Should India exercise the Baloch card?

Rattled by the abrogation of Article 370, Pakistan is brazenly threatening the nation with nuclear damnation and blackmailing the entire world into undoing the decision, as if the Islamic Republic’s very survival hinges on Kashmir. A soft state like India took some 70 years to acquire a hard edge and respond more muscularly to acts of murder and mayhem on its soil.

The devastating air assault on Balakot, after the surgical strikes in Myanmar and PoK, deflated Islamabad’s nuclear bluster once and for all, hammering home the lesson that India cannot be trifled with any longer. But then this has barely deterred the western neighbour from pursuing a suicidal path, which has gained global notoriety as the epicentre of terror.

Economically, Pakistan may be in a shambles, but is still flush with funds from Arab countries and unabashed loot of Balochistan’s vast mineral wealth. It possesses ample resources to orchestrate multiple attacks on the Republic, in ways that were inconceivable until a decade ago. It employs every bit of trickery and deceit to fulfil its most cherished goal, Ghazwa-e-Hind, the ultimate Islamization of entire subcontinent, beginning with the Kashmir Valley. It has co-opted the Hate-India groups, sham secular liberals and the Luyten’s media to promote spurious narratives on intolerance and the alleged suppression of minorities. The campaign to destabilize India is not only scary but would also make the workings of CIA’s dirty tricks department seem almost benign in comparison.

According to a latest Sunday Guardian report, a desperate ISI has now hatched its most diabolical conspiracy to shame India and compel the global community to intervene in the Kashmir dispute. The spy agency is planning to push tens of thousands of people from the PoK across the LoC in a bid to reclaim “the holy land of Kashmir” from India and precipitate a massive bloodbath. “The ISI’s plan is to force the Indian Army to shoot at the ‘unarmed pro-Kashmir protesters’” once they try to enter J&K with the help of Pakistani irregulars, the report quoting a Pakistani source, said. “Once a bloodbath takes place,” the source added, “as it will, Pakistan’s policymakers believe that the international community will be forced to intervene in Kashmir.”

The report also quoted a security official in Kashmir who said that fake images and videos are being fabricated and circulated about the alleged brutalities of the security forces to mislead the western media. If their storm troopers are barred from the volatile state, then they are bound to insinuate the government is being evasive about the ground realities. Even otherwise, there is nothing to prevent them from doctoring reports, based on half truths and hearsay, to suit a particular narrative and target India even more aggressively. If the nation is caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea today, then the political class, with its sins of omission and commission over the decades, must take the blame and make amends.

For instance, why has the current dispensation been sitting on the NN Vora report, constituted to go into the criminal-mafia-political nexus, in the light of the 1993 serial blasts; especially when it makes a great show of its patriotic fervour? Is the government not following the example of its predecessors in allegedly shielding Dawood Ibrahim, the country’s most wanted man, his linkages with powerful politicians and the ISI, besides his sinister role in terror activities? Would making the report public not have unravelled the diabolical mechanisms through which the system is being subverted from within, at the behest of the ISI?

Never before has the nation been so overwhelmed by wanton attacks on multiple levels or faced with such an existential threat. The time is now ripe to play the Baloch card, the only way India can checkmate Pakistan’s nefarious designs and silence the shrill anti-national voices within. This should be the logical culmination of a process that took birth with resolute military action in Myanmar, Uri and Pulwama, firmed up with annulment of Article 370 and nixing the practice of Triple Talaq, gathering greater and greater strength by the day. A dynamic assertion of the national identity has replaced the apologetic and craven approach to acts of terror and the abiding sense of victimhood.

Indeed the stakes are so high that New Delhi’s pursuit of the Baloch card would more than offset any likely adverse outcome. Jamal Nasir Baloch, who heads the Foreign Affairs Department of Free Balochistan Movement, spelt out the broad implications of their struggle (if carried out to its logical end). “The Baloch national struggle,” he told opindia.com, an online news portal, “can effectively reduce the territorial size of Pakistan into half and can also provide India with potential long-term influence from Chabahar to Strait of Hormuz in a post-regime Iran. It will also strengthen the pro-Indian democratic forces in Afghanistan because there is already an understanding among Afghan and Baloch to see the region free of Pakistani backed terrorism. An independent Balochistan would pave the way for the total elimination of fake state Pakistan . . . .”

Islamabad misuses every global platform to harp on so called excesses in Kashmir, even while committing the gravest of human rights violations and atrocities on Balochistan with impunity, relying on heavy artillery, fighter bombers and helicopter gunships for ethnic cleansing, besides jailing tens of thousands of protestors and forcing the mass migration of innocent civilians, something unheard of in the turbulent Valley, except in the case of Kashmiri pandits. The global community, more especially the US and European rights watchdogs, have not exactly covered themselves with glory by remaining mute spectators to the brutal suppression of an entire tribe.

