Volume 7, No. 3, March 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” is one of the most powerful monologues delivered by Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. It alludes to the contemptuous behaviour of the European hegemonic powers toward the European Jews, treating them as a subhuman species. Since culture belongs to the ruling classes, the culture of hatred was introjected into the psyche of the European people. The word ‘ghetto’ came from Venice, a place where the Jews were kept in a secluded area under the malignant gaze of Christian guards. ‘Pogrom’ – meaning riots or to wreak havoc – was adopted by the English lexicon from the Russian language. However, the word was not meant for the Jews alone but for all ‘undesirable’ communities, but like ‘anti-Semitism’, it was monopolised by the Zionist ruling class as a best-selling commodity. ‘Auschwitz’ happened in Poland and not in Palestine, where the process is repeated by the Jews on the Palestinians. A tyranny of the once powerless over the natives.
For the last seventy-odd years the people of Balochistan are asking the identical question once posed by Shylock. If we bleed like you, why are we treated as pariahs and less equals? Pakistan’s largest province brimming with natural wealth is suffering from acute poverty, a lack of basic resources, a declining population and unabated state oppression. No one knows how many Baloch men have been eclipsed in the dead of the night, only for some to be found as mutilated cadavers, while the silence of secrecy keeps shrouding the mysterious disappearance of others – the majority doomed to unlit pathways.
However, the mystery is not that mysterious for it sounds too familiar, and with each new disappearance it screams aloud: here lies the culprit, the state, a vampire that needs resources of the land but not the owners of the land. Not a new slogan for it was the dominant policy of the ruling classes of the western wing for the first quarter of a century in the united Pakistan when after enduring a selective genocide, the majority finally seceded from the minority through the barrel of a gun. It was the barrel of another gun, a political one, that brought secession but failed to bring the economic revolution imagined and materialised by Chairman Mao.
“The arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of arms,” Marx succinctly suggests, “Mechanical force has to be overthrown by mechanical force.” When the oppressed people stand up for their rights, emancipation and liberation, no one, not even divinity can stop them from attaining their desired goals. Despite the slogan of being created in the name of Islam, no divine power intervened in 1971 to halt the dissolution of the Two Nation theory’s myth, and nothing will impede the expression of the people’s will in the future.
Akin to all capitalist countries, Pakistan is also run by a company, for Marx, “a party of order” – an allusion to the French Revolution that culminated in Bonapartism – a disposable entity, mounted on the shoulders of all-powerful armed forces, which can be dispensed with with nonchalant ease by the same shoulders. Its directors, including its saviours, are inept, impotent and insecure. Their insecurity began right after Pakistan’s inception. To keep India at bay, the country was turned into a big cantonment watched eagerly by the ‘big brother’, forgetting that not large armies but the people are the ones who are the saviours of their country. The battle of Stalingrad proved the point when the workers turned into the Red Army became a bulwark against the might of the Nazis’ trained and highly professional army and finally humiliated the ‘invincible’ enemy.
If a country is reliant on its army and not upon its masses for its security, the former, in its privileged position, is likely to drain all its resources, which can be fatal for the country. “The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve peace,” AJP Taylor says, “carried the nations to war by their weight.” Both Nazism and Zionism have proved the point, and Pakistan too was dragged into at least two major wars and a nefarious Jihad not triggered by the enemy.
The historical duty of advancing the resistance spirally upwards in our times is left to the Palestinians. Akin to the Vietnamese, they have robbed the enemy army of the myth of its invincibility. The highly sophisticated Israeli army, armed to the teeth and laced with the latest technology and armaments tried and tested on Palestinians is being humiliated in the ground battle by the guerrilla fighters. Despite paying a monumental price of almost 30,000 dead, half of them babies, the Palestinians are refusing to give up the resistance. They are holding up the sky of humanity and resistance over our stooping heads. The oppressed of the world must learn at least one lesson from them. Nothing is settled as long as the people are prepared to fight their respective wars to make their history on their own terms.
