Quetta: Shal, the Kasi, the cantonment and the 1935 earthquake

At a glance

• Quetta (Kwatta in Pashto, Shal to the Brahuis and in the old records, also Shalkot) stands at 5,500 feet at the head of the Bolan Pass in Balochistan. [6, 7]

• Caroe wrote that the valley of Shal "is exactly on the line of ethnic division": Pashtun tribes to the north, Brahuis and Baloch to the south. [9]

• Mughals, Safavids, Hotaks, the Brahui khans of Kalat and the Durranis held it in turn. The Khan of Kalat allowed British troops there in 1876 and leased it in 1883, and it became the seat of the Baluchistan Agency and a major garrison. [6, 9]

• The town grew from about 4,000 people in 1876 to 24,584 in 1901. [6, 7]

• The earthquake of 31 May 1935 destroyed it. The Government of India's summary said thirty thousand people perished. [2]

• Pakistan's census counted 2,269,473 people in Quetta district in 2017 and 2,595,492 in 2023. In 2017 the largest mother tongue was Pashto (1,268,722), then Brahui (356,100) and Balochi (165,343). Hazaras and others live there too, and each community's place in the city is argued over. [4, 5]

The valley and its names

The Gazetteer of 1907 describes the Quetta tahsil as a horseshoe: the Sariab valley on the east, the Aghbarg valley on the west and the mass of Chiltan between them, with the Shal valley proper joining the two at the top. [6] The town lies under the slopes of Murdar, with Zarghun and Takatu to the north and the shoulder of Chiltan to the west. [6]

The Gazetteer says the district takes its name from two places, and that Kwatta, "now spelt Quetta", means a fort in Pashto, the name of the fort inside whose walls the old town stood. [6] That fort was the miri, a mound of hardened clay at the centre of Quetta. [6] Denys Bray, who wrote the report on the 1911 census of Baluchistan, says the name Shalkot lies behind the common idea that Quetta is a corruption of kot, a fort. He rejects that and says it is simply a Pashto word for a heap, and reports a local tradition that an Afghan army once heaped up earth there for fear of finding none in so unbelieving a country. [8] The two writers disagree on the meaning. To the Brahuis, Bray writes, the place is Shal, a name "much more ancient" than their story that Ahmad Shah presented the country to Nasir Khan's mother as a shawl. [8]

Rulers before the British

The Gazetteer's history is a list of fiefs. Sultan Husain Mirza of Herat gave Shal, Pishin and Sibi to Zunnun Arghun about 1470, and Babur drove Shah Beg Arghun out of Pishin and Shal in 1517. In 1543 Humayun came to Quetta in his retreat from India and left his infant son Akbar there before escaping to Herat. [6] The Safavid shah Abbas took Kandahar in 1622 and gave Pishin to Sher Khan of the Tarin. [6]

Quetta's neighbours appear in the Hotak story. In the Gazetteer's account of how Mir Wais took Kandahar in 1709, he first induced the Tarin of Pishin to withhold their revenue, so that the Georgian governor Gurgin Khan sent his bodyguard against them, and then killed the governor at a feast. [6] The longer story is in Mirwais Hotak and the Hotak dynasty. The Gazetteer says Quetta was probably taken by the Brahuis under Mir Ahmad, who reigned from about 1666 to 1696. [6]

The sources tell the handing of Quetta to the Brahuis in three ways. The Imperial Gazetteer says Nadir Shah gave it to them about 1740. [7] The Quetta-Pishin Gazetteer says Nadir Shah assigned it to Mir Nasir Khan and his mother, and that Ahmad Shah Durrani "is said to have finally conferred it" on the Brahuis after the campaign in eastern Persia in 1751. [6] Caroe follows the Durrani version: Ahmad Shah gave Nasir Khan an Afghan district, the valley of Shal, to fix his loyalty, and the Brahui villages just south of Quetta date from then. [9] On the Durrani side see the Durrani confederation and Ahmad Shah and the Durrani state.

