KNIGHTS, NOT PAWNS: ETHNO-NATIONALISM AND REGIONAL DYNAMICS IN POST-COLONIAL BALOCHISTAN

Abstract

The creation of Pakistan was a crushing blow to those hoping to establish autonomous, ethnically defined states in the western borderlands of the Indian empire. The best known of these movements, the Red Shirts (Khudai Khidmatgar), was active in the North-West Frontier Province since the 1920s and moved from affiliation with the Indian National Congress to advocating sovereignty and ultimately an independent Pushtun state when faced with the inevitability of Partition.¹ Similar Pushtun and Balochi movements arose in the last decades of the Raj in the areas that now constitute the Pakistani province of Balochistan. In the pivotal years of 1947 and 1948, the Muslim League was able to outmaneuver and suppress these ambitious young movements, but they did not die. In subsequent decades, Balochi and Pushtun nationalism became key elements in the political discourse and the equation of power in Balochistan, and they remain so today.