Seven Decades On, Balochistan Still Waits
Shoaib Ullah
Islamabad: Balochistan does not simmer. It burns slowly, deliberately, and with the patience of a people who have been waiting for over seven decades to be heard.
It is tempting to frame the Balochistan crisis as a security problem, and easier still to reach for military solutions. Pakistan has done both, repeatedly. Yet the province remains its most volatile, most underdeveloped, and most alienated.
At some point, the honest question is no longer what Balochistan is doing wrong, but what the state has refused to do right.
The roots of this failure run deeper than independence. Under British rule, Balochistan was never meant to be developed; it was meant to be held. The Empire invested where revenue flowed: in Punjab’s canals, in Sindh’s ports, in Bengal’s mills.
Balochistan offered strategic geography, not taxable prosperity, so it received strategic garrisons, not schools or roads. When the British left, they bequeathed to Pakistan a province hollowed out by deliberate neglect.
What followed independence was worse than continuity; it was the conscious repetition of the same colonial logic, only with a Pakistani face.
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Power was transferred not to the people of Balochistan but to a landowning elite that owed its position to the centre, not to the province. Genuine political leadership was suppressed in favour of manageable proxies, figures who could be relied upon to pass laws, legitimize decisions, and ask no inconvenient questions.
Budgets flowed toward Balochistan on paper and evaporated on arrival. Meanwhile, those who dared to organise politically were not debated; they disappeared.
“You can kill a man, but you cannot kill an idea.” — Sophocles
The enforced disappearances that have marked Pakistan’s Balochistan policy for decades are not merely a human rights crisis; they are a political one.
Every person taken without charge, every family left without answers, produces not submission but fury. The state, in its rush to bypass the courts, has bypassed legitimacy itself. It has made the law irrelevant in the very province where the law was most urgently needed.
A government that cannot make its case in a courtroom has already lost the argument in the streets.
Armed groups did not materialise from ideology alone. They are the accumulated residue of unanswered grievances: military operations that killed both the guilty and the innocent alike, a political class that represented Rawalpindi rather than Quetta, and a federation that spoke of rights while delivering absence.
Violence begets violence. This is not an excuse for militancy; it is an explanation that the state continues, at its own peril, to ignore.
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“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” — Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
There is still time, though it narrows with every passing year. The people marching today in Balochistan are not all carrying weapons; most are carrying placards, filing petitions, and speaking to cameras. They are doing precisely what a democracy asks of its citizens. The state’s response will define not just Balochistan’s future, but Pakistan’s credibility as a constitutional republic.
Wars end at tables, not at checkpoints. Pakistan has spent decades mastering the grammar of force. It is time to learn the language of politics.
The path forward requires no great invention, only the political will to do what has long been avoided: end enforced disappearances and subject detentions to judicial oversight; allow genuine electoral competition free from establishment interference; ensure that federal funds allocated to Balochistan are spent in Balochistan, transparently and accountably; and open sustained dialogue with political voices, not just the ones the state finds convenient.
Balochistan is not a problem to be managed. It is a people to be respected. The difference between those two framings is the difference between a state that governs and one that merely occupies. Pakistan must choose, and it must choose soon.
The writer is a student of International Relations at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. He can be reached at shoaibkhankakar01@gmail.com
The article is the writer’s opinion, it may or may not adhere to the organization’s editorial policy.
