Seeing Balochistan Too Quickly |
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On March 17, 2026, Pakistan announced the deployment of 3,000 Federal Constabulary personnel to Balochistan, citing the need to strengthen peace and stability following recent militant operations. The meeting in Quetta also decided to intensify action against baseless propaganda on social media. The response was familiar: more security forces, tighter information control, no political accommodation. It was, in miniature, the pattern that has defined Balochistan’s relationship with the Pakistani state for decades.
By the time the Jaffar Express was hijacked in March 2025, Balochistan had spent most of Pakistan’s history in unresolved conflict, marked by insurgencies never fully ended or addressed. Violence rose and fell as force temporarily displaced grievances. Enforced disappearances, reported for years by families and local journalists, had become a structural feature of governance. This long record produced little accumulated knowledge beyond the province. Balochistan was noticed episodically, then forgotten again, its history flattened into disconnected security incidents. The result was a failure to treat duration itself as evidence.
Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest and least populated province, is a vast, mineral-rich expanse governed less as a constituency than as a perimeter: secured, administered, extracted from, but rarely accommodated. What is new is how briefly Balochistan is allowed to enter national consciousness, usually through violence, before being reduced again to background noise.
It took the hijacking of the Jaffar Express for the world to notice Balochistan. For decades, the province existed in a peculiar limbo: permanently unstable yet strategically inconvenient, violent yet illegible. Its war endured, largely unseen. Endurance, in the modern media economy, rarely qualifies as news.
The hijacking changed that because it violated an unspoken rule of neglect. Trains are the connective tissue of the state. They move soldiers, workers, families; they pass through imagined national space. When violence interrupts that movement, it announces itself beyond the margins. The insurgency crossed an optical threshold.
What followed was not clarity, but compression. In the weeks surrounding the hijacking, violence across Balochistan was suddenly counted with precision: dozens killed in a day, more than a hundred in forty-eight hours, raids spanning Quetta, Panjgur, Harnai, Mastung, and Gwadar. These figures were reported as escalation. In truth, they marked a condensation of violence long dispersed. What years of killing had failed to register now arrived as a burst of legibility, mistaken for novelty.
Nearly a year later, when the Baloch Liberation Army announced Operation Herof, Phase Two in January 2026, the province returned to the news. Herof, a Balochi word for black storm, was a claim of presence: synchronised strikes across districts, prolonged engagements, a deliberate insistence on being seen. Attention would arrive through the blunt punctuation of spectacle.
A long, unresolved continuum
This visibility revealed a long, unresolved continuum. Balochistan has lived through multiple insurgencies since its accession to Pakistan. Each flare-up has been a recurrence, a return to grievances never fully addressed and never entirely silenced. Violence persisted quietly, sustained by memory, repression, and the slow accretion of mistrust.
The disappeared sit at the centre of this failure of knowledge. Their absence is physical and archival. Names circulate without files; photographs exist without records; testimony accumulates without adjudication. Over time, this produces a distortion: what cannot be conclusively verified is treated as marginal, even when structurally central to how the conflict is lived. Disappearance becomes not merely a tactic of repression, but a mechanism that thins knowledge itself, making the conflict harder to see, harder to describe, and easier to misunderstand when it finally forces attention.
The scale of disappearance, though documented, remains inconvenient to acknowledge. Conservative tallies compiled by Pakistani human-rights groups, often drawing on court petitions and family testimony rather than militant claims, run into several thousands since the early 2000s. They represent men taken once, usually without warrant; some later returned as bodies bearing marks of torture, many never returned. The uncertainty surrounding exact numbers has itself become a shield, allowing absence to be treated as allegation rather than structure.
Disappearances are one register of coercion. They exist alongside a vocabulary of encounters, denials, and stalled inquiries that blur the line between counterinsurgency and punishment. Repetition endures, violence normalised through routine.
Attention arrives refracted, through questions of foreign investment, economic corridors, and regional security. The language shifts quickly from grievance to geopolitics. Balochistan becomes visible as terrain where larger powers might lose control, rather than as a place where people have been disappearing for years.
That refraction is inseparable from material reality. Balochistan is endowed with gas fields, mineral wealth, and a strategic coastline, yet remains among Pakistan’s poorest provinces. This imbalance has hardened over decades. Ports are secured, roads extended, minerals extracted, while villages are raided and movement is monitored. Development appears as another layer of control. Gwadar is simultaneously port, prison, and provocation.
Conflicts that simmer without resolution are often treated as administrative failures rather than political ones. The dead are entered as numbers, their demands flattened into briefings. Over time, absence itself becomes normalised. When families search for the disappeared year after year, their persistence is read as tragedy, not indictment. When violence repeats without escalation, it is misread as stasis, an ugly stability that requires neither attention nor imagination.
