COMMENT: People of Balochistan deserve better.

Byline: Mohammed Hanif

MORE than 45 years ago, Jamil Ahmed, a young civil servant posted in the border areas of Balochistan, started writing a novel based on his experiences. The Wandering Falcon came out when Ahmed was 78, long after he retired after serving as the chief secretary of Balochistan. The 'wandering falcon' or Tor Baz of the title is a dapper young Baloch wanderer who is a witness to random atrocities but usually has no role in them.

Tor Baz, is a fascinating character - sometimes a hustler, sometimes a saviour, never at the centre of the story, 'familiar but unknowable', as a reviewer wrote. He is the kind of person who does not wield a dagger but is grateful if asked to wipe the blood off the floor after the dagger has been put to use.

Jamil Ahmed, in one of the very few editorial asides in the novel, wrote: 'There was complete and total silence about the Baluch, their cause, their lives and their deaths. No newspaper editor risked punishment on their behalf. Typically, Pakistani journalists sought salve for their conscience by wrongs done to men in South Africa, in Indonesia, in Palestine and in the Philippines - not to their own people.'

Reading about the minor controversy over adman and seasonal politician Mr Javed Jabber's nomination to the 10th NFC and his stance - one didn't ask for it but one deserves it, actually one has earned it - it occurred to me that JJ is a bit of an urban wandering falcon, sporting a suit and wielding a cigar, appearing and disappearing at the crucial junctures of our history, familiar yet unknowable. A pioneer adman and filmmaker and writer of many books, he served with Benazir Bhutto as well as her tormentor General Pervez Musharraf.

About his nomination to NFC, JJ is honest enough to admit that 'one is not an economist'. But his only qualification for representing Balochistan is that he is not from Balochistan. Yes, a bureaucrat from Punjab will represent KP, if he had this minor qualification of serving as KP's finance secretary.

JJ has many more qualifications. Few men devoted to learning and serving in Pakistan have achieved as much as Javed Jabbar has. Politicans like Sheikh Rashid and Yusuf Raza Gillani have written books, but only when they were in jail and had nothing better to do. JJ has written 11 of them without ever stepping into a jail compound. Which writer has had their books endorsed by Dr Eqbal Ahmed as well as that other great literary critic late President Farooq Leghari...