The Pakistan Point Man

After the election of Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali as the 20th elected  and the first Balochi PrimeMinister of Pakistan, Ayaz Amir, the well-known columnist of Pakistan, wrote as follows in the Dawn,the prestigious daily of Karachi, on November 22, 2002:

"What will he (Jamali)  make of the greatness thrust on him? He's a nice soul -- the lastdescription of the spineless -- and he shouldn't be expected to rock any boat.  In Balochistan theJamalis have never been known as rebels, swimming always with the tide, a quality PM Jamali now brings toIslamabad.  This should endear him to the Republic's uniformed President."

In the elections to the Pakistani National Assembly held in October last, Mian Mohammad Azhar, a Punjabiblue-eyed boy of the military, who had staged a revolt against former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and splitthe Pakistan Muslim League (PML) to form a new party called the PML (Qaide Azam) to carry out the wishes ofthe military, was, to the embarrassment of Musharraf, defeated from  the constituencies from which he hadcontested.  Shujjat Hussain, a Punjabi close to the Punjabi Generals, was elected by the PML (QA) as theleader of the parliamentary party.

In normal circumstances, he should have been invited by Musharraf, the Mohajir, to form the new Cabinet asthe Prime Minister after securing the support of the majority of the elected members. Musharraf did not do so. Instead, he suggested to the PML (QA) that it should designate Jamali as the Prime Minister and he should seekthe vote of confidence of the elected members.

Jamali suffered from two disqualifications -- a  case was pending against him in a local court and hehad previously held charge as the Chief Minister of Balochistan for two tenures.  Musharraf ordered thewithdrawal of the case against him and amended the Legal Framework Order (LFO) after the elections to lay downthat the fact that a person had held charge twice as a provincial Chief Minister would not debar him frombeing elected as the Federal Prime Minister.

The selection of Jamali for this post by Musharraf took everybody by surprise.  He was always seen asa non-entity at the State as well as the Federal levels. His only qualification for holding this office wasthe fact that he belonged to a Balochi tribe, which had fiercely opposed Mahatma Gandhi and the IndianNational Congress (INC) during the pre-1947 independence struggle and supported Jinnah's two-nation theory anddemand for the creation of Pakistan.

Another qualification in his favour was that his was one of the few pro-US tribes in Balochistan. He wasthe blue-eyed boy of not only the Army and Musharraf, but also of the American intelligence community. He was very close to Richard Armitage, the present US Deputy Secretary of State, Mrs. Christina Rocca, his no.2 in the State Department, Mrs. Wendy Chamberlain, the US Ambassador to Pakistan till last year, and Mrs.Nancy Powell, the present US Ambassador.  

All the four of them had either served in Pakistan or had closely been associated with the joint operationsof the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) during the jihad ofthe 1980s against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.  Jamali was one of their active collaborators andthey, therefore, know him well and feel totally comfortable with him.

Background

During the pre-1947 independence struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi, large sections of the Pashtun and Balochitribes of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan, under the leadership of Khan Abdul GaffarKhan, the Frontier Gandhi, Abdus Samad Khan Achakzai, the Balochi Gandhi,  and the  traditionallypro-Gandhi Balochi tribal Sardars of the Mekran Coast of Balochistan strongly opposed the two-nation theorypropagated by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League (ML), and refused to support Jinnah'sdemand for the partition of  India.

Amongst the few Balochi tribes, which, however, did oppose Mahatma Gandhi and support Jinnah, were theJamalis, whose then Sardar, Mir Jafar Khan Jamali, was embroiled in a land dispute involving his purchase of150,000 acres of land for Rs,40,000 from the Khan of Kalat.  The British authorities refused to authorisethe purchase and register the purchase deed in the name of Jafar Khan Jamali.  He went in appeal to theHigh Courts in Mumbai and New Delhi, both of which upheld the British order. He then took the case to thePrivy Council in London  which held the British order null and void and declared him the lawful owner ofthe land.

