Opinion | Voices From The Vanished: Fight For Justice In Balochistan
The month of January 2025 alone saw 107 enforced disappearances across the province, according to a chilling report by Paank, the human rights wing of the Baloch National Movement
In the shadowed corridors of the Pakistani state, where power is wielded not by the parliament but by barracks and clandestine agencies, the soul of Balochistan bleeds. The month of January 2025 alone saw 107 enforced disappearances across the province, according to a chilling report by Paank, the human rights wing of the Baloch National Movement.
These are not just numbers—they are human lives swallowed by a brutal machine that operates beyond accountability, with the military establishment acting as judge, jury, and often, executioner. Dr. Abdul Malik Baloch, President of the National Party and former Chief Minister of Balochistan, has emerged as one of the few political voices courageous enough to confront the state’s ongoing repression. In a recent public address, he condemned the federal government and military’s intrusion into Balochistan’s affairs, especially through the controversial Mines and Minerals Act, which he decried as a constitutional betrayal.
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Resource Colonialism in a Federal Guise
The plunder of Balochistan’s natural wealth—Saindak, Reko Diq, Gwadar—is conducted not with development in mind, but domination. The people of Balochistan are treated not as stakeholders, but as subjects of a 21st-century colonial project. Contracts with companies like Pakistan Petroleum Limited and Saindak Metals are renewed without the consultation of legitimate public representatives, further entrenching the military’s grip over the region’s resources.
John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher who laid the foundation for liberal constitutionalism, argued that a government loses legitimacy the moment it no longer operates with the consent of the governed. The Pakistani state’s actions in Balochistan represent a grotesque inversion of this principle. Where the social contract demands mutual obligation, the state offers extraction and suppression. In Locke’s words, such a regime ceases to be civil and becomes a “state of war".
Disappearances: The Anatomy of a State Crime
The figures from the Paank report are harrowing: enforced disappearances have become the norm rather than the exception. These are not rogue acts but systematic state policy—an organised terror campaign carried out by military and intelligence agencies to quash dissent and eradicate political opposition. The mutilated bodies of Muhammad Ismail (20) and Muhammad Abbas (17), found after being abducted from their Kalat home, represent the fate of thousands. Their youth, their innocence, their right to live—all discarded in the name of national security. Hekmatullah Baloch, another victim, was shot during a peaceful protest and succumbed to his injuries in a Karachi hospital. His crime? Demanding accountability.
Michel Foucault, in his seminal work Discipline and Punish, observed that modern states have replaced the public spectacle of punishment with hidden forms of control—surveillance, incarceration, and disappearance. Pakistan, in Balochistan, has regressed to a grotesque hybrid, mixing the medieval cruelty of mutilation with the modern state’s bureaucratic efficiency. The Fourth Schedule and Maintenance of Public Order (3MPO) are not laws—they are instruments of tyranny.
Illusion of Democracy and the Reality of Martial Law
While Islamabad claims to be a constitutional democracy, Balochistan is ruled like an occupied territory. Dr. Abdul Malik denounced the frequent use of colonial-era laws to detain political activists, many of them women. He rightly equated this crackdown to civil martial law—a regime where uniforms dictate politics and silence becomes the only guarantee of safety. The philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that the collapse of the line between the legal and the illegal is the precursor to totalitarianism.
In Balochistan, this line has not only been blurred; it has been erased. The people no longer know when they cross a boundary, because the boundary moves with the will of the soldier. This system does not merely suppress dissent—it criminalises existence itself. Border trade, once a lifeline for over three million people, has been strangled by new regulations and taxes. What remains is not law and order but extortion by officials, where survival is a privilege granted to the obedient and denied to the defiant.
Politics of Extraction and Exclusion
The resource curse is not a theory in Balochistan—it is a lived reality. The province is rich in gas, gold, copper, and port infrastructure, yet its people suffer from abject poverty, rampant illiteracy, and systemic unemployment. This paradox is no accident; it is by design. Antonio Gramsci’s idea of passive revolution is illuminating here. Gramsci noted how dominant classes use state apparatuses to integrate resistance into the system without altering its exploitative foundations. In Balochistan, token development projects and cosmetic representation serve as cover for a deeper colonisation.
What the state offers is not empowerment but pacification. Even the façade of electoral politics is undermined. Dr. Malik lamented that extensions to mineral contracts were being signed without legitimate public oversight, deepening the alienation of the Baloch people. This political exclusion is a deliberate strategy to delegitimise regional autonomy and enforce submission to centralised authority.
Dispossession Disguised as Security
The Talaar check post, which Dr. Malik demanded be dismantled, is not merely a security installation—it is a symbol of domination. It represents the architecture of occupation: a structure that surveils, intimidates, and fragments the community it purports to protect. Similar outposts dot the Baloch landscape like scars, each a reminder that the state sees its own citizens as insurgents in need of subjugation.
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, described colonial regimes that deploy violence not just to suppress rebellion but to imprint inferiority onto the colonised psyche. The Pakistan Army’s presence in Balochistan functions the same way. It tells the Baloch they do not own their land, their bodies, or their future.
Dr. Malik’s demands are not radical—they are constitutional. He asks for the release of political workers, simplification of trade rules, and the withdrawal of draconian laws. Yet in the eyes of the establishment, such calls are tantamount to sedition. This reaction reveals the state’s true nature: one that cannot accommodate dissent because its foundations are built on domination, not dialogue. It views Baloch identity not as a part of the national mosaic, but as a threat to its imposed uniformity. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas emphasised the importance of “communicative rationality"—the idea that democratic societies should resolve conflicts through open, inclusive dialogue. The Pakistani state, instead, speaks in the language of bullets, barbed wire, and black sites. It confuses coercion with cohesion and believes silence equals stability.
A Dark Mirror for the World
The world must not avert its eyes. What is happening in Balochistan is not an internal affair—it is a human rights catastrophe that demands international scrutiny. The United Nations, the European Union, and rights organisations must pressure Pakistan to end its military campaign of terror. Balochistan is the mirror in which we see the true face of the Pakistani establishment: brutal, extractive, and unapologetically authoritarian. Until the military returns to the barracks, until the disappeared are returned to their families, and until the people of Balochistan control their own destiny, there will be no peace. To paraphrase the philosopher Rousseau: A people once forced to be silent will eventually speak with fire.
Pakistan has, willy-nilly, disappeared the people of Balochistan—fathers, mothers, brothers, daughters—without remorse or accountability. This machinery of oppression has shattered countless lives and torn apart the social fabric of a proud and historic people. The silence of the disappeared echoes louder than any protest; it reverberates through every Baloch household and haunts every mother who waits at her doorstep. These disappearances, and the suffering they bring, are not merely crimes—they are the slow incineration of hope. If this trajectory of state violence and contempt continues, it will not just destabilise Balochistan but engulf any prospect of peace.
A state that thrives on the pain of its peripheries cannot claim unity; it can only demand obedience, and such obedience always comes at the cost of human dignity. It is no longer a question of politics—it is a question of survival. And the world must choose: to remain complicit in silence or to stand with a people struggling to be seen, to be heard, and above all—to be free.
The writer is an author and a columnist. His X handle is @ArunAnandLive. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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