Kidnapping is now a lucrative business

Like elsewhere in the world, in Pakistan also the ongoing insurgency tends to breed the curse of kidnapping, and more often of the innocent than marked targets. It is a potent weapon of war in the armoury of the insurgents and is being used quite frequently, particularly in the areas beset with militancy.
They kidnap people to secure exchange of their comrades captured by the authorities, and sometime to spread awe and fear in the area to prove their presence and establish their claim to dominance. In Pakistan, however, kidnapping is mainly a 'business' that is flourishing by the day and may not always be the handiwork of insurgents. Huge amounts are claimed by the kidnappers, and are often paid, mostly courtesy of third party private negotiators. In common parlance this is called kidnapping for ransom, quite a chunk of it is not reported to the authorities.
Two incidents of kidnapping and one of the attack on security forces in an eastern district of Balochistan on Wednesday brings out the phenomenon of kidnapping in all its weird dimensions. In the first case, armed men kidnapped the deputy commissioner of Jhal-Magsi district, who was on his way to Quetta in his official car, along with his family, after overpowering his guards. In the same area, armed men intercepted an engineer and took him away. In the third case, not very far from there, a police convoy was ambushed and shot fatally, including a police inspector.
The so-called Baloch Liberation Army has claimed responsibility for the crimes as if it would bring the outfit any closer to the hearts of the people. But the BLA may only be a client; the perpetrators of these heinous atrocities are most likely the criminal gangs that virtually rule the huge swathe of broken land and low mountainous landscape on both sides of River Indus where Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan meet, specially in the Kashmore-Bolan region, and lower Punjab areas near Indian border. Such is the scale of their sway in that literally unpoliced area that 55 kidnapping for ransom cases were reported only in the district of Rahim Yar Khan during the last three months. No wonder, all the kidnapped came home after paying the ransom. That's a measure of the professionalism in this flourishing business.
No wonder, the Sindh government has now formally requested its counterpart in Quetta to help combat the menace of kidnapping for ransom. How will that take place has never been an issue of serious deliberations at any level of the government. The curse is accepted as the people's fate - only the other day Sindh Home Minister Zulfikar Mirza openly conceded that the release of Satish Kumar remains a challenge even when the government is ready to pay the demanded ransom of Rs 5 million. The fact is that there is hardly a blueprint, what to talk of a strategy to deal with this menace - while the kidnapping for ransom business is run so meticulously.
There are gangs who collect information about the financial potential of the intended kidnappee's family and pass it on to the professional criminals, who carry out the act of kidnapping. The victim remains in the custody of the kidnappers till they manage to sell him/her to the highest bidder, who is safely ensconced in some inaccessible place, like the tribal areas for the kidnapped from northern Punjab and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Then begins hard bargaining through 'established' negotiators, who often include known personalities and at the end, the deal is sealed at a price, which the victim's family pays, underhand.
But kidnappings for political gains are a far less profitable business because it pays in extremely rare cases. No government worth its salt would succumb to such pressure and agree to give away hardened criminals for innocent innocents, and more so in cases where the kidnappers are its own nationals, as is the case with the BLA. In fact, in the end, the insurgents who claim kidnappings lose their credibility with the general public as true patriots motivated by a superior cause.
That has happened with the FATA-based Taliban and so are the Baloch insurgents in for it. It is, therefore, imperative that the nationalist groups in the affected regions like Balochistan and FATA don't appear to be condoning kidnapping of innocent people by keeping mum over such crimes. In the meanwhile, the government is required to revisit the laws and regulations aimed at curbing kidnapping to strengthen the grip on the mushrooming kidnapping for ransom crimes, mainly by deepening its intelligence surveillance into how these gangs operate. We would also expect the religious bodies to raise their voices against this crime, which not only destroys families but also encourages crime in society.