Appeasement would be too unfair a word to use for the offer President Pervez Musharraf made to the Baloch militants the other day in Sibi. He had said: "They too are our Pakistani brethren but at the moment they are misguided. I urge them to leave the path of terrorism...What are their demands? We will meet all of them".
This is indeed a departure from the past. There is a clear ring of reconciliation in his words, heard after a long spell of hard-hitting statements emanating from Islamabad and punitive actions, including humiliating incarcerations of some popular Baloch leaders.
Such a passionate appeal by the President admits, albeit vicariously, that the plethora of mega projects, some in execution and others still on the drawing board, for the purported development of Balochistan have failed to win the hearts and minds of its despondent population.
It would be unfair to deny the sincerity in the President's commitment to bring the country's poorest unit to the level of the richest, but the perception to which the Baloch people, by and large, are held hostage tends to obviate this reality. We all know that perception is always more powerful than reality, and that calls for an incisive look into the complicated tapestry of Balochistan, its history and its people.
Right now, as all over the developing world, a kind of social change is underway in Balochistan. Ubiquitous media in the emerging ambience of a global village is forcing the people of Balochistan to break out from the shackles of its primitive existence. Feudalism, in all its myriad forms, is losing ground to the forces of social change.
Social change in itself, however, is a painful process. And, that requires the government to come in with innovative interventions to mediate with a view to lessening the pain of social change.
Unfortunately, in introducing development and modernisation in Balochistan the military government of Pakistan adopted a simplistic approach of using force to overwhelm the resistance embedded in social, cultural and political values held dear by the people.
But that seems to be changing, as is amply reflected by the President's offer to talk to the militants. The growing American presence in the Gulf, apparently to pressure Iran into nuclear capitulation, with potential to inject instability into the entire region may too have added to the shift in the presidential tone.
Now that the federal government seems willing to cast a re-look at the Balochistan imbroglio, the first step should be to retrieve the report of the Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed-led parliamentary sub-committee from the cold storage.
In fact, this is possibly the only near-consensual document that is acceptable to the opposition in the parliament and majority of members and senators from Balochistan.
As this report is put on the table the other parliamentary sub-committee, headed by Senator Wasim Sajjad, with the mandate to propose constitutional amendments that are needed to address the grievances of the Balochistan province should be reactivated.
Meanwhile, all the incarcerated Baloch leaders should be given the opportunity to face the due process of law. Only then will they be able to join the process of reconciliation that President Musharraf has so much wished to be operational in order to realise the true potential of the country's biggest and mineral-wise richest province.
On their part the militants are expected to put aside their egos and sense of deprivation and come forward and join the President. The development process underway now in Balochistan is something real and genuine, with potential to bypass its detractors.
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