Abdul Basit Alvi
Mahrang Baloch’s article in The Guardian is a deliberate manipulation aimed at generating sympathy for a cause that has caused death, misery, and underdevelopment in Balochistan. She writes of extreme isolation, mental and physical decline, and emotional suffering, highlighting resilience through books, routines, and political conviction. Yet her ability to write and publish such an article from a Pakistani jail contradicts claims of solitary confinement, which by definition denies prisoners meaningful access to communication, writing materials, or platforms for political expression. Pakistani law forbids prisoners from engaging in political activities, making her access to international publication a sign of privilege rather than repression. Observers in Balochistan recognize that her detention was comfortable, exposing a fundamental inconsistency in her account, and her depiction of suffering is undermined by the liberties she enjoyed while claiming to be a victim of extreme isolation.
Her writings attempt to present her imprisonment as emblematic of a struggle against human rights abuses, enforced disappearances, and state oppression, asserting that her movement is entirely peaceful. This collapses under scrutiny, as she is aligned with the Baloch Liberation Army, a proscribed terrorist organization responsible for bombings, ambushes, and attacks on civilians and development projects. By failing to condemn these attacks and labeling the perpetrators as freedom fighters, she provides moral cover for terrorism, disregarding the rights of ordinary civilians, commuters, and children. Incidents of alleged enforced disappearances often involved armed insurgents or convicts, and the Pakistani state has the right and duty to detain and prosecute threats to national security. The refusal to condemn attacks like the Jaffer Express massacre, while criticizing the state, effectively encourages further violence. Meanwhile, counterterrorism efforts by Pakistan’s law enforcement have improved security, reopened schools, and restored markets, providing ordinary citizens safety and stability that her account ignores, while the sacrifices of soldiers and police defending civilians go unmentioned, exposing her portrayal of Balochistan as a fantasy of peaceful repression rather than the reality of ongoing conflict and gradual improvement.
The people of Balochistan are not the passive, manipulated masses that Mahrang Baloch’s article suggests. They are thinking, discerning citizens who have watched the trajectory of their province with their own eyes. And increasingly, they are drawing their own conclusions, conclusions that run directly counter to the narrative she is trying to sell. Many sensible Baloch are beginning to think that if solitary confinement of the kind Mahrang Baloch claims to have endured is what it takes to bring peace, then perhaps such measures are not as bad as the foreign human rights industry makes them out to be. This is not a celebration of torture; it is a recognition of a simple trade-off. A society that tolerates a certain level of militant violence is a society that will never develop, never attract investment, and never provide its children with a future. A society that firmly and consistently applies its laws to those who would destroy it from within is a society that can eventually move past violence and into prosperity. The people of Balochistan have seen the alternative to state action. They have lived through the years when the insurgency was at its peak, and they have no desire to return to those dark days. They understand that the rights of the many cannot be held hostage by the grievances of the few, and that a so-called activist who refuses to condemn the murder of civilians is not an activist at all but an accessory after the fact. This growing sentiment of solidarity with Pakistan and its armed forces is not the result of coercion or propaganda. It is the organic result of lived experience. When a father sees his daughter able to attend university without fear of a bomb blast, he credits the security forces. When a businessman sees a new road being built that connects his town to the national grid, he credits the federal government. When a tribal elder sees that the young men of his community are no longer being lured into militancy by foreign-funded propaganda, he credits the collective efforts of a nation that has refused to give up on its most troubled province.
The article by Mahrang Baloch in The Guardian, for all its literary flourishes and emotional appeals, is destined to fail in its primary objective. It cannot and will not sow the seeds of division and hate in Pakistan in general or in Balochistan specifically, because the ground upon which those seeds would need to fall is no longer fertile. The people have seen too much, endured too much, and learned too much to be misled by a narrative that collapses under the slightest scrutiny. They know that writing an article from jail is not evidence of oppression but evidence of privilege. They know that refusing to condemn terrorism is not a sign of moral consistency but a sign of moral bankruptcy. They know that the improvement in their daily lives is not an illusion but a hard-won achievement bought with the blood of Pakistani soldiers and the perseverance of Pakistani civilians. Mahrang Baloch may have succeeded in gaining a platform in the Western media, where ignorance of Balochistan’s complexities is deep and the appetite for anti-state narratives is insatiable. But she has not succeeded in convincing the people she claims to speak for. They have rejected her lies, they have rejected her sympathizers, and they have chosen instead the difficult, slow, and often imperfect path of national solidarity, economic development, and a future in which Baloch children can dream not of guns and martyrdom, but of schools, careers, and a peaceful life within the embrace of a united Pakistan. The article is a lie, a failed attempt, and a historical footnote. The resilience of Balochistan and its people, and their unbreakable bond with the rest of Pakistan, is the only truth that will endure.
