The Pulse | Society | South Asia

Mahrang Baloch’s Conviction is a Pyrrhic Victory for the Pakistani State

They may have locked up a popular and powerful activist. But this will only convince more Baloch that there is no space for political protest or dissent.

Rights activist and founder of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, Dr Mahrang Baloch, after delivering a speech at The House of Literature in Oslo, Norway.

On June 25, an Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) sentenced Dr. Mahrang Baloch, a Baloch rights activist and the founder of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), to life imprisonment over the killing of a paramilitary soldier during the July 2024 protest in Gwadar. She and another BYC activist, Sibghatullah Shahji, have been convicted of murder and terrorism. Both Baloch and Shahji boycotted the trial, which was moved from an open court to Quetta’s Huda Central Jail, and was conducted via video link.

Both denied the charges against them. Their lawyers will challenge the ATC’s verdict in the Balochistan High Court (BHC).

Although the Balochistan government upholds that the trial was fair and the prosecution furnished sufficient evidence to prove the charges against Mahrang, legal and rights bodies, including Amnesty International, have called it a sham for the in-camera proceedings.

Nevertheless, Mahrang’s conviction marks an inflection point in Balochistan’s troubled relationship with Islamabad, with far-reaching implications for the restive province’s fractured politics and security. This decision vindicates three fundamental realities confronting the Pakistani state in Balochistan.

First, as much as the state wants to downplay it, enforced disappearances remain the single most critical issue of the Baloch conflict. No amount of obfuscation, media censorship, legal intimidation and accompanying propaganda of terming the BYC as a foreign-sponsored entity will change the ground facts. In fact, such verdicts will make these troubling realities even more prominent. Instead of weakening the BYC’s movement, such counterproductive steps will further increase public anger in Balochistan.

Such verdicts, rather than acting as a deterrent, provoke a generation that consumes social media, thinks outside the traditional social frameworks and carries no tribal baggage. Balochistan’s Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha have grown up in a political environment where they have been directly or indirectly affected by the issue of enforced disappearances. Either their relatives, friends or someone they know has been forcibly disappeared, and this issue has scarred their collective memory. Against this backdrop, the state’s high-handed tactics taken from the old playbook, which pre-dates the advent of social media, are counterproductive. The more the state tries to suppress the issue of enforced disappearances, the more prominent it will become due to the decentralized flow of information through various digital and social media platforms.

Second, when a state has a hammer as the only tool, it tends to see every problem as a nail. Mahrang’s conviction, which is a desperate attempt to criminalize political dissent and rights protests, exposes the state’s narrow security-centric view of Balochistan’s political challenges. By prosecuting rights protests under the anti-terrorism laws, the state is inadvertently blurring the line between peaceful dissent and insurgency. When the BYC gained traction in Balochistan and the masses joined........

© The Diplomat