A festering wound in Pakistan

"The conspiracy of silence over Balochistan is finally breaking but the alienation of the province runs too deep for any easy solutions."

The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : A festering wound in Pakistan:  Intelligence agencies have viewed the Balochistan with suspicion from the very beginning for their reluctance to join Pakistan. This resulted in four earlier rounds of insurgency but none of them lasted this long. And those resistance movements were not for independence but rights, quite unlike this time. Demand for secession is a bitter pill to swallow for any country, more so for a nation that has been seeking strategic depth in Afghanistan at phenomenal costs to itself to counter the Indian behemoth.

As always, “foreign hands” are being accused of destabilising Balochistan with the aim to Balkanise Pakistan. Rhetoric of ‘foreign hands' has allowed for further militarization of Balochistan and given the military a licence to seal the province and make it a no-go zone where it can abduct, torture, kill and display bodies with impunity, extract Balochistan's resources under the barrel of a gun, use Balochistan territory to conduct nuclear tests. However, the military in Balochistan has not been able to control the spirit of the Baloch people.

Another atrocity in Kashmir

The Hindu : Opinion / Editorial : Another atrocity in Kashmir:


"The central government's dogged refusal to sanction the prosecution of central security force personnel facing credible allegations of murder in civilian courts, thus fostering a culture of impunity"


"The central government's unwillingness to ensure security force accountability is rivalled only by its indifference to enhancing security force competencies. Even though tens of thousands of personnel have been recruited into the central and state security forces, they remain ill trained — and, inevitably, trigger happy."