Baloch must embrace civil disobedience to resist Pakistan’s repression – Firstpost

What options are left when every legal path is blocked, when even mourning becomes a punishable act, and a mother clutching her son’s photograph is seen as a danger? When the courts, human rights commissions, and press clubs all turn their backs, what remains is not hope, but a quiet determination to endure and to resist.

The past year has made one thing clear to the oppressed Baloch nation: the state has no interest in dialogue, justice, or reform. The crackdown on the Baloch Yakjehti Committee; the arrests of peaceful activists like Mahrang Baloch, Sibghat Ullah Shahji, and Beebagr Baloch; the brutal response to the long march to Islamabad and the Baloch National Gathering in Gwadar—none of this was accidental.

It is part of a long-standing campaign to silence and intimidate Baloch voices through brute force. These were not militants, but students, lawyers, doctors and families searching for their missing loved ones. They carried placards, chanted slogans and held photographs. In return, they faced repression, arrests, baton charges, tear gas and complete indifference from the very institutions meant to uphold their rights.

In March 2025, in Balochistan’s capital Quetta, families of the missing came to the streets alongside young activists to demand answers. These were families who had spent years searching for their loved ones—sons, daughters, and brothers who had disappeared without a trace. They called for the release of detained members of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee and others held without charge. The state responded not with dialogue or compassion but with violence.

Pakistani forces opened fire on unarmed protesters, killing three children in broad daylight. Those who spoke out were arrested, and those who stood in solidarity were harassed and intimidated. Grieving women were dragged and manhandled in the streets, while Mahrang Baloch, a leading voice of the movement, was taken into custody along with others in a wave of unlawful detentions. In a political order where peaceful dissent is met with such force, mass civil disobedience is no longer just a right; it becomes a moral duty.

And now, as Baloch women and sisters themselves are being abducted, harassed and even killed, as they were in Awaran, Kech and Quetta, the red line has been crossed once again. This time, the response cannot follow the same path. It must take the shape of mass civil disobedience. A refusal to continue participating in a system that criminalises identity and grief.

The Baloch must now break the illusion of normalcy that the state depends on. Let teachers resign until the disappeared are returned or at least acknowledged. Let bureaucrats leave their offices and stop lending their labour to a government that erases their families. Let students refuse to sit in classrooms where their accents turn them into suspects. Let shopkeepers shut their stores, transport come to a halt and the roads empty. The state’s authority should be met with collective and determined withdrawal.

And let the Baloch people march again, not to courtrooms that offer no justice or press clubs that refuse to speak the truth, but to the gates of military cantonments and intelligence offices, where so many of the disappeared were last seen, where countless others continue to face inhumane torture. Let them stand before the institutions that built this terror and say, “Abduct or kill us too. You abducted our sons and our daughters. You killed our mothers. We will not live half-lives anymore.”

This is not some distant ideal or romantic notion. It has happened before, and it can happen again. From Gandhi’s Salt March in colonial India to the sit-ins led by Black students in segregated America, history shows that justice has always advanced when ordinary people chose civil disobedience over silent suffering. When the law serves only power, disobedience becomes the highest expression of civic duty.

Gandhi did not defeat the British with rifles; he broke their hold by daring them to arrest him, knowing thousands more would rise in his place. The Civil Rights Movement did not end segregation through appeasement but through the unbearable moral clarity of young people being hosed down for trying to go to school. The resistance that authoritarian states fear most is not violent—it is moral, disciplined, and impossible to ignore.

Pakistan may fear militants in the mountains, but what it fears even more is unarmed, organised resistance. It fears a protest that refuses to disappear, one that grows stronger each time it is attacked. It fears women like Mahrang Baloch, who stand before cameras and say, “We are not asking for charity; we are demanding justice. Stop your barbarity in Balochistan and give us answers.” And it fears thousands like her—people who carry no weapons, only the weight of memory and the strength to keep speaking when silence is safer.

The state has made it clear, time and again, that it has no tolerance for peaceful dissent. This is exactly why the leaders of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee were targeted—not because they took up arms or incited violence, but because they refused to be silent. They were not punished for insurrection but for daring to organise within the bounds of the law. They were not arrested for agitation but for remembering the disappeared. When a state begins to treat remembrance itself as a threat, when mourning is labelled as sedition, it becomes painfully clear that the era of appeals, petitions, and commissions is over.

Civil disobedience offers a way forward that does not rely on violence but on collective courage and dignity. Imagine mothers standing in quiet rows outside Pakistani military camps, holding nothing but photographs of their missing children. Imagine students walking out of universities in protest, not for privilege, but because their language or surname has marked them as suspects.

Imagine entire neighbourhoods marching together to the gates of military installations with a clear message: “We will not cooperate in our own erasure.” This is not disorder or chaos; it is disciplined, purposeful resistance. It is the reclaiming of moral ground in a system built on denial and repression.

The question is no longer whether the Baloch should resist but how to resist in a way that is effective, principled, and enduring. The answer lies in resistance that is nonviolent, collective, and unwavering. Continuing to beg a state that responds only with indiscriminate firing, tear gas, batons, and silence is a slow and suffocating death. Mass disobedience is never easy. It requires discipline, sacrifice, and unity that reaches across cities, communities, and generations, from Awaran to Kech, Gwadar to Quetta, Panjgur to Pasni. Yet it remains the only form of protest that carries both moral legitimacy and the power to shake the foundations of repression.

Let the state be forced to choose between acknowledging its violence or exposing its fear of peace. Let it come to understand that if it continues to criminalise grief, then grief will grow beyond its control. Let it face the reality of Baloch mothers who no longer beg but who will not walk away either. And let it be clear that if the state insists on erasing the Baloch, then the Baloch will step away from the very system that depends on their silence and cooperation.

This is what settles in when people have tried everything—waited outside courts, knocked on every door, held up photographs, but nothing changed. When silence and oppression are all the state offers, the only thing left is to say no, together. This is not a call to destroy but a call to sit down, to disrupt the system peacefully and refuse to be pushed aside any longer. And if the state sees even that as a threat, then let it do what it has done to so many before. Let it abduct us too. Let it kill us too. But we won’t be silent, and we won’t fade away like our lives don’t matter.

Dilshad Baluch is a journalist from Pakistan’s Balochistan Province and a graduate of Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @DilshadBaluch. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.