Candid talk: Mengal counts off Balochistan’s predicaments

Blames successive govts for ignoring the dirt-poor province; says Balochistan’s people

QUETTA: Akhtar Mengal is every politician’s one Baloch friend. Yet in his long political career, Mengal, who heads his eponymous faction of the Balochistan National Party (BNP), says he has never seen a government making a serious effort to improve the quality of life in his dirt-poor province.

“Balochistan is essentially treated as a colony,” 52-year-old Mengal says, as he counts off the province’s development issues. “Its literacy rate is among the lowest in the country, basic healthcare remains inaccessible and maternal mortality is high, the infrastructure is poor, and poverty is rampant.”

“This miserable state of my province inspired me to enter politics,” Mengal says of his early years when he returned to Pakistan after studying abroad for eight years. But since 1997 when he was the chief minister, nothing appears to have progressed, dejecting him to the point where he rarely attends provincial assembly sessions.

“If I bring up a serious issue, the legislators treat it as a joke. They complete their 100 sittings and that’s it. Most of the time, sessions last no more than 10 minutes,” Mengal says, describing the inner workings of the Balochistan Assembly. “It is selected, not elected by the people.”

Chief minister tenure

Among the most difficult challenges he said he faced during his years as the chief minister is scarcity of funds. “People had pinned their hopes on our government – the nationalists’ government – but a mere Rs1 billion was allocated for the entire province,” he claims. “Villages and towns in Balochistan are widely scattered. This makes providing healthcare and education a major challenge. Developing a province that constitutes half the land mass of Pakistan with such a paltry amount is impossible.”

And then there was the politics of a coalition government and the pressures of dealing with the powerful establishment. “We [coalition partners BNP and Pakistan National Party] knew each other but were not close enough to have an understanding, and the supposed good relationship with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was only for media consumption.”

That politics hasn’t changed much in Mengal’s view, as the development of the Gwadar-Kashgar economic corridor shows. “Chief Minister Dr Abdul Malik himself has said several times that he should be given authority over the Gwadar project, underscoring the fact that he currently has none,” Mengal argues. “The government has brushed aside the interests of the people of Balochistan,” he says.

Tribal chiefs

Himself a tribal chief, Mengal says he has never defended Balochistan’s tribal setup. “Tribal chieftains have been part of provincial and federal governments since the birth of Pakistan. In 1947, the leaders even sought the help of tribal chieftains to lay the foundation of the new country. So the system was flawed from its foundation.”

But, he says, those who blame the tribal chiefs for the province’s lack of development should ask themselves what other alternative the people of Balochistan had been given. “The leaders wholeheartedly accepted the Sardars and still seek their support to form governments. A majority of tribal chiefs side with the government and always offer their support when asked.”

Asked about the common perception that Premier Sharif is a good friend of his, Mengal says that he is only a friend when BNP is in the opposition. “At least 70 BNP activists have been killed in targeted attacks because of political opposition. If the prime minister is my friend, how come my friends are being killed?”

However, undeterred by these pressures and by his own pessimism, Mengal says he is reorganising his party since so many members have been killed or are in exile. “The last decade has been tragic for my party,” he says. “We have lost key leaders while many went abroad. But we will continue our political struggle.”

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