Self-Inflicted Idiocy: Rebuttal to a Blog about Balochistan

This is a rebut­tal to “Balochis­tan: Self-inflict­ed mis­ery?” pub­lished in Express Tri­bune blogs on 12th Sep­tem­ber 2014. The afore­men­tioned blog is one of the most base­less and mis­lead­ing arti­cles ever writ­ten about Balochis­tan and there­fore I feel com­pelled to write a rebut­tal to set the record straight. I can’t fath­om how the said blog passed through the edi­to­r­i­al checks before being pub­lished. The author of the Arti­cle “Israa Shah” has vis­it­ed Quet­ta and Ziarat and based on her expe­ri­ences of a few pic­nics, she has man­u­fac­tured an utter­ly flawed and ludi­crous argu­ment.

Author’s rela­tion to Balochis­tan is lim­it­ed to sight­see­ing vis­its only there­fore the erro­neous blog she has writ­ten hard­ly cor­re­sponds to ground real­i­ties. The obvi­ous rea­son behind the fal­lac­i­es is the author’s igno­rance about Balochis­tan, its his­to­ry, cul­ture and the peo­ple. The author even does not know the dif­fer­ence between Baloch and Balochi. The peo­ple of Pun­jab are called Pun­jabi but the peo­ple of Balochis­tan are called Baloch not Balochi, lat­ter is the lan­guage that the Baloch speak.

The author while prov­ing her point has called Haz­aras, set­tlers. That’s again not true as Haz­aras are con­sid­ered natives of Quet­ta and not set­tlers. Anoth­er mis­take that author makes is her inabil­i­ty to dis­tin­guish the Baloch sep­a­ratists from the sec­tar­i­an mil­i­tants. She gives an impres­sion that Haz­ara Shias in Balochis­tan are also being killed by Baloch mil­i­tants which is wild­ly untrue and unjust.

More­over, accord­ing to the author the peo­ple of Gilgit–Baltistan demand sep­a­ra­tion from Pak­istan. I do not know which Gilgit–Baltistan she is talk­ing about because there has nev­er been any such demand from the Gilgit–Baltistan that is locat­ed in the North of Pak­istan. All the high­light­ed and cor­rect­ed mis­takes show that Author is clue­less about Balochis­tan and she is try­ing to make a flawed argu­ment based on pre­con­ceived mis­con­cep­tions.

Like­wise, the author quotes Nas­rul­lah Baloch, the chair­per­son of the Voice for Baloch Miss­ing Per­sons (VBMP) about the num­ber of Baloch miss­ing per­sons. She does that to prove a point that just because there is a huge dis­crep­an­cy in the num­ber of miss­ing per­sons as claimed by gov­ern­ment and VBMP, there­fore media can’t be trust­ed when it reports about Balochis­tan. As usu­al there is no basis to this argu­ment of the author as well. More impor­tant­ly appar­ent­ly she does not under­stand that the stag­ger­ing num­ber of Baloch miss­ing per­sons high­light the plight of Baloch peo­ple, not of set­tlers.

Then come two sweep­ing state­ments which con­sti­tute the main argu­ment of the blog. The author writes:
Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, the peo­ple bear­ing the brunt of this unrest are most­ly the “set­tlers”.

Notwith­stand­ing the fact that many set­tlers have been killed unjus­ti­fi­ably in past, which is strong­ly con­demnable but call­ing set­tlers big­ger vic­tims of the Balochis­tan con­flict as com­pared to natives is a mis­state­ment of a myth­i­cal pro­por­tion. The natives are bear­ing the brunt of this con­flict for last 6 decades.
While in con­tin­u­a­tion of spilling pearls of wis­dom, the author gives anoth­er sweep­ing state­ment:
In my opin­ion, what is hap­pen­ing in Balochis­tan is an exam­ple of extrem­ism that is cov­ered as Baloch nation­al­ism.

The author gives the impres­sion that all the vio­lence tak­ing place in Balochis­tan includ­ing the sec­tar­i­an vio­lence is due to Baloch nation­al­ism. This obser­va­tion can be termed as a work of pure fic­tion with no basis in real­i­ty. In fact, reli­gious extrem­ism is being used to counter Baloch nation­al­ism, accord­ing to sources.

The blog being rebutted is a typ­i­cal exam­ple of igno­rance about Balochis­tan preva­lent in the pop­u­lar dis­course. Every now and then, a writer who has vis­it­ed Balochis­tan for some recre­ation­al activ­i­ty writes such base­less arti­cles. The edi­tors of nation­al news­pa­pers pub­lish them because, with few notable excep­tions, they them­selves are obliv­i­ous to the ground real­ties in Balochis­tan. Jour­nal­ism in Balochis­tan is an extreme­ly dif­fi­cult job due to threats faced by jour­nal­ists from secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment and oth­er war­ring groups in Balochis­tan. There­fore, the truth hard­ly sur­faces in nation­al nar­ra­tive of Pak­istan. This lack of knowl­edge about Balochis­tan makes peo­ple write base­less things which only exist in the gal­lop­ing imag­i­na­tion of writ­ers such as Israa Shah.