Ahmed Yusuf writes about the recent assassination of BNP-M Secretary-General Habib Jalib Baloch, and the life of his namesake.
BNP-M Secretary-General Habib Jalib Baloch
Habib Jalib Baloch, the secretary-general of the Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M), was gunned down on 14 July in Quetta, in what is believed to be a targeted attack. The incident took place in broad daylight, when Baloch was dropping his children off to school en route to work where he was to plead a case before a court of Pakistani law.
Baloch is the second Jalib to have attained iconic status. The first, Habib Jalib, was a poet of revolution whose writings only got posthumous recognition from the Punjab government. Despite his overt ideological leanings, he was kept on the ‘outside’ in the Communist Party of Pakistan, ostensibly to protect the identities of the party’s inner core. Jalib was to work on a mass front; after all, he was a man of the people.
Tortured and incarcerated by four successive regimes over three decades for his ‘unpopular’ views, Jalib’s political acumen is perhaps least stated. His poem, Jaag Mere Punjab (Wake up, my people of Punjab), while directed against the Pakistani establishment, urged his people and comrades to take stock of the fragile situation in Sindh and Balochistan, especially in the post-1971 context.
Nonetheless, the Pakistan establishment failed to appreciate Jalib’s aspirations for a united and harmonious confederation. Pakistan – the entity – would remain intact, but there would be social justice among provinces and the people of these provinces, Jalib believed. Nor did his comrades manage to appreciate the gravity of the situation in the smaller provinces of Pakistan, especially Sindh and Balochistan, that he had pointed to. General Zia ul-Haq’s persecution of leftist and other progressive activists and the fall of the Soviet Union meant that by the time Jalib was released from incarceration by Benazir Bhutto, the Left was largely disorganised.
Jalib breathed his last on March 12, 1993. His demise was mourned in limited leftist circles, but he went away silently.
Habib Jalib Baloch’s death, on the other hand, is not so silent.
Baloch’s party, BNP-M, is among the last remaining political forces from Balochistan that engaged with the Pakistani state. The party’s ideological bearings are premised on the goal of self-determination through a peaceful and democratic struggle, while their secular outlook found company in the liberal and progressive circles of Lahore and Islamabad.
As news of his assassination began to spread, many outside Balochistan hurriedly arranged demonstrations to protest the killing. In Balochistan proper, riots and violence erupted across the province – even before the police stopped and tear-gassed a BNP-M contingent which was carrying the body of their secretary general to the Governor House to protest the killing.
Political and social activists described Baloch as an affectionate man, a perceptive operator, a shrewd activist, and certainly, a man of the people. And the Baloch people responded to their Jalib’s killing in the ultimate paradox: violence as a riposte to the killing of a man non-violence. Within hours of the murder and police brutality, BNP-M chief Akhtar Mengal declared on television that he had lost all hope in Pakistan’s state machinery or even the judiciary to deliver anything to the Baloch. The BNP-M had also announced a 40-day mourning and a three-day strike; violence was reported on each of these days.
Both Jalibs were men of the people. Both came from humble backgrounds, making their identification with ideals of social justice as part of a more organic process. Most importantly, both men were grounded in their times. The first Jalib may not have been blessed with a vibrant movement at the time of his demise, but the second was part of a movement that seeks independence from Pakistan. In the past, the BNP-M was accused of being bedfellows with Nawaz Sharif, who supported the formation of Akhtar Mengal’s government in Balochistan. The heroic status accorded to Nawab Akbar Bugti – who also engaged with the Pakistani state for a long time – on his demise may serve as a reminder of how previous discretions have been ignored, and how newer legends come to be formed. The reaction to Baloch’s assassination simply underlined the fact.
While Islamabad and Punjab struggle to deal with the war on terror and innumerable suicide attacks, targeted attacks in Balochistan have gone largely unnoticed. Cases of missing people are still unresolved, and local journalists have reported the use of drones to crush militant Baloch segments. Attacks on both ethnic and non-ethnic Baloch have been taking place with regularity and while they may serve to discredit the movement, in equal measure, every political activist who perishes in the struggle adds to the folklore of the Baloch nationalist movement of today. The imagination of that account has no place for Pakistan or Punjab.
It is a pity that Habib Jalib Baloch, who retained some trust in the Pakistani constitution, could not be protected by the law or those who enforce the law. When he stepped out of his house on 14 July, little had he known that those who threatened to kill him would execute their plans that day. His demise shattered any (cosmetic) bonds forged by the democratic government, but the importance of his life was lost in the imagination of the Pakistani establishment.
The phrase, ‘Jaag Meray Punjab‘, rings even louder today. Rest in peace, Habib Jalib Baloch.
– Ahmed Yusuf is a Karachi-based journalist.
