Pakistan’s Formula for Self-Destruction

AT A CONCLAVE of overseas Pakistanis who had gathered in Islamabad last month, Chief of Army Staff General Asim Munir thundered, “You have to narrate Pakistan’s story to your children so that they don’t forget it when our forefathers thought we were different from Hindus in every possible aspect of life.”

Even discounting the nationalist fervour that marks such occa­sions, Munir’s fulmination was quaint. Why would he remember something that was said 85 years ago as a political idea? Back in 1940, almost to the month, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had demanded a separate nation, claiming that Hindus and Muslims were two distinct nations. It would be a mistake to think that Munir was marking an anniversary. His concerns were more contemporary.

A month before his speech, Baloch rebels had hijacked the Jaffar Express in a remote corner of Balochistan leading to the death of many soldiers. In 2025, 229 Pakistani soldiers died in the province at the hands of militants. The graph of violent incidents and deaths has shot up sharply in the province since 2020. Munir’s frustration forced him to say what is accepted as a truism in the subcontinent. He had to rally his soldiers and his ‘nation’. Hindus came in handy.

The problem that Pakistan faces today is that the Two Nation Theory was a stillborn product. The sheer cultural diversity of the subcontinent required a different approach at forging nation-states. India chose a more time-consuming but sturdier option. It continues to grapple with fissures even today. But at no point have political cleavages become so pronounced that they pose a threat to the state itself. By conventional history, Pakistan crossed that dangerous threshold in 1970 when Bengali nationalism sundered the Land of the Pure. But Baloch separatism, which paradoxically is weaker and potent at the same time, is hollowing out Pakistan internally. It is unlikely that Balochistan will secede anytime soon. Its consequences, however, will prove deleterious for Pakistan.

On March 27, 1948 Mir Ahmad Yar Khan, Beglar Begi, Lord of the Lords, the Khan of Kalat, finally gave up the prize that he wanted so badly: independence from the clutches of the British and their successors. Under the watchful eyes of Jinnah, he signed the Instrument of Accession and joined Pakistan with “internal independence”, an expression that proved to be meaningless.

It was a poisoned chalice that Pakistan grabbed even if it did not realise it at that time.

Kalat was the leading state of the Balochistan Agency, a col­lection of native states in the extreme north-western corner of India. The Khan of Kalat was the head of the sirdars who made up his state. Other regions, such as Las Bela and Kharan, were his feudatories but had pretensions to independence. In normal time, Kalat was a hotbed of intrigue among the sirdars and the Khan. The sirdars wanted to be as independent as possible while accept­ing the Khan as their leader. Intriguing was a way of life in Kalat even as all Baloch loved freedom.

This fact was used with Machiavellian efficiency by Jinnah to get Ahmad Yar Khan to sign on the dotted line. Jinnah’s interest was simple: he wanted Quetta—part of an area leased by Kalat to the British—to remain in the hands of the new Pakistan govern­ment. There were other prizes as well. Jinnah’s confidant, Barris­ter M Ziauddin, noted, “At the present juncture if Pakistan loses Quetta it loses one of the most important military stations, and the strategic routes to Persia and Afghanistan… the potential mineral wealth of Baluchistan exists in the tribal areas.”

Pakistani officials, led by the country’s first Foreign Secretary Mohammed Ikramullah, used all kinds of devices to “persuade” Kalat to be “reasonable”. Las Bela and Kharan were told they would accede separately to Pakistan, giving them the dubious impression that they were “indepen­dent” of Kalat. Finally Kalat relented. Yet, Balochistan’s fractured landscape that enabled Pakistan to get a grip over the province would haunt it through the decades.

Within a year, Ahmad Yar Khan’s younger brother Abdul Karim rebelled against the signing of the Instrument of Accession. The first Baloch insurgency lasted two years (1948-50). But it was only the start of a series of insurgencies. Balochistan rebelled time and again: from 1958 to 1959; from 1963 to 1969; from 1973 to 1979; and continuously since 2004. The spiral of insurgency is never-ending.

