and regional states with imperialist designs have exploited Balochistan to plunder this wealth. It was the ordinary inhabitants of this resource-rich but tragic land that have suffered the misery of this aggressive exploitation.

Pakistan’s redundant and reactionary ruling classes have intensified the repression of the oppressed classes and nationalities. The state has morphed into a prison house of the oppressed nationalities and an instrument of class repression. It is the youth who are spearheading the rebellious struggle against the forces of oppression. However, the nationalist movement has been weakened in those sections where the imperialist influences have penetrated the leadership in the guise of deceptive support. Actually, it’s a ploy to use these movements as their bargaining pawns with the state and other stakeholders in Balochistan.

The Islamic fundamentalist and religious sectarianism is a relatively recent phenomenon in the dynamics of the conflict in Balochistan. It is used to undermine the nationalist insurgency. The Shia and the Wahabi regimes of Iran and Saudi Arabia are propping it up for their hegemonic interests. The grotesque mass slaughter of the Hazara Shias in the last few years was the result of this sectarian madness. These theocratic regimes have bribed sections within the state and political elite to infiltrate. The resultant sectarian savagery has traumatised the oppressed masses
of Balochistan.

However, it was the US imperialists that introduced “modern” Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon to protect imperialist interests and crush the Saur revolution in Afghanistan. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the then American president Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, replying to a French journalist in the 1980s said: “It was more important to bring down the Soviet empire than to worry about a few stirred-up Muslims.” It is not just in Afghanistan but also throughout the region and even in the Middle East this virulent plague of “a few stirred-up Muslims” is
ravaging civilisation.

Now the Chinese are the largest stakeholders in this beleaguered region. They have taken over the Gawadar port and Balochistan’s gold and copper resources. The primary motive of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is to boost the profits of the Chinese corporate capitalists. The western imperialists are not happy with this arrangement between the Pakistani and the Chinese states, and hence there is another proxy war that perpetuates Balochistan’s indigence. How could the wily Indian state remain aloof in this blood-stained corporate plunder? Apart from their strategic interests, the Indian army’s main basis of massive funding and the fifth highest military spending in the world is its continuum of hostilities and provocations with its Pakistani counterpart. The Pakistan military’s policy is based on the same doctrine.

Balochistan’s ordinary inhabitants have been the victim of state and non-state actors’ violence for generations. Terrorism in whatever form targets the oppressed and the dispossessed as its first victims. In the last few years there have been innumerable missing persons and mutilated bodies of political activists thrown on the wayside in Balochistan’s rugged wilderness. However, the mainstream nationalist leaders have not been able to mobilise the masses in an uprising as is happening in the Indian-occupied Kashmir at present. In the rest of Pakistan there has been a meagre support for the struggle of Balochistan’s oppressed masses for their socioeconomic and national rights. One of the main reasons has been the degeneration of the left leaderships and certain inertia in the class struggle. The masses throughout Pakistan have been subjected to socioeconomic exploitation, misery, poverty and deprivation. Terrorism and oppression are an insult upon injuries of these working classes.

This mayhem and brutal oppression of the ordinary people of Balochistan shall face the retribution of history sooner rather than latter. The workers and the oppressed classes will rise in a mass revolt and cut across the oppression of the state and imperialists. Not only in the most industrialised areas of the country but also in Balochistan where the proletariat may be numerically small, its role in society and the traditions of defiance are crucial.

The military operations and “combing of society” have failed to check terrorism. Rather, this intensifying repression aggravates snags in the lives of the ordinary people. Quetta today looks like a besieged colonial city with military check posts every few metres. Other areas of the country are increasingly facing a similar anguish. The relentless terrorist strikes without impunity exhibit the failure of the state to eradicate this brutality. It is only the mass movement led by the workers and the youth that can wipe away the vicious cancer of terrorism by overthrowing the rulership of these complicit and repressive state and non-state elites through their revolutionary overthrow.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at lalkhan1956@gmail.com