Modi referred to Balochistan in his 2016 Independence Day address, the first ever by any prime minister of India, acknowledging its unrelenting, decades-long struggle for justice and restoration of rights. He also sent an unmistakable if subtle message to Pakistan, signaling a shift in India’s stand. In 2017, Brahumdagh Bugti, founder of the Baloch Republican Party and living in exile, perhaps encouraged by the stand, sought Indian citizenship for himself and his trusted aides Sher Muhammad Bugti and Azizullah Bugti. Once granted, it would have considerably strengthened the Baloch moment. But then vote bank politics, sneaking in through the back door, perhaps derailed the possibility, dashing the fond hopes of millions of freedom loving people.

One of the analysts went as far as to suggest that approving Bugti’s bid would have ‘delegitimized’ their struggle in Pakistani eyes. The point here is that if fanatical elements are being freely indoctrinated on its soil to revive the Khalistan movement in India, evoking memories of the bloodletting and devastation of the late 1980s, then the political dispensation would have been well within its rights to grant citizenship and strengthen the hands of oppressed people. Did India not welcome the Dalai Lama and make him one of its own, on humanitarian grounds and in open defiance of Chinese dictates, a far reaching decision for which Nehru is rightly lauded? Considerations of vote bank politics should now be brushed aside, keeping the larger national interests in mind.

Allah Nazar Baloch, a leader of the Balochistan Liberation Front, recalled Pakistani army’s savagery towards his people and how they cumulatively slaughtered 45 members of his own extended family, including two siblings and five nephews. Still not satisfied, these psychopaths in khaki abducted his ailing wife and infant daughter to inflict unspeakable psychological tortures on the leader, besides bombing his home town relentlessly. How can the western world and its entire human rights ecosystem so blithely overlook the infamy of the most depraved bunch of humans, masquerading as soldiers, with the blood of three million innocent Bengalis on their heads, yet go out of their way demonize the Indian Army in Kashmir.

The Pakistani Army has staged a number of operations to quell rebellions by the ethnic groups, demanding a greater share of Baloch resources. Hundreds of bodies have been dumped in mass graves in areas like Quetta, Qalat, Khuzdar and Makran, places associated with their long struggle. Islamabad, sitting on the region’s huge natural resources, including Reko Diq, a goldmine, reportedly worth $100 billion, would never countenance sharing it with Balochis. The tribal group, belonging to a radically different culture, clime, language and history, too equally repudiates the Punjabi occupiers, who forcibly annexed their independent sovereign state, at gunpoint, after the Baloch Assembly rejected the suggestion to join Pakistan.

If Islamabad cries wolf every so often regarding the alleged excesses of Muslims in India, should New Delhi not hold it accountable for a drastic reduction in the population of Hindus from a substantive 20 percent at independence, to a miniscule two percent on its soil, currently. Are their human rights of any less consequence than that of the Islamists? Has the community become the victim of mass executions like the Shias and Hazras, Balochis, Ahmediahs, Mohajirs and other minorities? Obviously they could not have vanished into the thick air on their own.

What is more, Pakistan remained supremely unconcerned about the brazen abduction of a 19-year-old Sikh girl, forcibly converted to Islam and married to a Muslim boy. Like so many other conversions of Hindu and Christian girls in the past. However, the girl was restored to her parents, according to the latest reports.

The Imran Khan government never took the initiative to deliver justice to the aggrieved Sikhs on its own, but acted only after being compelled by the international community. Islamabad’s thundering silence for days on end speaks volumes about its upholding the law of jungle and the bid to target Indic religions. Will the Luytens media ever question the Pakistani mullahs’ act of trampling on the human rights of the minority communities? At about the same time, their counterparts at the New York Times (NYT), a bastion of colonial supremacy, published a clumsily argued piece by Imran Khan, imparting lessons to India on the no first use of nuclear option, especially in the wake of Article 370’s removal.

The hypocrisy of the US daily, for its seemingly liberal values, becomes apparent when it is willing to stand by the forces steeped in medieval age barbarism. Other American media outlets too jumped into the fray, playing up the write-ups of Khan and his diplomats, besides equating Gujarat with Nazism. Could there have been a more absurd analogy?

Islamabad habitually approaches international forums, rights watchdogs and civil liberties groups in Europe, with a litany of complaints regarding the alleged suppression of Kashmiris. Their spin doctors blow up every trifling episode into an event of global magnitude to demonize the Indian Army and circulate fake reports about growing intolerance, secure in the Goebbelsian belief that a lie repeated a thousand times assumes the force of truth. Should India not, after playing the victim card for several decades, take a leaf out of their book and highlight the horrific truth about Balochis’ systematic exploitation, their mass executions and the open loot and plunder of their resources, on world platforms.

Creating a climate against an unrepentant rogue state, which will not allow it to thrive at the cost of the Republic, should be the top priority of the present dispensation. It is time to pay back Pakistan in the same coin, but on the side of righteousness, because it is a matter of survival of dharmic values.