Pakistan’s 'Hard State' Strategy: Repression Over Resolution

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The Pakistani human rights activist I.A. Rehman once told this author: India uses politics to resolve its militancy problems; Pakistan uses the military to solve its political problems. In 1971, the Pakistan military establishment was convinced that instead of political accommodation, the only way to solve the political crisis in the erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was to use genocidal tactics to crush Bengali aspirations. More than half a century later, the playbook of the Pakistan Army has not changed much. Back then, it was ‘kill 20,000 Bengalis and all will be well’. Today, the focus remains on using hard power to crush the Baloch resistance. In the words of the Pakistan Army-backed Chief Minister, Sarfaraz Bugti, “It is time to leave behind any confusion and launch a full-scale operation against terrorism.” He has issued orders that, if implemented, will convert Balochistan into a full-fledged police state. 

Following the rather audacious hijacking of the Jaffar Express train by guerrillas of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), a brutal crackdown on political activists in Balochistan was imminent. The Pakistan military’s spokesperson declared that the “rules of the game had changed” after the train hijacking. That the Pakistan security forces never really played by any rule in Balochistan and blithely and with complete impunity violated all laws, regulations, and constitutional rights given to citizens was conveniently forgotten by the Pakistani media. The Punjabi-dominated military sees unrestrained repression as the only solution to restiveness in the troubled province. This became clear after the Parliamentary Committee on National Security met, which was also ‘briefed’ by the military’s top brass. 

With civilian politicians eager to rubber stamp everything the army generals want, there is no scope for new thinking. The default option is always to use force and double down on repressive tactics to make the recalcitrant Baloch fall in line. 

According to reports, the Pakistan Army Chief General Asim Munir demanded legal cover for intelligence agencies abducting/arresting suspects—powers given to the security forces under the draconian Action in Aid of Civil Power (presumably including the power to ‘intern’ a suspect indefinitely, without charge and legal recourse)—and to allow military courts a free hand in all terror cases. In other words, the Pakistan Army was demanding legal cover for the extra-legal impunity they already enjoyed. General Munir believed the solution to Pakistan's problems lay in its ability to become a ‘hard state’ to address the gaps in governance that were being filled by the ‘blood of armed forces’. The fact that in Balochistan, the Pakistan Army was to blame for the misgovernance in the province escaped the generalissimo. The civilians, quick to appease Munir and his cabal, formed a ‘Harden the State’ committee to transform Pakistan into a ‘hard state’. 

It was quite clear that the Pakistan Army, which, in no uncertain terms,is the Pakistani state, had no use for adopting a political approach, or even combining kinetic action against militants with a political engagement with genuine representatives of the alienated and disgruntled Baloch. For the Pakistan Army, every problem is a nail and the hammer is its only solution. With civilian politicians eager to rubber stamp everything the army generals want, there is no scope for new thinking. The default option is always to use force and double down on repressive tactics to make the recalcitrant Baloch fall in line. 

No surprise then that among the first things the Pakistan Army did to show that Pakistan was now becoming a ‘hard state’ was to arrest the iconic Baloch civil rights activist Dr Mahrang Baloch and her fellow Baloch Yakjheti Committee (BYC) associates and book them on charges of murder, terrorism, and sedition. The BYC activists were protesting mass burials in unmarked graves, and demanding the handing over of the bodies of alleged terrorists who the Pakistan Army claimed had been killed during the operation to end the train hijacking. According to the BYC, the Pakistan Army had killed in cold blood some of the ‘missing persons’ who were in their illegal custody and shown their bodies as having been recovered from the site of the train hijacking. 

Far from cowing down the Baloch populace, the brutish tactics of a deeply unpopular provincial government against Mahrang Baloch sparked widespread  protests in the entire Baloch belt of the province. The anger in the Baloch population only increased after images of heavy-handed police action against BYC activists in Karachi were splattered all over social media. Respected Baloch leaders like former Chief Minister Akhtar Mengal declared a long march to protest against the mistreatment of women activists. He even warned Pakistan's President, Asif Ali Zardari, and his son Bilawal Zardari that this insult to Baloch women would never be forgotten. 

