By Anika Nazir
Researcher | Community Development Professional | Women’s Wing Head, SYSF | J&K, India
On June 22, 2026, an anti-terrorism court in Quetta sentenced prominent Baloch human rights activist Dr. Mahrang Baloch and fellow Baloch Yakjehti Committee leader Sibghatullah Shah Jee to life imprisonment.
The case concerned the killing of a paramilitary soldier, Shabbir Baloch, during a Baloch Yakjehti Committee protest in Gwadar in July 2024. Prosecutors said Mahrang Baloch had incited protesters who later attacked security personnel. The court said eyewitness and medical evidence supported the prosecution’s case. Baloch and Shah denied the charges, and Baloch’s lawyer said the verdict would be challenged in the Balochistan High Court.
The Balochistan government has defended the judgment as the outcome of a fair trial and says violence against state personnel cannot be protected under the banner of peaceful protest. The defendants and human rights organizations tell a very different story.
Amnesty International said the proceedings failed to meet fair-trial standards and argued that no direct evidence had been presented linking the activists to the killing. United Nations human rights experts also condemned the sentence in July, raising serious concerns about the prosecution and treatment of Mahrang Baloch as a human rights defender.
The disagreement over the case is important. But so is the larger question behind it.
Mahrang Baloch did not become one of Pakistan’s most recognizable human rights activists because of a single demonstration in Gwadar. Her public life grew out of a much older crisis in Balochistan: enforced disappearances, allegations of extrajudicial killings, political alienation and a persistent belief among many Baloch that the resources beneath their land have brought greater benefits to Pakistan than to the people who live there.
A personal history shaped by disappearance
For Mahrang, the issue of disappearance began inside her own family.
Her father, Abdul Ghaffar Lango, was a political activist who disappeared years before Mahrang became internationally known. TIME reported that his body was recovered in 2011. Mahrang has said publicly that her father had been forcibly disappeared, and his death became an important part of the path that eventually led her into activism.
She later trained as a doctor but became increasingly identified with campaigns against enforced disappearances and alleged extrajudicial killings in Balochistan.
The Baloch Yakjehti Committee, or BYC, has become one of the most visible organizations associated with those campaigns. The organization describes itself as a peaceful civil rights movement. Pakistani authorities, however, have accused the BYC of links to the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army, an allegation the group has repeatedly denied.
That distinction cannot simply be brushed aside.
Balochistan faces a real and violent insurgency. Separatist militant organizations have carried out deadly attacks against Pakistani security forces, civilians, infrastructure and other targets. Any serious discussion of the province has to acknowledge the suffering caused by armed groups as well as allegations of abuses by the state.
But recognizing a genuine security threat does not remove the state’s obligation to distinguish between armed violence and peaceful dissent.
That is where the case of Mahrang Baloch has become so important.
A conflict with deep roots
Balochistan’s grievances did not begin with the present generation.
Their roots extend to the creation of Pakistan itself and the disputed history surrounding the accession of the princely state of Kalat in 1948.
The Khan of Kalat signed an Instrument of Accession to Pakistan on March 27, 1948. Pakistani accounts regard the accession as legally valid and part of the consolidation of the new state. Baloch nationalist narratives have long challenged the circumstances surrounding that decision and regard it as the beginning of a political relationship imposed from the centre.
The historical interpretation remains contested. What is not in dispute is that an armed revolt led by Prince Abdul Karim followed, beginning a pattern of recurring insurgencies. Even the Balochistan government’s official historical account records Baloch uprisings in 1948, 1958-59, 1962-63 and 1973-77, followed by another phase of insurgency beginning in the early 2000s.
Nearly eight decades later, the conflict has accumulated layers of grievance that go far beyond the original accession dispute.
Questions of political autonomy, representation, security operations, enforced disappearances and control over natural resources now sit alongside that unresolved history.
Resource wealth and persistent poverty
The economic contradiction is difficult to overlook.
Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province by land area and contains enormous reserves of natural resources. The Sui gas field in Dera Bugti became one of the foundations of Pakistan’s natural gas industry after its discovery in the early 1950s. Decades later, communities around Sui were still campaigning for wider access to the very gas extracted from their area. As recently as March 2026, provincial authorities were inaugurating new gas-supply projects intended to address long-standing local shortages.
The province also contains Reko Diq, one of the world’s significant undeveloped copper-gold deposits, while Gwadar port has become a strategically important part of Pakistan’s economic relationship with China.
Yet the development figures tell another story.
UNDP has ranked Balochistan last among Pakistan’s provinces in human development and has reported that it has the country’s highest levels of multidimensional poverty. The Asian Development Bank, while backing the Reko Diq project and emphasizing its development potential, has also described Balochistan as Pakistan’s least-developed province.
This is one of the most powerful sources of resentment in Balochistan.
A province can be rich in gas, copper and gold and still leave many of its citizens struggling for clean water, health care, education and economic opportunity.