The Kasi and the tribes around

The Kasi, or Kansi, are the Pashtun tribe of the Quetta valley itself. The Gazetteer places them in the Sarban division of the Afghans as descendants of Kasi, son of Kharshbun, and says their own tradition brings seven sections from around the Takht-i-Sulaiman about seven centuries before 1905, to settle first at Samli in the Kuchlak circle. [6] They have an entry in the family tree at Kasi of Quetta, and the site's Kakar page notes that the Kasi stand beside the Kakar in Quetta although the genealogies place them under Kharshbun. The leading families, in the Gazetteer, are the Arbabs, headed by the Ahmad Khanzai. The Kasi paid revenue to Ahmad Shah and had suffered earlier from Kakar raids on the north and Brahui raids on the south. [6] When batai replaced the old fixed assessment in 1890 the Kasi headmen lost their customary share of the crop, and from 1891 they received Rs. 1,800 a year in perpetuity as compensation. [6]

The Gazetteer also records sayings of other tribes against the Kasi, such as "Misfortune to the man, who puts his trust in a Kasi". It gives them in the voice of a colonial official as the opinion of neighbours, and no Kasi view is recorded. [6]

North of the valley the Gazetteer names the Kakar, among them the Panezai of Pishin, who were the main armed opponents of the British in 1840 and 1841, and the Achakzai of Toba and Chaman, who plundered the army's baggage on the Khojak in 1839. [6] Caroe names the Tarins, Achakzais, Kakars and Panris as the main Pashtun tribes north of Quetta and calls the Achakzais Durranis. [9] See also Tarin and Panni. About half of what was called Baluchistan, Caroe adds, was Pashtun, in the hills and valleys north and north-east of the capital, in tribes "considerably less than half a million souls in all". [9]

The first Afghan war

The Army of the Indus reached Quetta on 26 March 1839, short of food, and stayed until 6 April. Captain Bean was left as Political Agent under Shah Shuja. [6] On 23 June 1840 a force of about 800 under Gafur of the Panezai Kakars attacked the town and was driven off in about three hours, with 22 of its men killed. In July the Brahuis from Kalat besieged it for a week until dissension broke up their camp. [6] General England's brigade was beaten at Haikalzai on 28 March 1842 and won there a month later. The British left Quetta between 12 September and 1 October 1842, and it returned to the Khan of Kalat. [6]

The cantonment

Robert Sandeman's treaty with the Khan of Kalat was ratified at the end of 1876. While it waited, 300 men of the 4th Sikhs under Captain Scott were placed at Quetta with the Khan's consent, and the Baluchistan Agency, with its seat at Quetta, followed in 1877. [6] Caroe writes that Sandeman and the Government of India were thinking of the defence of India against Russia, and that Sher Ali "greatly resented and feared" the advance to Shal, which Caroe counts a cause of the second Afghan war. [9] From April 1883 Quetta was made over in perpetuity at a quit rent of Rs. 25,000 and joined to Pishin, which the treaty of Gandamak had ceded in 1879. [6] Caroe notes that the cession carried the frontier across the Khojak range to Chaman, a short distance from Kandahar. [9] What that meant for the Pashtun lands is in the Durand Line, 1893 and the three Anglo-Afghan wars.

The old town had clustered round the miri, which became an arsenal. Government bought about 3,754 acres between 1878 and 1883, 3,496 of them for the cantonment, and gave the displaced townspeople plots in the new civil town. The trees along the roads came from cuttings brought by the camel-load from Kandahar at the order of the Political Agent, Barnes. [6]

By the Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 the town had a cantonment on the north, civil lines and the native town beyond the Habib Nullah, a garrison of mountain batteries, infantry and cavalry, and an Indian Staff College under construction. [7] The 1901 census counted 24,584 people: 3,678 Christians, 10,399 Muslims and 8,678 Hindus. [7] The Quetta-Pishin Gazetteer says nearly all the civil population was from outside, mostly Punjabis and Sindhis who held most of the trade and the government posts. [6] Bray, in 1911, found only 1,427 of the 34,000 or so counted in the town to belong to the local Pashtun, Baloch and Brahui tribes, 386 of them women, and read this as tribesmen coming alone and for a time to find work. He put the normal population nearer forty-five thousand than the thirty-four thousand counted in the off season. [8] Caroe judged that British rule left the tribal countryside much as it had been: "The Quetta Staff College, the regiments, the railway, are outside the tribal existence". [9]