Jafar Khan's case was argued by a team of three lawyers consisting of Jinnah, Bhulabhai Desai and ChaudhryMohammed Ali.  In return for his help in enabling Jafar Khan Jamali win the ownership of the land, Jinnahsought the assistance of the Jamali tribe for countering the strong influence of Mahatma Gandhi and the IndianNational Congress (INC) in Balochistan and the NWFP.  Jafar Khan and his family joined the ML and were inthe forefront of the anti-Gandhi and anti-INC  forces in Balochistan till the creation of Pakistan onAugust 14,1947.  Jafar Khan instigated the Mullahs of Balochistan against Gandhi and the INC and managedto secure the endorsement of a tribal jirga for Balochistan joining Pakistan.

When Jinnah visited Jacobabad in the tribel belt (on the Sindh-Balochistan border) for the first time onOctober 16,1938, the tribals of the region, overwhelmingly pro-Gandhi and pro-Congress, boycotted him. He could not even get a place to stay.  The local administration, controlled by the Congress, saw to itthat even the waiting room of the local railway station was locked up. On hearing this, Jafar Khan rushed toJacobabad, rallied his Jamali supporters, got the Congress workers beaten up and forced the local Mullas tohold a reception in honour of Jinnah at the local Eidgah.

After this embarrassing experience, Jinnah did not venture into the tribal belt again till June,1943, whenJafar Khan organised an incident-free visit to Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, by Jinnah and his sisterFatima.  Jinnah described the Jamali tribe as the ML's "gateway to Balochistan".

After Pakistan became independent and the death of Jinnah and the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan, thethen Prime Minister, Jafar Khan and his tribe remained staunch supporters of Fatima Jinnah  and criticsof Ayub Khan and his military regime.  They opposed the merger of Sindh, Balochistan, the NWFP and Punjabinto an one-unit called West Pakistan.  He was imprisoned a number of times by the Ayub regime.

After his death on April 7, 1967 at Karachi, the Jamali tribe under the leadership of  his brother Haji Shah Nawaz Khan Jamali and then his son, Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, the present Prime Minister,ingratiated itself with the political and military leadership.  Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, not known tobe a man of principles and widely reputed to be an opportunist, kept switching sides between the PakistanMuslim League (PML) and Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), depending on who made thehighest bidding for his services.

The elections of 1970 saw the Bengali nationalists of the then East Pakistan, under the leadership ofSheikh Mujibur Rahman's Awami League (AL) and the Balochi nationalists of Balochistan under the leadership ofthe sardars of the Bizenjo, Marri, Mengal and other tribes sweep the polls under the guidance of Ghaus Bux Bizenjo, the leader of the National Awami Party (NAP). The refusal of Gen.Yahya Khan, at the instigation of Z.A.Bhutto, to allow the AL assume office in Pakistan set in motion a train of events, which ultimately ledto the birth of Bangladesh, with Indian help.

A similar refusal by Z.A.Bhutto to let the Balochi nationalists assume office led to a revolt by theBizenjo, Marri, Mengal and other tribes.During the next four years (1973-77), on the orders of Z.A.Bhutto, thePakistani Armed Forces crushed the Balochi revolt, killing thousands of Balochis. Bhutto ruthlessly used theAir Force to crush the revolt.

The Jamali tribe led by Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali colluded with Z.A.Bhutto and the military to crush thenationalists.  The nationalist leaders appealed to Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister, to come to theirassistance just as she had gone to the help of the AL in the then East Pakistan.

Though her sympathies were with the Balochi nationalists, who had always, in the past, stood by MahatmaGandhi and the Congress, she could not assist them for operational and political reasons. 

• First, India did not have a common border with Balochistan. 
  
  
• Second, India's well-tested covert action capability, which served it so well in East Pakistan, wasland-based and not sea or air-based.
  
   
•  Third, the Indian Navy's reach, overt or covert, did not extend beyond Karachi.  
  
  
• Fourth, in East Pakistan, India had a valid reason for intervention  in the exodus of millions ofrefugees into India. There was no such valid reason  in Balochistan.  There was large-scale exodusof refugees, but they went into Afghanistan and did not come into India.  
  
  
• Fifth, Bhutto, the Army and the ISI had succeeded in creating a wedge between the Pashtuns and theBalochis by settling a large number of Pashtun ex-servicemen in Balochistan, including Quetta.  
  