The hijacking shattered that illusion of containment. Attention arrived suddenly, impatiently, hungry for explanation beyond the available evidence. The desire to know quickly, because the headlines were urgent, began to outrun the discipline required to know responsibly.
There is a familiar rhythm when long-ignored conflicts abruptly command attention. An ecosystem of instant expertise emerges alongside the headlines, confident voices armed with titles and affiliations, speaking with authority unearned by proximity or time. Certainty circulates faster than evidence; interpretation outruns observation. What takes years to understand is explained in days, and a cottage industry forms around compression itself.
Balochistan’s insurgency has always sat awkwardly within standard categories of violence. Above all, it is an insurgency that has survived less through escalation than through persistence: outlasting repression, negotiation, co-option, and silence. Periods of relative quiet are taken as proof of defeat; renewed violence is framed as resurgence. Neither captures the underlying reality. The conflict has never been conclusively resolved, only intermittently suppressed. What appears as dormancy is often only latency.
The best work on such conflicts begins in humility. It treats uncertainty as a condition to be managed, not eliminated, fragmentation as a feature rather than a flaw. It resists the urge to retrofit violence into familiar organisational models and recognises that state practice – prolonged coercion, denial, and militarisation – shapes insurgent behavior as much as ideology does. In places like Balochistan, where access is limited and documentation uneven, restraint is not caution; it is rigour.
Sealing the story before it becomes uncomfortable
Much of what now passes for analysis of Balochistan struggles with this standard. The confidence is loud; the file beneath it is thin. Accusations of foreign sponsorship are repeated with ritual certainty, even as proof remains elusive. The insistence on identifying an external hand often functions as narrative closure, sealing the story before it becomes uncomfortable. Instead, the work requires patience, historical memory, and a willingness to sit with incomplete information.
Journalists in Balochistan describe a different reality. When asked about foreign involvement, many answer with weary simplicity: the problem is neither mysterious nor new. Those who report from inside the province speak of an unaccommodating state, a security apparatus that substitutes coercion for politics. They treat us like a colony, meaning not a metaphor but a method: extraction without consent, administration without accountability, development measured in corridors and contracts rather than in schools, clinics, and rights. In that frame, extrajudicial killings and disappearances are a governing grammar, one that shapes what can be said, what cannot be proved, and what families learn to fear as normal.
If Balochistan was once invisible, it is now saturated. Images of violence, funerals, wounded bodies circulate widely. But abundance has its own way of falsifying. Pro-state narratives frame violence as terrorism; counter-narratives portray a people under siege. Each side curates its own archive, reinforcing conviction rather than challenging it.
For those watching from elsewhere, the effect is less illumination than vertigo. Proximity is simulated without context. Suffering is visible, but causality remains opaque. The danger is compression: complex histories flattened into shareable moments. The flood of images creates a sense of knowing, but visual saturation does not equal comprehension.
One casualty of this accelerated attention is restraint. Faced with an unfamiliar conflict, analysts reach instinctively for comparison. The appearance of female fighters in recent Baloch militant attacks has triggered immediate searches for resemblance elsewhere. To move too quickly from isolated acts to established patterns is to mistake appearance for structure. The Tamil Tigers and Kurdish movements offer dense archives. But to map conclusions from those settings onto a conflict still struggling to be seen risks mistaking analytical familiarity for insight. Comparison must follow understanding, not stand in for it.
Balochistan’s suffering also circulates regionally, often in distorted form. For sections of India’s jingoistic commentariat, it becomes a convenient exhibit in a larger indictment of Pakistan. Such appropriation mirrors what it claims to condemn: the reduction of lived grievance into rhetorical asset, the conversion of pain into position-taking.
The deeper risk is that Balochistan will be misunderstood quickly, at precisely the moment when patience matters most. Visibility creates urgency; urgency breeds confidence; confidence hardens into narrative. Once set, those narratives are difficult to dislodge.
The long wait of families of those who disappeared or died
The Jaffar Express made it impossible, at last, to look away. What matters now is less the quantity of attention than the way it is exercised: slowly, carefully, and with a willingness to remain uncertain.
Beneath the headlines, thousands of families still search for the disappeared and thousands more live with deaths never officially acknowledged. These figures accumulate in silence, year after year, untouched by the brief mechanics of attention. Premature comprehension can be its own form of violence: closure built on thin files and loud images. In places like Balochistan, being seen too quickly carries its own cost.
The train has long since departed Quetta station, its passengers dispersed, its wreckage cleared. But the families still gather at courthouses with photographs of the disappeared, still wait for names that may never be called. That patient, unspectacular persistence – ignored before the hijacking, likely to be ignored again – remains the more enduring story.
Shyam Tekwani is a professor and columnist specialising in security affairs. Views expressed in this article are those of the author.