Why Pakistan Army chief attended slain Baloch leader Siraj Raisani’s funeral
Balochistan Awami Party leader Siraj Raisani, who was killed in the Mastung bomb blast last Friday, was hailed by Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa as a “soldier of Pakistan” whose sacrifice the country would never forget. Major Gen Asif Ghafoor, head of Inter Services Public Relations, quoted Bajwa describing Raisani as a “die hard brave patriot Pakistani who shall be remembered for his commitment and contributions”.
It is not a label that the Pakistan Army has given to any other Baloch, not even to Mir Jam Mohammed Yousaf, who was Pervez Musharraf’s hand-picked chief minister for Balochistan and belonged to a family of staunch Pakistan loyalists, and certainly not to the other Pakistani patriot, Nawab Akbar Ali Khan Bugti, who was taken out by the Army on Musharraf’s orders in 2006.
It is also not often that the Pakistan Army chief flies all the way to attend a Baloch funeral.
His presence at Siraj Raisani’s burial shows how the Pakistan Army is reinventing its presence in that troubled province.
The Mastung attack was the deadliest to hit the province in the last several years and it left at least 148 people dead. In 2016, over 70 people were killed when a suicide bomber targeted the Quetta court. Before that in January 2013, 90 people of the Hazara community, a Shia minority group, were gunned down.
Bomb blasts in Balochistan do not get much media time, and Mastung was attacked on the day former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s arrived in Pakistan to be jailed. The attack that killed over a hundred people was barely noticed, though a candidate was killed. It was only when the Pakistan Army chief flew to Quetta for Siraj’s funeral that the Pakistan media began covering it.
The IS has claimed responsibility for the Mastung attack on Friday. Mastung, some 22 km from the provincial capital Quetta, has been a known hub of Islamist extremists. It is the Balochistan headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), from where the group has launched deadly attacks on Hazara Shias. The LeJ has openly declared ties with IS.
In November 2017, the IS and a faction of the LeJ called LeJ Al Alami jointly claimed the bombing of a Sufi shrine in Quetta in which 50 people were killed. At the time, a spokesman of the LeJ Al Alami told Reuters: “Right now, in Pakistan, and especially in the cities, wherever there are attacks taking place, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi Al Alami is cooperating with [IS] either directly or indirectly.”
But Friday’s attack was different as the target was not an ethnic or religious minority.
Since his death, images of Siraj standing on the Indian Tricolour have circulated on social media. Pakistan blames Baloch separatism and terrorism on India, and the photographs have turned him into a hero.
Another member of the BAP, Sarfraz Bugti, tweeted a picture of himself standing on the Tricolour as Siraj had done, saying that this is why he was killed. The photo is viral on social media and has triggered copycat photos.
The hashtag #IamSirajRaisani was trending in Pakistan over the weekend. And Maj Gen Ghafoor, the ISPR chief, tweeting about Siraj’s killing, said that “attempts of inimical forces to derail important democratic activity shall not succeed”.
So who was Nawabzada Mir Siraj Khan Raisani? This question has gripped Pakistan after the rich encomiums paid to him by the Pakistan Army and it seems not many Pakistanis knew much about him either before he was killed, except that he was the younger brother of Muhammed Aslam Khan Raisani, who was chief minister of Balochistan in 2008.
