THIS is an emotional topic but let’s try to keep the debate dignified and inclusive. That’s how Sabeen Mahmud introduced the panel discussion on Balochistan on April 24 at T2F in Karachi. Right after leaving that event, Sabeen was gunned down brutally in her car by unidentified gunmen.

We will never know for certain who killed Sabeen or why. We do know, however, that public discussion on any issue concerning Balochistan is becoming increasingly difficult. There is an official state-sanctioned narrative on Balochistan which paints the people of that province as backward, disloyal to the Pakistani nation-state, and responsible for their own region’s underdevelopment. And there are a few isolated voices that dare to question that narrative, to point out the responsibility of state actors in bringing about the conditions under which a brutal counter-insurgency is currently being waged. The Pakistani establishment has little tolerance for those wanting to speak these inconvenient truths, and the Pakistani public and mainstream media show little interest in hearing them.

A public space like T2F is precious because it offers a rare platform for these voices of dissent to have their say. The headliner for this ‘Unsilencing Balochistan (Take 2)’ event was Mama Qadeer, the man vilified as being a terrorist and “anti-state” threat who was recently banned from travelling outside the country. The soft-spoken Qadeer combined history lesson and personal testimony in his prepared talk, cataloguing a staggering record of injustices and abuses against the Baloch.

The mutual distrust and use of militarised force goes back to the 1948 annexation of Balochistan by Pakistan, and the policies adopted by the centre have exploited the natural resources of the province while systematically denying its inhabitants any meaningful representation. Qadeer touched upon the early decades of this unequal relationship and the series of military operations launched against Baloch nationalist and separatist leaders. The latest phase of this intensifying state crackdown has produced the phenomenon of ‘missing persons’, the immediate cause of his own activism.

A public space like T2F offers a rare platform for voices of dissent.
State paramilitary and intelligence agencies routinely pick up Baloch men and boys, accused of being armed militants but who are usually just civilians or political activists, and they disappear without a trace. It is their relatives who, finding no answers or redress from any court or government agency, banded together to form the Voice of Baloch Missing Persons, the organisation that Mama Qadeer leads.

He claims that the number of those missing is upward of 21,000. The tortured, mutilated bodies of some of these men show up years later, an increasing trend that has by now produced reportedly 6,000 “killed and dumped” bodies. He spoke quietly of the horror of having his own son, Jalil Reki, meet the same fate — picked up in front of his house by security agencies in 2009 and his body found in 2011.

In 2013, Qadeer led a group of relatives of Baloch missing persons as they walked on foot from Quetta to Karachi and then onwards to Islamabad, in a desperate bid to attract some attention to their cause. His fellow marchers and panelists at T2F, Farzana Majeed and Mir Muhammad Ali Talpur, added to his account of that historic long march. They are resigned to facing incessant questions about the foreign funding their group allegedly receives, and talk about their modest budget supported by members’ meagre donations as well as the hardships and acts of generosity they encountered during their march.

What exactly was the threatening, potentially seditious content of this discussion then? Per*haps it was Mama Qadeer’s comparison between supposedly pat*riotic military dictators who routinely flout the Constitution and the Baloch who are labelled anti-Pakistan simply for demanding their democratic rights. Or mention of the mass graves full of unidentified bodies that have been discovered in Khuzdar and elsewhere, coupled with the suggestion that it is some of those missing Baloch bodies that turn up on the streets of Karachi with increasing frequency. It might have been Farzana’s plea to international human rights agencies and the UN to take up their cause because no one in Pakistan is willing to provide them the due process they demand.

Maybe it was Talpur’s disquieting remarks about the depth of disillusionment and alienation felt by the young generation of Baloch who see separation from the federation as the only solution. It could have been his comments about the distinct ethnic identity of the Baloch nation that pre-dates an artificially created religious nationalism, or his reminder that the Pakistani state has never shown any reciprocal interest in keeping Balochistan as an equal member of the federation.

Until we have a chance to hear marginalised views, engage with ideas and their critics, and collectively figure out what counts as our national interest, we will never know.

Dangerous ideas