When Nawabzada Lashkari Raisani stood outside the Balochistan High Court this week and called the Mines and Minerals Act a "law of plunder," he was making a claim that deserves to be taken seriously. Balochistan's resources have been extracted for decades without dignity or justice for the people who live above them.

His High Court petition is a legitimate challenge to legislation that bypasses provincial rights. But the details that emerged from that same hearing tell a more complicated story. The chief minister's executive order supposedly halting the Act's implementation exists, it seems, only on someone's mobile phone — not on a court record, not shared with the public.

Raisani's counsel noted dryly that the government appeared to be "running the province through mobile phones." Meanwhile, Raisani's own letter to the Mines and Minerals director requesting basic licence details has gone unanswered. Miners in Duki still die in unsupported coal pits, without good wages, pensions or legal protection. Sovereignty is invoked loudly. The people it claims to protect remain in the dark.

This pattern is not unique to Balochistan. Rights claimed in public, power exercised in private — and when rights are claimed at all, they shelter a coterie of powerful elites while millions of poor people's claims go unattended.

The pattern has found its most dangerous expression this week in the Strait of Hormuz, where a five-week conflict following US and Israeli strikes on Iran has left the waterway largely closed, oil prices surging, and humanitarian supply chains to Gaza, Sudan and the Congo severed. On Tuesday, the United States Ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, condemned Russian and Chinese vetoes of a resolution to protect commercial shipping, calling Iran's closure of the strait an act that was "holding the global economy at gunpoint."

The language was striking. So was what followed. Within the same news cycle, President Trump announced he had reached an agreement with Iran to charge one million dollars per ship crossing Hormuz. The country holding the world at gunpoint would now collect the rent. Washington would take a cut.

If Hormuz becomes a permanent toll zone administered by a bilateral deal rather than international law, the precedent travels

If Hormuz becomes a permanent toll zone administered by a bilateral deal rather than international law, the precedent travels

The contradiction is not incidental. It is the point. Waltz invoked Congo, Sudan and Gaza from the Security Council podium — framing Hormuz as a humanitarian crisis — while his president was negotiating a toll arrangement with the regime allegedly responsible for that crisis. China and Russia vetoed even a watered-down resolution that contained no authorisation of force, only encouragement for states to coordinate defensive efforts.

Iran's ambassador praised the vetoes as preventing the Council from being "misused to legitimise aggression." Every party arrived with a sovereignty argument. None of them came for the ships.

What this arrangement reveals is who pays when great powers perform sovereignty: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar were not parties to the announcement — yet their exports and imports pass through the same strait.

Their import supply chains depend on it. They are now subject to a charge levied by two powers, one that closed the waterway, one that helped strike the country that closed it, neither of whom asked their permission. The toll booth metaphor, which might have seemed rhetorical, turns out to be literal.

History has been here before. In 1956, Egypt's nationalisation of the Suez Canal triggered a military intervention by Britain, France and Israel, proving that strategic waterways are never neutral when sovereignty collides with external interests. The crisis was resolved not by the intervening powers but by American and Soviet pressure, a reminder that chokepoints are stabilised by politics, not force.

If Hormuz becomes a permanent toll zone administered by a bilateral deal rather than international law, the precedent travels. Malacca, Bab el-Mandeb, and the Bosphorus each is a candidate for the same logic.

The lesson connecting Quetta's courtroom to the Security Council chamber is not that sovereignty is wrong. It is that sovereignty without accountability is indistinguishable from plunder. Raisani is right that Balochistan's resources belong to its people, but those people are still waiting for an executive order that exists only on a mobile phone, still waiting for a response to a letter about mining licences, still dying in coal pits that no elite nationalist rhetoric has made safer.

Iran is not wrong that external powers have long used international law selectively, but that observation does not explain why a toll on a shared waterway serves anyone in the region except the two parties splitting the proceeds.

Sovereignty invoked to protect people is a principle. Sovereignty invoked to extract rent from them is a racket. This week, in a Quetta courtroom and a New York chamber, both were on display — and the people who paid the price were, as usual, the ones whose names were never in the room.

© The Friday Times