Pakiza Khan (Pride of Pakistan)
Until we name the root, every workshop, every “grand dialogue,” and every billion-rupee package will remain theatre. Balochistan is not suffering from a shortage of seminars. It is suffering from a surplus of politicians who live on the state’s milk and then whisper, in private rooms, as if they stand with those who want the state broken.
A few days ago, Islamabad hosted a high-profile Balochistan National Workshop. Delegates from across the province sat with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Chief of Defence Forces Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, and other top officials. Questions were asked openly. The conversations lasted three days. That much, at least, is evidence that the federal government and the national security institutions are not treating Balochistan as an afterthought. People identified problems in their own idioms. Fine. Some of us prefer to be blunt.
I am from Balochistan. I know its pain. The bond between Pakistan and Balochistan is not a slogan invented in Islamabad; it is a living relationship, and I work to strengthen it without apology and without the luxury of hiding behind ambiguity. What has become unbearable is a different fact: the very people who extract benefit from state institutions sit in private gatherings and attack those institutions’ policies as if they were not beneficiaries at all as if they were standing with the BLA. They feel no shame taking privileges from the republic. When the moment comes to defend the republic’s narrative, they vanish.
Do the arithmetic. Balochistan has 65 members of the provincial assembly, 20 members of the National Assembly, and 23 senators. That is 108 parliamentarians. When the state’s case must be made against separatist propaganda, against the romanticisation of violence, against the lie that Pakistan is an occupying force in its own province where are these 108? Except for a handful, they are nowhere. They all want billions in development funds for their constituencies. Scroll their social media. Read their public speeches. How much of it is a frontal contest with the separatist narrative? How often do they walk into the argument instead of outsourcing it?
Then what is the point of keeping these 108 milk-fed Majnoons.
Most of them do not even go among the public. When they do, the conversation collapses into constituency bargaining: roads, schemes, contracts, the next tranche. The national narrative is someone else’s problem. Then they fly to Islamabad, sit in high rooms, and announce, with a straight face, that “the state’s narrative does not work.” Of course it does not work. It was never their work. Carrying Pakistan’s case in Balochistan was the job of these same milk-fed Majnoons. They dumped that duty onto the shoulders of the national security institutions and ran after development funds.
This is the root. Not the absence of dialogue. Not the absence of money. The absence of political courage among those who have already been paid, seated, and titled to show that courage. There is only one honest way out of this arrangement: send them home. After the Senate elections, there is no national necessity to keep this provincial assembly intact so that personal political machines can be polished with public resources. Balochistan does not need another season of the same faces explaining why the same failure is everyone else’s fault. It needs a technocrat government whose only entry test is competence how far a person is a master of the field he or she claims. Balochistan does not need more politicians. It needs experts who can pull a province out of crisis: water, revenue, minerals governance, education, local administration, counter-propaganda that actually reaches the street.
Enough politics has already been played on national resources. The moment for a large step has arrived. The situation is extraordinary; extraordinary measures are no longer optional. First, get rid of the Majnoons who eat and then look away. If the National Assembly and the Senate cannot be touched for now, then at least send the 65 MPAs home.
Workshops can continue. Funds can continue. Security operations will, of necessity, continue. None of it will substitute for this reckoning. A province cannot be argued back into the federation by institutions alone while its own elected class collects the cheque, skips the argument, and then complains that the argument is weak. That is not a governance gap. That is a betrayal with a payroll.
If Islamabad is serious and the last three days suggest it wants to be seriousness begins with refusing to subsidise silence. Balochistan’s people deserve representatives who will fight for Pakistan in public with the same energy they use to fight for funds in private. Until that happens, keep the experts. Send the rest home.
—The writer is a Quetta-based analyst, anchor person and national-security communicator, and a recipient of the “Pride of Pakistan” recognition.
