How Pakistan’s strong-arm tactics are fanning insurgency in Balochistan – Firstpost

Recent days have brought bloody turmoil to Pakistan as its restive Balochistan province suffered two major attacks by the secessionist group Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) within the span of a week. First, on March 11, the militants hijacked the Quetta-Peshawar Jaffar Express carrying over 400 passengers, including security personnel, to demand in exchange the release of Baloch political prisoners and forcibly disappeared persons.

The Pakistani forces launched a rescue operation, somehow managing the release of 346 hostages and losing 28 people, out of whom 18 were army and paramilitary soldiers. Next, on March 16, the group attacked a Frontier Corps (FC) convoy in the Noshki district of the province, killing at least 5 people, including 2 FC personnel. Despite decades of iron-hand policies to counter insurgent activity in Balochistan, the militancy appears to have grown both in its resolve and capability.

Amid this context, a great opportunity for the Pakistani state to engage with and mend its relationship with the Baloch people has been the peaceful Baloch resistance movement that demands state accountability within the federation. However, far from utilising that chance to address people’s grievances, the government has severely cracked down on, vilified, and misrepresented the civil resistance, further fuelling separatist sentiments.

The armed Baloch insurgency is almost as old as the state of Pakistan. Over the decades, the Baloch people have complained that the federal government has exploited the resource-rich province, keeping it impoverished and developmentally backward. Moreover, in response to the militancy, the government has enacted a strategy of collective punishment on the whole population.

Especially since the 2000s, due to the notorious ‘kill and dump’ policy of the establishment, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, fake encounters and custodial torture have become part and parcel of Baloch lives.

Anyone perceived as a threat to the state, from political activists, journalists, and human rights workers to students, has been targeted under the garb of counter-terrorist action.

The relentless excesses by the state as well as the total lack of accountability have provided the stimulus for the armed insurgency, causing an endless loop of violence and oppression.

Therefore, the emergence of a peaceful grassroots social movement, amid this crossfire between the state and the militancy, is truly remarkable and a welcome chance for the establishment to initiate confidence-building with the people.

Led mostly by women, the Baloch civil resistance marks the coming together of a number of peaceful associations, most prominently the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), to highlight and organise against the state’s regime of human rights abuses in the province.

Coming into national and international limelight, particularly during the December 2023-January 2024 ‘March against Baloch Genocide’ from Turbat to Quetta to Islamabad, the BYC has actively worked to strengthen the grassroots movement, despite persistent state obstructions such as network and internet blackouts, arbitrary arrests, attacks by security personnel, and a constant threat of killing or ‘disappearance’.

In July 2024, the group organised the ‘Baloch Raaji Muchi’ at Gwadar bringing together demonstrators from all over Balochistan at a scale that is unprecedented in the history of the province. Most recently, in January 2025, the BYC observed the ‘Baloch Genocide Remembrance Day’ at Dalbandin, again rallying thousands of people to voice their sufferings and expose the state’s brutalities.

Right from its nascent days, the Pakistani authorities have launched a multi-frontal offensive against the civil resistance, deploying not just ground forces but also a vicious propaganda campaign to discredit and silence the Baloch people. It has been an old tactic of the establishment to falsely link any and every instance of Baloch dissent to the armed insurgency, along with the accusation of being propelled by foreign interests.

Therefore, it is no surprise that the former caretaker Prime Minister Anwaarul Haq Kakar, former Balochistan Information Minister Jan Achakzai, and the director-general of Inter-Services Public Relations (the media wing of Pakistan’s military), Lt Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, have all pronounced the BYC leadership as ‘proxy’ of terrorists and their supporters as terrorist sympathisers.

The mainstream media incessantly repeats these claims while completely denying coverage to the demands of the Baloch resistance, the turnout in demonstrations, or the heavy-handed response of the state. In this scenario, social media has become both a tool for alternative narrative-building for the resistance as well as another arena for propaganda diffusion for the state.

In fact, a December 2024 report by The Balochistan Post, citing documents from the Chief Minister’s Secretariat, reported that the provincial government spends around PKR 5.5 million per month on ‘social media employees’ to spread state propaganda and disinformation against dissidents.

A staggering number of troll and bot accounts that amplify state lines, along with issuing threats to movement leaders, can be seen on digital platforms since the days of the Baloch long march. A dominant trope of the disinformation campaign, which frequently uses photoshopped images, doctored audio and video clips, and AI-generated propaganda, is when missing persons for whom the movement raises its voice are wrongly portrayed as separatist militants.

The establishment in Pakistan blatantly lies and denies the severity of the plight of the Baloch people, egregiously understating the number of enforced disappearances. In one such instance, former interim PM Kakar claimed that the UN places the number of enforced disappearances in Balochistan at 50.

Although it is difficult to conclusively determine the number, even Pakistan’s own Commission of Enquiry on Enforced Disappearances puts it at 2,752 cases since 2011, with 468 being unresolved, while non-governmental sources reveal a much grimmer picture (the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances recorded over 14,000 missing in Balochistan in 2016, and the Voice of Baloch Missing Persons noted over 7,000 of the same in 2023).

Notably, Pakistan has not ratified the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, despite being repeatedly urged by the UN.

Given the scale of the security crisis that the BLA has unleashed on Pakistan, the establishment must take it as a wake-up call to finally correct course with the people of Balochistan. Despite its militant manifestations, the Baloch problem remains one of political discrimination, negligence, and ruthless suppression.

The civil resistance that has pulled grassroots mobilisation in the province is an opportune channel for the state to earn the people’s trust. However, despite the movement leaders continually clarifying their non-secessionist stance, the state appears bent on misrepresenting and violently clamping down on them, further alienating the people and fuelling support for insurgent counteraction. Instead of securitising the entire Baloch population, Pakistan must immediately rethink its approach and enact meaningful political remedies to its decades of injustices and oppression in its largest province.

The author is a PhD scholar at SIS, JNU, New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.