Prime Minister Imran Khan’s decision to convert Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) in the occupied northern areas into Pakistan’s fifth province at the behest of China has caused a setback within the country. This week, Imran Khan’s fierce rival, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, joined the ranks of opposition leaders who have spoken out against Imran Khan for implementing the Beijing agenda.
The head of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F) stressed that turning the Gilgit-Baltistan area into a full-blown province would end up validating India’s August 5 decision to treat Jammu and Kashmir as a centrally administered territory.
“A deal has been made for the blood of Kashmiris … Business is being done in the name of Kashmir diplomacy,” the cleric told reporters in Athmuqam on Tuesday. He promised “not to allow the partition of Kashmir.”
Nearly 70 kilometers away, Latif Akbar, chairman of the PoK unit of the Pakistan People’s Party, told reporters in Muzaffarabad, the Pakistani-occupied capital of Kashmir, that the federal government’s move to treat Gilgit-Baltistan as a province was not acceptable to them.
Pakistan has traditionally claimed that parts of Kashmir it controls are semi-autonomous and not formally integrated into the country, in keeping with its position that a region-wide referendum should be held.
Gilgit-Baltistan’s assimilation to the Islamic state is widely seen as an implicit recognition from Islamabad’s perspective that the Line of Control (LoC) is the border between India and Pakistan, a proposal that had been raised by the National Security Advisor from Pakistan, Moeed W Yusuf, a decade. earlier.
Spending on some key CPEC projects ($ million)
- Gwadar East-Bay Highway 141
- New Gwadar International Airport 230
- Breakwater Construction 123
- Dredging of berths and canals 27
- Free Zone Development 32
- Pak-China 100 Friendship Hospital
- Pak China Vocational and Technical Institute in Gwadar 10
- Cross-border fiber optic cable 44
- Thakot-Havelin Section Karakoram Highway Phase II 1,386
- Peshawar-Karachi Highway Section Multan-Sukkur 2,980
- Khuzdar-Basima Highway N-30 80
- Dera Ismail Khan-Zhob Upgrade Phase I 195
- Karakoram Thakot-Raikot Highway 719
- Expansion and reconstruction of the Karachi-Peshawar railway line 8,172
- Havelin Dry Port 65
However, the Imran Khan government has made clear that it has no intention of backing down on its plan for GB and has proposed as a first step holding elections for the Gilgit-Baltistan legislature on November 15.
Pakistani observers in India link Imran Khan and Army Chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa’s anxiety to push for the change in GB status with increasing pressure from China to secure the China Pakistan Economic Corridor that Beijing wants to expand under. the Xi Jinping Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI.
It’s a plan that’s been in the works for four years, long before Imran Khan came to power thanks to populist guarantees to root out corruption and reduce poverty.
Indeed, it was after Xi Jinping’s visit to Pakistan in 2016 that the first reports emerged of a plan to improve the constitutional status of the Gilgit-Baltistan region. A report by the AFP news agency in January 2016 quoted an official: “China cannot afford to invest billions of dollars in a highway that passes through disputed territory claimed by both India and Pakistan.”
This statement made four years ago, said an observer from Pakistan in New Delhi, explains the imran Khan government’s push to change GB status in 2020. And there is nothing Khan can do about it. “He has no other choice and he has to agree with Beijing,” he said.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, like much of the Belt and Road Initiative conceived by Xi Jinping, is essentially designed to serve the interests of China rather than the participating countries. This explains the focus on the development of the port of Gwadar, often described as the jewel in CPEC’s crown that has proven to be a tax haven for China and helped reduce the costs of its exports.
Former Pentagon official Dr. Michael Rubin recently described the pact with China on CPEC as a deal with the devil, partnering with a country that has been responsible for the incarceration in concentration camps of a million Muslims and does not think about killing. to Pakistanis and humiliate Pakistan.
For China, Pakistan can be an important market, providing land links to West Asia and building a strategic port at Gwadar that would help Beijing reduce its dependence on the Straits of Malacca, he said.
The money that Beijing has invested in Pakistan’s CPEC branch has already gagged the Islamic country from commenting on the brutalization of Muslims in Xinjiang province. Beijing also uses Islamabad to keep India engaged in its terror camps.
.
