Why the pursuit of liberty in Pakistan’s largest province has turned into a bloody proxy war.
By: Syed Mubashir Shah
Balochistan exists in a state of tragic irony. As Pakistan’s largest, resource-rich province, its people are frequently denied the most fundamental components of human development, from clean drinking water to functioning schools and basic healthcare. This long-standing economic neglect is worsened by an outdated feudal structure where local waderas often abuse power over vulnerable communities with near zero accountability. When the state apparatus fails to address these local tyrannies or actively manages peaceful constitutional demands with force, a volatile sociopolitical vacuum is created.
In this context, the problem of enforced disappearances has come to represent the central cause of collective grief among the Baloch people. The non-violent human rights movements, including the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), under the leadership of Mahrang Baloch, have organized their people on the basis of an open manifesto that advocates the cessation of extrajudicial abductions and the strict adherence to due process. But the heavy-handedness of the state through the recent judgments of the anti-terrorism court imprisoning non-violent activists for many years has criminalized protest politics.
Yet, these systemic failures also feed a far more dangerous undercurrent: the armed militancy of the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA). While the BLA uses revolutionary rhetoric to claim the mantle of Baloch liberation, its actions reveal a profound moral abyss. During mass-casualty events like the Nushki and Musakhel incidents, militants systematically intercepted passenger vehicles, checked national identity cards, and executed dozens of civilians solely based on their Punjabi ethnicity. By shifting from a political struggle against state overreach into an ethnocentric campaign targeting low-wage laborers, the BLA strips itself of any moral legitimacy.
This ethical breakdown mirrors the core thesis of French philosopher Albert Camus in The Rebel. Camus argued that true rebellion must possess a moral limit. When a revolutionary movement decides that its ends justify the slaughter of innocents, it ceases to be a force for liberation and becomes a mirror image of the tyranny it opposes. By adopting tactics of indiscriminate terror against everyday citizens, the BLA has crossed that exact line.
Moreover, the crisis is complicated due to heavy regional geopolitics. The Islamabad government has time and again accused external intelligence services such as India’s RAW of funding and arming the BLA to create unrest in Pakistan and hamper economic projects such as China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Even though New Delhi denies such claims, it is seen by the security experts that foreign patrons exploit the actual internal dissatisfaction in order to play the proxy game regionally.
Some lessons that Baloch people know more than any outsider: Rebellion has its own limit. Mahrang Baloch set this limit even in his prison cell, protests peacefully do not mean taking arms; no one can mix these things up – neither the government nor the militants. Putting people in prison because they talk will not help much; it will only drive more Baloch youngsters toward armed men. And when the BLA murder laborers due to their last name, it does not free anybody but creates another grave on an uncounted list. There seems to be something between all these – ordinary Baloch citizen who still lacks water and misses his brother and wants to be treated like a citizen.
