Pakistan bomb blasts

Why in the News?

A recent bomb blast has killed at least 53 people and injured over 70 in a suicide blast in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, marking it as the deadliest terror attack in Pakistan since 2018.

Balochistan remains a problem province for Pak:

1. Balochistan is the largest Pakistani province which is sparsely populated and impoverished, compared to the rest of the country. 
2. Its strategic location and abundance of natural resources, especially oil, makes it strategically vital for Pakistan.

3. The province has been a site of bloody insurgencies, brutal state repression, and an enduring Baloch nationalist movement since 1948.
   1. Though the province chose to remain as an independent Baloch state, a treaty of accession was signed between Baloch and Pakistan after the Pakistan Army moved into Balochistan in 1948.
   2. five Baloch “wars of independence” were fought in 1948, 1958–59, 1962–63 and 1973–1977, and currently ongoing since 2003, against the accession agreement.
4. These insurgencies have been brutally dealt with by Pakistani forces, who have been accused of committing numerous atrocities such as abductions, torture, arbitrary arrests and executions.
5. According to NGO ‘Voice for Baloch Missing Persons’, around 5,228 Baloch people have gone missing in the period between 2001 and 2017.
6. In the recent times, Baloch nationalist organisations have grown close to Islamist organisations including the TTP and the Islamic State.

Driven by ethnic wedges, economic injustice

1. Fundamental reason for the persistence of conflict is ethnic difference.
   1. People of Balochistan have a shared history, language and other cultural similarities.
   2. This is very different from Punjabis or Sindhis.
   3. However, Punjabi landlords who had an almost unchallenged hold over Pakistan’s bureaucracy, led to sparking of ethnic differences.
   4. The ethnic differences became the driving force behind Baloch nationalism.
2. Deep economic and political grievances faced by the Baloch people.
   1. It entails a sense of economic alienation.
   2. They do not gain the advantages of its own abundant natural resources.
   3. The economic injustice faced by the Baloch population was revealed by the construction of the China-backed Gwadar Port, in which Punjabi and Sindhi engineers and technical specialists were hired en masse in spite of extremely high levels of unemployment among the educated Baloch population.