Imran Khan is the greatest sportsman that Pakistan  has produced. One can  also only admire his accomplishments as a philanthropist  in building  and then running the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital. There can be  little doubt about Mr Khan’s sincerity towards his country and his  desire to  see Pakistan better than it is. Like most people who are much  blessed in so  many ways, Imran Khan also has the curse of a monumental  ego. And that ego has  led him into politics. Egged on by that other of  god’s charges to Pakistan, the  F-sectory/Defence/Gulberg/Hayatabad  elite, Imran has become a spokesperson against Pakistan’s ongoing fight  against the Taliban and extremism. Imran has religiously maintained  moral and political ambivalence in the face of Taliban’s inhumanity and  has instead unhelpfully laid all the blame at the foot of—who else—but the Americans.

Maybe  a history lesson is in order for our good friend, because  while he was an international  star, yours humbly was doing research in  central Punjab. During that time,  Imran Khan’s ex-guru General Hamid  Gul was also in the neighbourhood addressing  rallies of thousands of  Lashkar-e-Tayyaba recruits in Shorkot, Multan,  Khanewal, Mian Channu  and so on. Those were also the days when every other day  a mosque  congregation was being gunned down or blown up in central Punjab. That  was also the time, when dispossessed, oppressed and exploited rural  masses in  southern Punjab were seeing their children finding a semblance of dignity  through their association with the Kashmir Jihad.  Young men, who could not  raise their eyes in front of the landlords and  Police, could walk down the  streets of Kabirwala brandishing weapons  with no fear of interference from the  civilian state machinery. Arms  caches were openly being maintained in  seminaries all over southern  Punjab. One could not go to a mosque without being  accosted by a  Lashkar, Sipah or other jihadi outfits’ recruiters.

I often say to people that I am more optimistic  about Pakistan today than I have  ever been in my adult life. This is  because my adulthood was synchronous with  the post-Zia dawn of  democracy in the country and the earnest beginnings of the  Kashmir  Jihad. Anybody with even one eye could see our intelligence agencies  piloting the country towards an abyss. Collection pots everywhere for the  jihad, bearded zealots cruising around in twin cabs brandishing  weapons, known  sectarian assassins, e.g., Masood Azhar being sprung  from police custody by men in shalwar  kameez and military  haircuts, Qiyas and Diyat bill, Islamization and so on. Well folks  twenty years of our military and civilian elites’ exertions bore fruit  in the  shape of Punjabi, Pathan and Afghan Taliban and something called  a strategic  depth for Pakistan.To  digress a little, as a geographer who knows a thing or two about geopolitics and in fact even teaches it to goras,  I am absolutely  stupefied at this notion of strategic depth. In my  classes, we spend some time  debunking these old early twentieth century  geopolitical myths as largely atlas  gazing nonsense. Our military  intellectuals, however, have apparently not  updated the curriculum at  the Command and Staff College, Quetta or the National  Defence University in decades.

But  returning to the optimism part, on the American  dictate — which was absolutely  the wrong reason for doing the right  thing — we reversed twenty years of  self-destructive Afghan and Kashmir  policy. Finally today, Pakistan is  confronting its demons of its own  creation, and by God it is painful. But then  what did we expect it to  be? Poor people in central Punjab, women in Khyber  Pakthtunkhwa and  families in Kashmir have been paying the very real price of  our jihadi  adventures for the past two decades. Now it is time for the  politco-military elites including the wily mullah diesel to pay the  price of  their misdeeds. In this moment of reckoning and painful  national exorcism Imran  Khan is telling us that we shouldn’t have  picked a fight with the Taliban at  the American’s behest. He is correct  we shouldn’t have — we should have picked  a fight with them and  destroyed them long before the Americans had ever asked  us. Even with  one less after the death of Osama bin-Laden, we cannot  morally  or practically afford Imran’s way.