Pakistan’s government argues that large-scale projects, investment and infrastructure will bring jobs, revenue and development to the province. That possibility should be judged on results.
For Baloch families, however, the question remains straightforward: after generations of extraction, when will the wealth of Balochistan be visible in the lives of ordinary Baloch?
The unresolved question of the missing
The issue that has perhaps done the greatest damage to public trust is enforced disappearance.
This is not a concern documented only by Baloch nationalist organizations.
Pakistan has its own Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances. According to official figures released in October 2025, the commission had received 10,636 cases of alleged enforced disappearance from across Pakistan since March 2011. It said 8,986 had been disposed of and 1,650 remained under investigation at the end of September 2025.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has repeatedly raised concerns about disappearances in Balochistan. Following a fact-finding mission in 2025, it reported continuing enforced disappearances, shrinking civic space and a lack of accountability in the province. Its annual assessment of Pakistan’s human rights situation also said enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings persisted during 2025.
The numbers offered by activist groups are often considerably higher than official figures, and those competing totals should not be presented as though they are interchangeable.
But arguments over the exact number should not obscure the central problem.
Even one family left for years without knowing whether a son, father, husband or brother is alive, detained or dead represents a failure that requires an answer.
Counterterrorism cannot mean that people simply disappear from the protection of the law.
When women carry the movement
Perhaps the most striking change in the Baloch rights movement has been the increasingly public role of women.
Mothers have appeared at demonstrations carrying photographs of missing sons. Sisters and daughters have joined marches and sit-ins. Women who might otherwise have remained outside formal political life have become some of the movement’s most recognizable voices.
TIME noted this transformation when it included Mahrang Baloch in its TIME100 Next list in 2024, describing how women had moved to the forefront of peaceful Baloch advocacy as men in their communities were killed or went missing. In late 2023, Mahrang led a long march to Islamabad involving families demanding answers about missing relatives.
There is something particularly powerful about this form of protest.
For many of these women, political activism was not born in a university seminar or party office. It began with an empty chair at home.
Someone disappeared, and a family member had to begin asking where he had gone.
That is what makes the state’s response to peaceful activism so consequential. Pakistan has every right to prosecute people responsible for murder, terrorism and attacks against civilians or security personnel. No human rights argument requires a government to tolerate violence.
But the line between militant violence and peaceful dissent must remain visible.
When anti-terrorism laws are used against human rights defenders, the evidence and legal process must therefore withstand especially close scrutiny.
In Mahrang Baloch’s case, Pakistan’s government says that standard was met. Amnesty International and UN human rights experts say it was not. That disagreement deserves examination through an open and credible appeals process.
Pakistan’s human rights argument must also apply at home
There is another reason this case deserves attention beyond Balochistan.
Pakistan has spent decades raising the issue of Jammu and Kashmir in international forums. At the United Nations General Assembly as recently as September 2025, Pakistan again called for Kashmiris to receive the right to self-determination.
Pakistan is entitled to make its case on Kashmir, just as allegations of human rights violations anywhere in the region deserve serious and independent scrutiny.
But principles become more persuasive when they are applied consistently.
If Pakistan asks the international community to listen to communities that say their political rights are being denied, investigate alleged abuses and uphold the principle of self-determination abroad, it should be equally willing to confront credible allegations of disappearances, unlawful detention and political repression within its own borders.
This is not an argument for equating two different conflicts. Kashmir and Balochistan have different histories, legal questions and political circumstances.
It is an argument about consistency.
A government’s international human rights advocacy becomes harder to defend when families at home spend years demanding the most basic information about missing relatives.
Force alone has not solved Balochistan
Pakistan cannot ignore the violence of Baloch separatist organizations. Civilians have been murdered. Soldiers have been killed. Infrastructure has been attacked. Militancy remains a serious threat to the people of Balochistan as well as to the Pakistani state.
But history also shows that force alone has not resolved the province’s conflict.
Balochistan has experienced repeated insurgencies and repeated security operations since Pakistan’s earliest years. The grievances have survived both.
A durable solution requires more than another military operation or another round of arrests. It requires credible investigations into disappearances, accountability wherever unlawful abuses are established, political space for peaceful dissent, meaningful representation and development that allows Baloch communities to see a fair share of the benefits generated by their province’s resources.
Mahrang Baloch’s life sentence has therefore become about more than one activist and one criminal case.
It has become another test of whether Pakistan can maintain a clear distinction between peaceful political dissent and militancy, whether its judicial system can command public confidence in deeply political cases, and whether Balochistan’s longstanding grievances can finally be addressed through politics rather than another cycle of violence.
Behind the statistics and political arguments are families asking questions that should not be difficult for a state governed by law to answer:
Where is our son? Where is our brother? Where is our father?
For as long as those questions remain unanswered, Balochistan’s crisis will remain unresolved.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, editorial position, or policies of Khaama Press.