Who lives in Quetta

The Gazetteer says Pashto and Brahui are the main local languages, that Pashto speakers made up over 77 per cent of the district's rural population, and that Persian was spoken by Kandaharis and Hazaras. [6] The Imperial Gazetteer wrote that "as a navvy the Hazara or Ghilzai Afghan is unrivalled", a colonial writer's generalisation. [7] Bray called the district essentially Pashtun, shading into Brahui country to the south. [8]

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics counted 2,269,473 people in Quetta district in the census of 15 March 2017, against 774,547 in 1998, with 999,385 of them urban. [4] Its 2023 census put the district at 2,595,492 in 288,690 households. [5] Table 11 of the 2017 district tables gives mother tongue, as census counts: Pashto 1,268,722 (55.9 per cent), Brahui 356,100 (15.7 per cent), Balochi 165,343 (7.3 per cent), Punjabi 104,386, Urdu 53,111, Sindhi 36,629, Saraiki 33,173, Hindko 26,163, Kashmiri 8,348 and other languages 217,498. [4] Table 10 counted 283,869 residents as non-Pakistani. [4] Dawn, reporting the provisional 2017 results, quoted a senior Bureau officer saying that the effect of Afghan refugees showed most in Quetta, Killa Abdullah and Pishin, and Sadique Baloch, editor of the Balochistan Express, saying that Quetta's growth also came from Baloch families leaving districts of conflict. [10]

The earthquake of 31 May 1935

The earthquake struck about three in the morning of 31 May 1935. C. P. Skrine, Political Agent of Kalat and Chagai, had dined in Quetta the night before and found it at the height of its spring season, with the King's Birthday celebrations about to begin. [1] Reaching it next morning, he found the Civil Lines in ruins, the Residency standing but damaged, and in Bruce Road, which he called the Piccadilly of Quetta, "scarcely two or three of the familiar shops were recognizable". [1] The damage ended about half a mile beyond the Habib Nullah, so that most of the cantonment was spared. [1]

The Government of India's summary to the Secretary of State on 21 June said thirty thousand people perished, about twenty thousand buried in the city. [2] Skrine's later figure was "at least 24,000 persons" in Quetta itself, 3,000 in nearby villages and some 3,250 in Kalat State, from a summer population of about 65,000. [1] An early official estimate of 3 June put the city's dead at 26,000 out of 40,000. [2] The Bureau of Public Information said itself that estimates varied because the scale of the disaster made counting impossible. [2] The town was put under martial law. Skrine heard that the troops dug out several hundred living people in three days, along with 3,000 or more bodies, and that the dead were buried in trenches outside municipal limits or burned on pyres. [1] Many survivors believed Chiltan had turned volcanic, which helped the military evacuate them to Sind and the Punjab. [1]

W. D. West of the Geological Survey put the shock's intensity at 10 on the Rossi-Forel scale along a belt about 68 miles long and 16 wide, from Baleli to Mand-Haji, and thought a shallow thrust fault the cause. [1] The Government decided in December 1935 to rebuild the cantonment and civil lines on the old sites, giving as reasons progress in earthquake-resistant building and the immunity of the dry alluvium of the north-eastern cantonment. [1]

Pashtuns and Baloch in the province

Caroe called the name Baluchistan a misnomer because of the Pashtun share of the province. [9] Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai, who published Istiqlal from Quetta and was martyred there in 1973, is the best-known Pashtun political leader of the town. The article on him gives the sources for his life.