  
• Sixth, the Shah of Iran had made it clear that he would not allow an independent Balochistan to come intobeing as this could lead to a demand for the merger of the Balochi areas of Iran into the new independentState.

The hatred of India is a typical characteristic of the converts to Islam from the so-called backwardclasses of the Hindu community and their descendants. The Balochis and the Pashtuns, who were the desendantsof the Muslim migrants into India from Afghanistan, Iran and the Central Asian Republics, did not share thishatred. Compared to Sindh, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal from where most of the Hindu convertsmigrated to Pakistan, the Pashtuns and the Balochis were economically backward and ill-educated, but in theirthinking they were secular and cosmopolitan. It was for this reason that after Pakistan was born in 1947, theonly substantial leftist and Marxist pockets in then West Pakistan were seen mainly in the tribal belt.

After Bhutto, the Army and the ISI crushed their revolt, the survivors of the revolt led by leaders such asAtaullah Khan Mengal, Khair Bux Marri, Sheroo alias Tiger Marri etc crossed over into Afghanistan and tookshelter there.  The leftist Government in Kabul welcomed them with open arms, trained and armed them andused them against the Afghan Munjahideen backed by the CIA and the ISI. Many of the Balochi youth were takenby the Soviet troops to Moscow for higher education in the Lumumba University and other places.  They allcame back to Afghanistan converted to communism.

Worried over the spread of communism and over the assistance rendered by them to the Soviet and Afghantroops in their operations against the surrogates of the CIA and the ISI, the US and Pakistan mounted acampaign to decimate the Balochi nationalists operating from Afghan territory.  Mir Zafarullah KhanJamali and his tribes placed their services at the disposal of the CIA and the ISI.

As a reward for his services, the CIA suggested to Gen. Zia-ul-Haq to make him the Prime Minister after the1985 elections. Zia instead made Mohammad Khan Junejo, a Sindhi, the Prime Minister in order to counter thegrowing influence of Benazir Bhutto, a Sindhi, in Sindh and the Seraiki areas of southern Punjab.  Junejo,like Jamali now , was also considered a non-entity, who would meekly carry out the dictates of the military. Initially, he did, but subsequently grew in stature and started resisting Zia's orders. It was the differencesbetween the two over the way Junejo handled the Afghan proximity talks in Geneva and over the enquiry into theblasts at the army arsenal at Ojehri, which reportedly killed over 300 innocent civilians, which led to hisdismissal by Zia in 1988 and the ordering of fresh elections. Before the elections, Zia was killed in a planecrash.

Second Time Lucky

Jamali has now been second time lucky. There has been a convergence of interests between Musharraf and theUS over his being made the PM -- firstly, to protect the US oil and gas interests in Balochistan, about 30 percent of which are controlled by Texas-based companies; secondly, to protect the US air bases in Balochistan,which play an important role in the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda and which might play an even moreimportant role if the US decides to make a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear establishments; and tocounter the spread of the influence of the fundamentalist parties from the Pashtun to the Balochi areas.

Jamali has till now been carrying out the wishes of Musharraf and the US.  He calls Musharraf hisboss. Next to Musharraf and his Cabinet colleagues, the other person he meets most frequently is Nancy Powell.There are already some indications that Musharraf has been disappointed over his failure to browbeat theopposition into accepting the amendments to the Constitution introduced by Musharraf in the form of the LFOand into giving up their opposition to his continuing as the Chief of the Army Staff. Musharraf has also beenworried over the failure of Jamali to prevent repeated attacks by unidentified elements on the pipelinescarrying gas and oil from Balochistan into Punjab and Sindh.

There are also indications that Jamali himself has been unhappy over Musharraf's reluctance to share withhim the responsibility for foreign policy; for the control of the nuclear command; and for the implementationof the economic reforms. While Jamali has been doing all the talking on India's proposal for the resumption ofthe bilateral dialogue, the directions are coming from Musharraf.

How effective and dependable will he be as the Indian Prime Minister's interlocutor or will Musharraf takeover as the interlocutor, pushing Jamali to the sideline? If he does it, what will be the impact on therelations between the self-appointed President and the elected Prime Minister? These questions, difficult toanswer presently in any definitive manner, will assume increasing relevance in the weeks and months to come. 

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently,Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), ChennaiChapter.)