Meanwhile, the predominant Lahore and Islamabad-based Punjabi media either completely blacked out the protests and crackdown, or spread disinformation about the scale of these demonstrations. There was also the display of hostility and unfounded insinuations directed at Baloch activists. For instance, one misleading headline in the newspaper, Express Tribune , ‘BLA's proxy exploits train attack’. Other social media handles known to be proxies or close associates of the Pakistan Army launched a fusillade against BYC leaders, portraying them to be the political face of BLA, or even that they were on the Indian payroll or taking money from other foreign powers. Some increasingly irrelevant mainstream politicians like Aimal Wali, great-grandson of the venerable ‘Frontier Gandhi’, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, are trotted out to discredit people's movements like BYC and Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), but with zero impact on the ground. None of these tactics is new; what is new is that these campaigns of calumny are finding no resonance in Balochistan. Quite to the contrary, the vulgarity of the troll corps of the Pakistan Army has only alienated the Baloch.

The game plan of the Pakistan Army is to use the sledgehammer approach  against not just the Baloch insurgents but also  political activists like Dr Mahrang Baloch and BYC. This is despite the fact that the BYC has always protested peacefully, never preached violence, has never openly supported separatism, and has only demanded their legal, constitutional and human rights while staying within the limits prescribed by Pakistan’s often misused and battered constitution. But this is a crime in the book of the Pakistan military, which demands complete and unquestioning subservience of civilians to what the high-school-pass generals deem to be in the best interest of Pakistan. That parade ground or Directing Staff (DS) solutions are not applicable in the complex and chaotic political world inhabited by hundreds of millions of people with competing demands, escapes the regimented military mind. 

The new dispensation in Washington is too self-obsessed, transactional, and uninterested in egregious violations of human rights to bother about what is happening to the Baloch or other ethnic and religious minorities in Pakistan. 

For now, the Pakistan Army has decided to make an example of activists like Dr Mahrang Baloch. They can probably no longer do what they did to three top Baloch National Movement (BNM) leaders in 2009 when they were abducted from their lawyer's office in broad daylight and their bullet-ridden bodies were dumped in the wilds a few days later. Mahrang and some others have become very high-profile given all the international media coverage around them. Mahrang’s arrest has become a cause célèbre with other rights activists weighing in and demanding her release. There is no surprise that Pakistan Army generals and politicians feel that these Baloch activists need to be cut to size. Since they can’t be abducted or killed, they are being booked under the draconian laws passed by parliamentarians, most of whom sit in the House based on an extremely dubious, if not entirely fraudulent, election mandate.

The way the Pakistan Army sees it, it enjoys complete impunity within Pakistan. There are no legal safeguards, no functioning justice system, no constitutional constraints, and no resistance from media or political parties to challenge their extra-legal actions. Voices on social media are also being muzzled either by arbitrarily shutting down access to platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter) or by booking journalists on charges of anti-state activity. The Pakistan Army enjoys impunity at the international level as well. The European Union (EU) is preoccupied with its own set of problems. But even otherwise, the EU did little to pressure the Pakistan Army to stop violating the civil rights of the people. There has been some virtue signalling from the Europeans, but nothing beyond that. The Pakistanis have learnt there are no consequences attached to ignoring the EU. 

The new dispensation in Washington is too self-obsessed, transactional, and uninterested in egregious violations of human rights to bother about what is happening to the Baloch or other ethnic and religious minorities in Pakistan. The Russians, Chinese, and Arabs are unlikely to comment on this issue. If anything, the Chinese could even fuel the Pakistan Army to unleash overwhelming violence on the Baloch to subdue and subjugate them. Thus, there is little to hold back the Pakistan Army’s hand. 

The only problem is that Pakistan has been trying to do this for the last 80 years, and it hasn’t worked. Perhaps it is time that human rights bodies and international media organisations start looking closely at what is happening to the Baloch. They might discover that Balochistan is one of the most strategically critical areas in the world, not just in terms of its location but also in terms of its enormous mineral wealth, something that would certainly be of interest to the US President. That the Baloch are not religious fanatics but are progressive and secular Muslims only makes their case more compelling. 

Sushant Sareen is a Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.

• International Affairs
• Neighbourhood
• Indian Foreign Policy
• Great Power Dynamics
• Defence and Security
• Terrorism
• Neighbourhood

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