Please, don’t turn this into Baywatch

Pakistani policymakers should not to repeat their follies of the 1950s in Gawadar

It was almost overnight that most of the commoners in the oil-rich Middle East and Gulf countries began replacing their donkey carts with the latest brands of Mercedes cars, thanks largely to the OPEC, an oil cartel put together hastily by the world oil producers. OPEC demanded and got a steep rise in the world oil prices from $2 a barrel to $40. This was early 1970s. As opposed to this, the commoners of Sui in Balochistan, where gas was discovered as early as 1954, are still driving their donkey carts, while using this costly commodity at throwaway prices are the not-so-rich of Punjab and Karachi who have become filthy rich by Pakistani standards and continue to drive the latest models of the most hi-tech luxury cars.

The reason for recalling the differing fates of commoners from the oil-rich countries and those from gas-rich Sui at this point in time — when we are rejoicing over the $46 billion Chinese investment proposals, with Gwadar in Balochistan occupying the cornerstone of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) — is to warn the Pakistani policymakers not to repeat their follies of the 1950s.

To start with, the government should immediately announce a moratorium of at least one year on sale and purchase of land in Gwadar as well as along the pathway of the two routes of the CPEC — one traversing from Gwadar to Dera Ismail Khan, on to Gilgit-Baltistan and up to Kashghar in China, and the other traversing from Gwadar to Sukkur, on to Lahore, Islamabad and going up to Kashghar. Fly-by-night adventurers have already done a lot of purchasing in Gwadar since the port was completed in late 2000. The government should resume all these lands immediately paying the investors the market price and then distributing the entire land in and around the district among the locals in bankable size pieces with each member of the local family getting an identical share.

Since the development in and around Gwadar is likely to be started soon and in right earnest people from out of Balochistan are going to be swarming the port city within no time in search of all kinds of jobs and the qualified ones finding them quickly. This would certainly reduce the local population of Gwadar especially, and Balochistan generally, into a minority causing a lot of justified heart burn to the local people. The federal government, especially the provincial government, should ensure that while the work at the site does not suffer because of a minority-majority tussle, both the locals and those who come from other provinces suffer from no misunderstandings. This would need forward-planning and an understanding between the federation and the other three provinces that those who come from out of Balochistan do continue to remain domiciled in the provinces from where they had come. Here it would not be out of place to refer to a relevant constitutional arrangement in Canada that ensures that those who go to other states in search of work continue to remain the citizens of the state from where they had gone. This is crucial for voting purposes that enables societies to acquire enough political power to protect their socio-political and economic interests. The two governments, federal and provincial, would do well to visit this particular clause in the Canadian Constitution.

Since the visit of the Chinese president, some people have raised a number of questions. It is always good to ask questions, but wrong to take positions even before all the relevant details are in hand and counter-checked. I recall that in her second government, the late Benazir Bhutto had toyed with the idea of developing the coastline of Balochistan to attract investment from the US and Europe. The then opposition, using its lifafa journalists, pounced on the idea and trashed it on a daily basis until a properly terrorised government abandoned it. The most distressing part of the media campaign was its attempt to present the project as a bid to turn the Balochistan coast into some kind of Baywatch, a popular American TV series in which bikini-clad young lasses were shown gambolling around on California beaches and in their spare time rescuing swimmers from unexpected tidal waves.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 29^th,  2015.

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