The province's politics turn on how many Pashtuns it has and where. Dawn wrote in 2012 that the mainstream Pashtun nationalist parties support the Baloch demand for rights within the state, and quoted Rauf Lala of the Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party: "We do support Balochistan comprising Baloch areas, not Pashtun areas". [12] The same report says that when One Unit was abolished the Pashtun-dominated urban part of British Balochistan was merged into the province, and that Achakzai was the only Pashtun nationalist leader to oppose that and demand Baloch-Pashtun parity. [12] Aurangzeb Kasi of the Awami National Party held that the dismissal of Ataullah Mengal's government in 1973 began the distrust between Baloch leaders and Islamabad. [12]

The census sharpened the quarrel. A Dawn writer, Muhammad Shayan Lakdawalla, wrote in April 2012 that Afghan refugees had long been concentrated in Quetta, its suburbs and other Pashtun-dominated places, and that nationalist parties called their inclusion in the census a conspiracy against the Baloch, meant to make them a minority in their own province. [11] A reader answered under the article that Pashtuns had boycotted the previous census, so refugees alone could not explain a rise in the Pashtun count. [11] Dawn's report on the 2017 results showed the Baloch share in the 21 Baloch-majority districts falling from 61 to 55.6 per cent and the nine Pashtun-majority districts at 26 per cent of the province. A Bureau officer said Afghans and others would be left out of the final count. [10]

The Hazaras of Quetta

The Hazaras are Shia Muslims, and Human Rights Watch put their number in Balochistan at about half a million. [3] Its 2014 report "We Are the Walking Dead" says more than 500 Hazaras had been killed in attacks since 2008 and that the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni militant group, claimed the worst of them. On 10 January 2013 a suicide bombing at a snooker club on Alamdar Road killed 96 Hazaras, and on 17 February 2013 a bomb at the Hazara Town vegetable market killed 84. [3] Since 2012, the report says, Quetta's Hazaras have kept to the districts of Marriabad and Hazara Town. [3]

Hazara voices in that report are those of the families. Ramzan Ali, whose brother Nadir Ali was killed in April 2012, said it was "very unsafe for us to move out of our area now" and that the family had turned to air travel because buses were too risky. Ahmad Hussain, whose brother died in the June 2012 university bus bombing, said "We are now hostages in our own city." Juma Khan, son of a man killed in a 2011 bus bombing, said "The government has failed to protect our community." [3] Abdul Khaliq Hazara, chairman of the Hazara Democratic Party, told Dawn.com in January 2013, during a hunger strike, that the failure of the government and the law-enforcement agencies to stop the "genocide" amounted to complicity, that no arrests had been made, and that only a military-supervised targeted operation could remove the few people responsible. He said the community had always held to a non-violent approach. [13]

The authorities answered in different ways, as the report records. After the January 2013 bombing, it says, the federal government dismissed the provincial government and imposed federal rule in response to the Hazara community's demands. [3] The army's public relations chief, Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, said on 22 February 2013 that "The armed forces were not in contact with any militant organization, including Lashkar-e-Jhangvi." [3] Balochistan's home secretary, Akbar Durrani, told HRW that it was wrong to assume that nothing had been done: many had been arrested, but could not be prosecuted for lack of evidence. [3] The Quetta police chief, Mir Zubair Mehmood, conceded that the police had "not had any significant successes" against the group, said it had lost 30 of its men in six months, and listed what he thought were the reasons the Hazaras were attacked, beginning "Of course, it is because they are Shia." [3] The then chief minister, Aslam Raisani, was quoted after the Mastung bus killings as calling the 40 dead "not a big deal", and the interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, told parliament after the Taftan attack of June 2014 that the pilgrims' bus route of 700 kilometres could not be secured. [3] HRW's own conclusion was that it found no evidence of official patronage of the group, but that the police and security forces had done little to investigate or prevent the attacks. [3]

Quetta on the road from Kandahar

Quetta lies on the road from Kandahar to the sea. In January 1882 about 150 people expelled from Kandahar by Abdur Rahman reached it on their way to Karachi, among them Sardar Ghulam Muhammad Tarzi, as that article records. Dawn wrote in 2012 that Afghan refugees, arriving since the Soviet occupation, had traditionally been most numerous in Quetta and its suburbs. [11] Their story is in the Soviet war and the refugees.