Can you tick off some examples of train hijacking? Top of the mind recall, personally, are three; two of them movies. Taking of Pelham 123, and Steven Seagal starrer Underseige 2. The third one however is the true-blue blockbuster. Just about a few weeks ago a small number of Baluchi warriors of an obscure province of Pakistan accomplished the impossible – of hijacking not only an entire train and taking Pakistani military personnel travelling in that train as hostages but subsequently conducting about 56 attacks on the Pak Army in the span of the next few days; two daring episodes that have left the entire Pakistani military establishment looking like a bunch of amateurs.
What led to all this? What changed in the Baluchi liberation movement? Why is this assertion that they have gone “liquid”? What am I trying to get at?
I have been a fan of Zygmunt Bauman’s philosophy of Liquid Modernity for some time now. To give you all a brief idea about his core message: Bauman established that ‘In the modern struggle between time and space, space was the solid… being an obstacle to the resilient advances of time. Time was the active and dynamic side… the invading, conquering and colonizing force’. In effect, most of the old and settled – institutions, ideas, relations – denote Bauman’s ‘solids’, while most things modern that tend to change or influence the old, denote ‘liquids’. Examples of such solids could be those old, compact, and tangible schools and factories, marriage as an institution, pre-woke era genders – tangibles or intangibles that remained rules-based and compact. While examples of liquid could be gender fluidity, live-in relationships, globalised business models; ideas and practices that influence the existing “solids”, are shapeless, flow freely, and remain difficult, if not impossible thus to contain or hold.
Let us park that teaser there and notice the evolution of the Baluchi movement very briefly. Pakistan has had three major external helping hands where appropriating and holding on to the Baluchi territory is concerned. It was England that helped Pakistan during the first innings, to forcibly make Baluchistan a part of Pakistan in 1950s. It was the USA that helped Pakistan – indirectly – to keep Baluchistan under control, through the second innings. During the US-sponsored “Afghan Jihad”, Pakistan was the launch-pad – the VIP lounge of CIA-Pentagon. These people wanted a domestically silenced Pakistan; and Rawalpindi diverted a section of the funds and weapons to violently suppress the Baluchi liberation movement. Pakistan’s third external help came from China during the first two decades of the new millennium. As long as BRI (and by extension, the CPEC) remained China’s signature project to dominate the eastern hemisphere, Beijing kept pouring money into Pakistan – a part of which got utilized to keep the Pakistani murder-machinery active in Baluchistan.
Why were/are the Baluchis so dissatisfied to demand autonomy from Pakistan? To give you the main points: Baluchistan is 44% of Pakistan geographically, yet they have minimal political representation, with only about 15 seats out of 336, in the National Assembly of Pakistan. That aside, Pakistan has been appropriating Baluchi resources like gas, minerals, fish, and fruits since the 50s, without passing even a fraction of the proceeds to the Baluchi people. As a result of these two, the Baluchis have always remained extremely poor and politically vulnerable. The only solution to this was sociopolitical activism, which has been brutally suppressed by Rawalpindi through mass rape and murders of civilians, abductions and forced disappearances of the local leaders (they are called sardars), their families, and of the common activist – it is an agonizingly long list of dead and “disappeared” that have touched a portion of nearly every household in the region in the shape of missing fathers or husbands, sons and daughters.
The Baluchi movement was initially not about freedom and independence; it was about a certain degree of strategic autonomy. But the racist establishment that is the Pakistani Punjabi state, instead of engaging and negotiating, chose to descend on the movement like a sack of bricks, and violently destroyed the identifiable “solids” in the equation – the tribal sardars, their little sociopolitical institutions, and their identities. As the Pak Army responded to Baluch activism with protracted violence, these tribal representative units slowly disappeared or went into hiding; the second generation of the leadership fled Pakistan and spread all over the world; and the voice of the Baluch people ceased to jam the Pakistani radar.
In hindsight, the death of the first phase of the Baluch liberation movement in the hands of Pak Army- ISI nexus was the destruction of old-school “solids” – of tribal activism, tribal camps, and tangible leaderships. And as the Pak-Punjabi establishment kept gloating over these results, sometimes during the new century, the Baluch liberation movement instead of dying, not just morphed from being a chiefly tribal initiative about strategic autonomy but into a demand for complete independence, and its new leadership passed on to hundreds of nameless and faceless people predominantly from the Baluchi middle-class. Today, the Baluchi movement is a complete civilian movement that remains populated by the middle to lower class. There are no sardars that dominate, no tribe that speaks for them, these people have no tangible HQ, and there are no ways to talk to them. For the Pak Army, there are no nails to hammer and no targets to shoot. This is now a conglomerate; there are no heads to cut-off.
With the movement becoming liquid, their support has diversified too. Recall the elites from them that were forced to settle abroad. They remain a major source of revenue today. That apart, the Baluchis have networked with the Afghan Taliban and the TTP to coordinate – from weapon supply to movements and attacks on the Pak establishments. Their operative capacity has improved; their lobbying skills have gone up significantly (Dr Mahrang Baloch being considered for the Nobel Peace is a good example of that); and they have – by the virtue of being a thorn to Chinese CPEC – managed to get the USA interested in them too.
Would the US help them create proxy-war conditions against the Pak Army? Perhaps not immediately, because the Baluchi fighters lack the numbers to create a proxy army. But their prospects certainly look better: the US would most definitely want to use them as cat-paw to sabotage CPEC and slow-bleed China’s commercial interest in Pakistan, as well as to utilize this window to needle Iran. And who knows, this might even lead to a soft-balkanization and partial autonomy for Baluchistan by the next decade.
I hope readers understand that a simple failure of the Punjabi Pak establishment to treat Baluchis as human beings has led to a liquefication of what was earlier a solid, comparatively easier-to-handle movement. And like the way there is no predicting which way liquid flows and what all it dissolves in its way, there is no predicting of the manner how this movement is going to mutate, or the kind of disasters that future holds for Pakistan.
All that we know is that with the Pashtuns, the Baluchi cat too is out of the bag now.
Author: Arindam Mukherjee a geopolitical enthusiast and the author of Puppeteer, A Matter of Greed, and JourneyDog Tales. His YouTube channel is Heartland Ari; and his X handle is heartland_ari.
