Celebrating Baloch Culture Amid Rights Challenges – OpEd |
Baloch Culture Day on 2 March is a festival of colour and poetry that now doubles as an indictment of Pakistan’s security state. Even as Islamabad projects images of men in embroidered turbans and women in mirror work dresses, families in Balochistan mark the day by holding photographs of the disappeared instead of dholaks and flags.
A day of celebration and mourning
Baloch Culture Day, observed each year on 2 March across Balochistan, in other Pakistani cities and in the wider diaspora, is meant to showcase Baloch language, music, dress and history. Its contemporary form emerged around 2010, when calls for marking a dedicated culture day gained traction through Balochi media platforms. That same year, violence surrounding student activities in Khuzdar left two Baloch students dead and several others injured, according to contemporary reporting. Since then, the day has become both an assertion of identity and a reminder that this identity is under siege in a federal structure that marginalises the province even as it exploits its resources and strategic location.
State-sponsored pageantry versus lived reality
Officially, Pakistan touts Baloch Culture Day as proof of “national integration” and harmony, with military run institutions organising dress competitions, walks and musical evenings that frame Baloch culture as a decorative subset of a benevolent Pakistani whole. Yet for many families, the day is now shrouded in grief because loved ones have been abducted by Pakistan’s security agencies and never returned. This dissonance of a state that organises cultural pageants while denying its own citizens the right to life, liberty and dissent turns the celebration into a stark moral question rather than a simple festival.
Enforced disappearances: the crime that defines Balochistan
Amnesty International describes enforced disappearances as a “grim reality” in Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan, where activists, students and political dissidents have been systematically targeted. Citing official figures, Amnesty notes that Pakistan’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances has recorded at least 10,078 cases of enforced disappearance since 2011, including 2,752 from Balochistan alone. Human Rights Watch has likewise noted that since March 2011, 8,463 complaints of enforced disappearances had been received by the Commission, with rights groups and families insisting the true numbers are higher. Even earlier, Human Rights Watch documented disappearances in Balochistan and traced responsibility to security agencies such as the Frontier Corps and intelligence services in a report titled “We Can Torture, Kill, or Keep You for Years.”
A pattern of killings, torture and collective punishment
The story does not end with people vanishing into secret detention. Amnesty International has warned that victims of disappearances face a high risk of torture and death, and that despite hundreds and possibly thousands of cases, perpetrators have rarely been held accountable. Baloch human rights groups such as Paank, the rights wing of the Baloch National Movement, recorded 785 enforced disappearances, 121 extrajudicial killings and 261 torture survivors in just the first six months of 2025, accusing the Pakistan Army, Frontier Corps and intelligence agencies of running a coordinated campaign of repression. The Baloch Yakjehti Committee has also reported cases in 2025 in which women, including relatives of activists, were allegedly abducted, describing the pattern as collective family wide punishment.
Crackdown on peaceful protest and political expression
When Baloch families marched approximately 1,800 kilometres from Turbat to Islamabad in late 2023 to demand the return of their missing relatives, they were met in the capital with arrests, detentions and police action. Amnesty International and Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission condemned the crackdown on these peaceful protesters and reiterated concerns that enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings are being used to silence Baloch dissent. United Nations human rights experts have likewise criticised the “unrelenting use of enforced disappearances” in Balochistan and raised concerns about the conflation of minority rights advocacy and public demonstrations with terrorism, as well as repeated internet shutdowns that restrict freedom of expression and association.
International scrutiny is growing, but not enough
Recent UN press statements have called for independent and effective mechanisms to search for the disappeared, criminalisation of enforced disappearance in domestic law, accountability for torture and extrajudicial killings, and the release of detained Baloch human rights defenders. The UN Human Rights Committee’s 2024 concluding observations similarly urged Pakistan to legislate comprehensively against enforced disappearances, curb the use of military courts in civilian cases, limit internet shutdowns and ensure defamation and electronic crimes laws are not misused to silence dissent. Despite this scrutiny, allegations of abductions, killings and intimidation persist.
Against this backdrop, Baloch Culture Day acquires a new political charge: every embroidered shawl and folk song becomes an act of defiance against a state that many Baloch families accuse of denying them justice and voice. For those concerned with constitutionalism and human dignity in Balochistan, standing with families demanding the return of their loved ones, transparent investigations and meaningful accountability is not interference, but a call for adherence to legal and human rights standards that Pakistan has itself pledged to uphold.