Since then Pakistan has tried all tactics that any colonial power tries to pacify the province. These have ranged from co-opting rebels by making them chief ministers and governors to out­right military repression. Instead of bringing peace, Balochistan has oscil­lated from period to period of insur­gency. The intervening time breeds the illusion of peace. Since 2004 even that illusion has vanished.

Today, there is not one area across the length and breadth of Balochistan—the largest prov­ince of Pakistan—that is safe from militant attacks. But that has not deterred the army leadership. In the course of his speech Munir said, “We will beat the hell out of these terrorists very soon.” His rhetoric was incendiary: “[E] ven ten generations of terrorists cannot harm Balochistan and Pakistan.” The same language was used by another army chief, Pervez Musharraf, in 2006 when he said of the Baloch: “They won’t know what hit them.” In Au­gust that year, the Baloch sirdar Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti was killed in an army bombing cam­paign. Since then, the insurgency has gathered more steam.

It is instructive to compare the arc of separatism in the subconti­nent, from East Bengal to Kashmir to Balochistan. East Bengal was first off the mark. Three days be­fore the Khan of Kalat was forced to sign the Instrument of Acces­sion, Jinnah told an anxious crowd at Dhaka University that “Urdu and Urdu alone” would be the state language of Pakistan. There were feeble protests at the gathering listening to Jinnah but the first shots of separatism in Pakistan’s Bengali zone had been fired.

The same pattern of exploitation that would inflame the Baloch in the 21st century angered the Bengalis much earlier. East Pakistan was the top foreign exchange earner for Pakistan. Jute was a large part of the country’s export earnings but that did not matter: East Pakistan neither received its fair share of the economic pie nor political representation. In the December 1970 elections to the National Assembly, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League had a majority of seats (167/300) but instead of becoming the prime minister of Pakistan, he was detained. A year later Bangladesh was born.

India’s handling of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K)—an erstwhile province that not only enjoyed internal autonomy (all Indian states are autonomous in their domain) but also had its own con­stitution and a distinct flag—presents an interesting contrast to East Pakistan and Balochistan. For the longest period (1950 to 2019), J&K was effectively a separate zone of governance. It would have remained so had a long-running insurgency (from 1989 onwards) that had a religious core to it not acquired menacing propor­tions. India has witnessed multiple insurgencies with the first one in the Naga Hills district beginning barely a decade after Independence. But the Indian solution is to quell insur­gency followed by full restoration of political rights. The entire pack­age of elections and financial help in the form of Central aid is pressed into service. Provinces like Punjab, Mizoram, Assam, and Nagaland have seen this package being repli­cated with success.

This is working in J&K as well. The Supreme Court ordered elec­tions there and the Election Com­mission duly conducted them in the timeframe specified by the court. In due course statehood will be restored to J&K. When the Pahalgam terror­ist attack took place, J&K was in a more or less normal state. Pakistan’s attempt was to revive terrorism and separatism; that effort has now en­dangered Pakistan itself. India’s re­sponse makes that amply clear.

In none of India’s states and re­gions where insurgencies have bro­ken out have there been issues of representation or of exploitation of resources for the benefit of a particu­lar state or group of people. India’s political economy has a very strong redistributive bent, one that powers its democracy. That and in­ternal autonomy are the secret of India’s stability. This is also a matter of luck: no single province and language is overwhelming. Hindi has just about enough numbers to be acceptable across the country without trampling on local linguistic sentiments.

But above all, India is not based on a theory that different peoples constitute different nations. The latter is the not-so-secret formula that powers Pakistan’s instability. From a Muslim homeland, Pakistan is now a Punjabi-dominated state with an “autonomous army”. This is a formulation alien to India.

What does all this mean for the present conflict with India? Internally, Pakistan will continue to fray but externally Great Powers won’t let it fall—Islamabad’s arsenal of nuclear weapons being a consideration.

Over time, however, the results will lead to the cementing of an unhappy equilibrium. The army will continue to “justify its existence” in nationalist terms by exporting terrorism to India but will then keep facing military responses from Delhi. India’s responses will no longer be along conventional lines. n

2025 India-Pakistan warIndia’s partitionMuhammad Ali JinnahOperation SindoorPahalgamPakistan ArmyPakistan’s Chief of Army Staff General Asim Munir