The debate about cancel culture, for Finkelstein “a civic form of McCarthyism”, may be new, but the oppressed people of the world from Palestine to Balochistan to Kashmir have been familiar with it for eternity. For their oppressors they do not exist, they are cancelled. Once the Bengalis figured it out, they cancelled their oppressors and despite their apocalyptical plight the Palestinians are striving to do the same, as are the people of Kashmir and Balochistan. The process is not exclusive to a certain country, it is destined to repeat itself wherever rights are usurped and the oppressor’s coercion reigns supreme.
The outburst of Pakistan’s caretaker premier – albeit even the elected premiers in Pakistan are mere caretakers – against the Baloch and their sympathisers was something noticeable. His exasperation was obvious for he was threatened by the emerging unity between the intellectuals of the major province who returned their awards to the state and the repressed humanity of Balochistan. It was a subtle nudge to the inflated ego of the parasitic praetorian guards that could be a prelude to a tempest.
The younger generation of the Baloch has matured to fight its battle, a treat to watch. Their slogans are familiar, and so is the terror of the state and the complicity of the media. Their persecution cannot be any different from the persecution perpetrated by the oppressor on any other oppressed people since it is innate to the capitalist system. Balochistan is an expropriated region, an ideal picture of primitive accumulation and accumulation of capital through dispossession. Everyone knows which way the expropriated capital ultimately flows, certainly to the coffers of the Bonapartist army.
Every resistance requires organisation, a precondition for every successful struggle. No one was more conscious of this reality than Lenin. The building of the core structure of the Bolshevik Party was the key to the successful taking of power by the Soviet communists. A revolutionary leadership laced with the theoretical weapon alone carries the potential of leading its followers from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. Theory without action is like living in a self-indulgent, narcissistic bubble, and action without theory is hara-kiri. The war the Baloch people are destined to fight should be a war of class-based ideas, for people can be killed but their ideas, becoming a material force, live and blossom for another day.
While enduring a consistent genocide, the Palestinian resistance has created, developed and nurtured its organic intellectuals, the essential and fascinating part of any struggle. Edward Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish and Riffat Alareer – the last a brilliant poet and professor of English, a victim of premeditated target killing by the Israeli forces, whose body is still lying under the rubble – are to name but a few. His last poem, “If I have to die/You will have to live”, caresses every heart and makes it bleed in pain. He said, “If they come for me, I will throw my marker on them; that is the only weapon I have.” Our Baloch comrades should also be prepared to throw their gauntlets or at least their markers on the enemy, and in the process, must create their organic intellectuals.
Will throwing the marker make a difference? Of course, every act of defiance, even presenting a flower to the enemy as its forces are aiming to kill the revolutionary gives a message of nonconformist peace loud and clear. Today we are offering an olive branch, but tomorrow our homemade arms will respond to your violence. This is what the Palestinians are doing, and the tradition must be followed ritually by all oppressed people. Max Weber once said: “All historical experience confirms the truth that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.” So, let’s achieve the impossible in Palestine, Kashmir and Balochistan, where the oppressed are yearning for a just society. A right to be recognised both politically and economically as equal human beings. If denied they can rightfully ask their oppressors: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
P.S. The Pakistani media outlets have returned this article to me. I wish it could be published in the print media, but it was not to be. I envy the giants such as Gideon Levy and Amira Hass. Their assault on the apartheid and repressive state while living in Israel is heroic. Being white Ashkenazi, they are immune to the otherwise fascist state. Yet their courage is unique because they have to fight against the Zionist masses, forming 90 percent of the indoctrinated Jewish people wanting to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. But we the Punjabi pundits and Indian Brahmans are not given that much space. “Perseus,” Marx says, “wore a magic cap so that the monsters it hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap on to our own eyes and ears, so as to deny that there are no monsters.”
The writer is an Australian-based academic and has authored books on socialism and history. His latest work: God’s Republics: Making and Unmaking of Israel and Pakistan is available on Amazon.com. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com