Late Dr. Eqbal Ahmed would relate the most interesting story of the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore, the iconic Bengali poet and intellectual, and the Indian nationalists in the 1920s and 30s. Robi Thakur—as Tagore was known among his admirers, was deeply hostile towards what he saw as a decidedly western model of nation states, and its underlying nationalist ideologies. In fact, he went on to declare that the unspeakable slaughter of World War I, was very much a symptom of a European disease–nationalism. It is then quite an irony that India and then Bangladesh chose Tagore poems as their national anthems.

Indian nationalists, including the Muslims, while aware of his hostility to their agenda, paid due homage to Tagore as a cultural giant. Tagore was against the British rule not because it was by the white man but rather because it was unjust. He flatly declared that the Indian nationalist project was based upon a politics of difference. Eqbal Ahmed quotes him as saying, ‘today you make a distinction between the white man and the brown man. Tomorrow you will make a distinction between the Hindu and the Muslim; the day after you will make a distinction between the North and the South. There is no end to the politics of difference’. He was prophetic, because that is indeed what came to pass. One could add that the day after Pakistan was created, we made a distinction between Muslim and Ahmadi, the day after we drew a line between West Pakistani and Bengali, the day after we drew a wall between Sunni and Shia, and now the Baloch nationalists want to repeat the odious formula one more time.

Robi Thakur wanted to see a decentralized India with the British perhaps as part of its future on an equal footing with its other inhabitants. He wished for an India whose ethnic and linguistic diversity was reflected in the flexibility and multiplicity of its political structures and institutions, with an underlying universal principle of social justice. Robi Thakur failed as did another messenger of equality through diversity, Muhammad Ali Jinnah—but that is another story. Instead victory belonged to the centralized Nehruvian state model, of which India and Pakistan were the first specimens followed by the entire post-colonial world.

Balochistan has legitimate grievances, but its grievances are no more urgent and legitimate than the grievances of poor farmers, workers, rag pickers, women and ethnic and religious minorities in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan or Azad Kashmir. Punjabi landlord, bureaucrat or general is no more kindly disposed towards the Punjabi labour activist, tenant farmer, or dissident artist or writer than the populace of Balochistan. The whole Okara Seed Farm fiasco is a useful piece of more recent anecdotal evidence to keep in mind.

For reasons that can be the topic of multiple dissertations, the Pakistani state relatively early decided to recast its nationalist ideology in the mould of right wing unitary religious identity and culture. That recasting resonated with the middle class migrants from India and then the Punjabi middle class of government servants, businessmen and industrialists, but had no traction with any of the other groups in the country. Ethno-nationalist movements in Pakistan, including Punjabi ethnonationalism, have always been aligned with the political left. It is little wonder then that because of that political chasm, a debate on political ideology and state formation descends into a vapid separatist discourse. The Baloch nationalists are as much to blame for this state of affairs, as is the Pakistani state.

Today Baloch nationalists voice the legitimate concerns of the poor and dispossessed Balochs in the language of separatism–and that too ironically from their high walled mansions in Karachi Defence. There are perhaps more Balochs working in Sindh and Punjab than live in the entire Pakistani province of Balochistan. The economies and societies of Balochistan and the rest of Pakistan are so intertwined that to speak of severing the connections is doing the ultimate disservice to the legitimate underlying message of local autonomy over local resources—yeah right—as if anywhere else in Pakistan has achieved that blessed state.

So in a free Balochistan there will be no appropriation of people’s resources by the elites? There will be no distinction between Baloch and Brahvi? Brahvi and Pashtun? Pashtun and Hazara? Would there be a repeat of the holocaust that was the India Pakistan partition? This is insane! The disenfranchised and oppressed Baloch will find no separate peace from the disenfranchised and oppressed Sindhi, Punjabi, Pashtun or Kashmiri. Whatever we are, inner, outer, material, spiritual we are in it together. We have drawn lines and found that there is no separate national nirvana—votaries of Baloch separatism would do well to remember that.