Pakistan’s liberal class has failed Dr. Mahrang Baloch |
Over Eight months have passed since Dr. Mahrang Baloch, a young physician turned human rights icon, was arrested on trumped-up charges in Quetta, Balochistan. 257 days since the state threw her into jail under Pakistan’s catch-all arsenal of “anti-terrorism” and “sedition” clauses. And 37 weeks since much of Pakistan’s so-called progressive intelligentsia, which was once vocal and proud of its commitment to dissent, fell conspicuously and unforgivably silent.
The cruelty of this moment is not just in what the state has done to Dr. Mahrang and her comrades in the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC). It is in how predictable the silence of non-Baloch Pakistanis has been, including among the ever-shrinking ranks of “liberals” who still claim to champion democracy. In a country descending, quite visibly, into a military authoritarianism, or so to say an Orwellian farce, even moral outrage has become selective.
This is the joke Pakistan has become: a place where everyone knows the cases against Mahrang and her associates are a sham and yet almost no one outside Balochistan dares to say it aloud.
To understand why the establishment is so determined to crush Dr. Mahrang, it is necessary to recall the arc of her rise. The Baloch Yakjehti Committee was never just another protest collective. Founded in 2018 by Dr. Mahrang along with Sammi Deen Baloch and Beebow Baloch, the BYC emerged as a rare, grassroots Baloch women-led peaceful movement. Its central goal was exactly the issue the Pakistani state has most wanted to keep hidden: the unending human rights violations by its military, especially enforced disappearances and custodial killings.
For decades, Baloch families, mostly women and children, marched in circles demanding to know where their sons, brothers, and fathers are. What the BYC did was to put names, faces, stories, and grieving families at the centre of a national conversation that Pakistan’s military dominated establishment........