The Necropolitics in Balochistan: Memories, Emotions, Identity
Mohammad Ali Talpur

In this paper I will try to answer very important questions related to the Baloch struggle and the toll it has taken of lives and the importance those lives have gained, for they sacrificed not for personal benefits but for the Baloch nation. Questions were proposed and posed by Saeed Mengal w/o Shaheed Faisal Mengal.
How do graveyards, the missing, the tortured, the assassinated, and funerals affect and become an overriding factor for the people? How do grief and resulting emotions become motivating factors for mass mobilisation in Balochistan? How do the death squads, the missing, and the mass graves impact the discourse on politics in Balochistan? How does the graveyard of New Kahan, the graveyards of the unknown, become political spaces and symbols of resistance legacy? Why is the state fearful of the dead, their funerals and graveyards? What reactions come from the mothers and relatives and how important are these for the resistance? How did the gender norms see a change due to the state repression and killing sprees? How does the Necropolitics steel the psyche of the people instead of weakening it? In short, how important is Necropolitics in the context of Balochistan?
Before I begin to answer these very important questions, I consider it necessary to repeat a quote from an old piece, which may help understand the answers better. I had then said: “The Baloch history of resisting aggressors form the crux of its culture, and they are brought up in an ethos that equates Freedom with Dignity.” It is an established fact that when a colonised and oppressed Nation starts to resist oppression, exploitation and repression, in short colonisation and all attempts at their erasure by the coloniser, for it is only through erasure that the coloniser can feel safe in occupying and exploiting the land and resources of the colonised, the coloniser adopts a brazenly brutal policy of decimation because it is fearful that its privileges and loot will end unless it initiates a brutal policy of repression to deter opposition to its aim and make things easy for itself.
This is the policy that the coloniser will adopt and pursue when it understands that the colonised will not give up on their rights, resources and land. This has to lead to a conflict between two unequal forces as the coloniser has resources and partners, who also eye the resources, to help and subsist it, while the colonised are weak as they are deprived of even the normal facilities of development by the coloniser. They are disenfranchised, disempowered, deprived of opportunities to gain strength for any strength the colonised secure endangers the coloniser’s rule. This strength can be educational, social, political or economic, and all these are considered as a serious threat by the coloniser. The coloniser starts with the belief that what they seek to capture and exploit is terra nullis for the people there. Their lives, culture, history and everything else associated with their lives is meaningless and a hindrance to the objectives of the coloniser. How the colonised respond to the repression, loot of resources and land and the gradual march towards erasure like the western powers practiced in the Americas, Australia and wherever they thought they would benefit and Israel does today and is doing since 1948 in Palestine, depends on the history, culture and consciousness of the colonised. History and culture give the consciousness to resist when there is an element of love of land and a sense of pride in history and culture of resistance to the aggressor.
Anyone who covets something that belongs to others, be they individuals, groups, nations or countries, the predominant element at work is avarice and greed and this is reinforced by racism and arrogance of power. Those who resist are guided by love of motherland, a sense of self-respect and dignity, plus pride in one’s history and culture. Two diametrically opposing sentiments and interests are at work in this equation. One is bent upon subjugating and looting while the other on resisting and defending their interests. There has to be a clash of interests and objectives, which more often than not takes the shape of a brutal conflict.
There always arises the question as to who initiated the violence. There is the tendency of the mainstream to blame the colonised. This is so because the interests of the media and the colonisers are the same and they support each other to the hilt. Although the colonised never initiate the violence but even if for argument’s sake we were to concede that, don’t you think that exploiting someone else’s resources and trying to control the lives of the colonised is by itself the most vicious form of violence against a people? That ‘violence begets violence’ is axiomatic and so very well established a fact that only the very biased could miss or disregard its importance or the consequences that stem from ignoring it. I say this to understand and explain as to why states disregard it and perpetrate violence against the colonised people. Repression and economic and resource exploitation too are a form of violence, which people who have the care and consciousness of their rights, oppose.
States initiate violence on those who seek to defend their rights and resources in the hope that the colonised and the oppressed will fear the violence unleashed on them and submit and there will be an end to the resistance. This is the prime folly, for a people with a history and legacy of resistance to injustices and exploitation do not submit but respond with defensive violence. States not learning from the initial folly persist with this folly and the initial violence transforms into a perpetual cycle of violence. A huge price in terms of death and destruction is exacted from the colonised but they continue to resist for they understand submitting would not only mean a life of deprivation and indignity, it would end up in their total erasure.
Why don’t States understand? They do not understand because they believe that they have enough military power and support of those politicians and groups who benefit from the endowments of the state. These benefits are never permanent and states keep changing their favourites and even at times punish them as has been often seen. They think by killing, disappearing and jailing people they will be able to subdue them but it doesn’t work out that way because the people keep resisting the state and its beneficiaries.
The attitude of the state here is that of their minion Rao Anwar, the Crime Control Department (CCD) of Punjab established in February 2025, and the Sindh police who think by killing innocent people and petty criminals in fake extrajudicial killings they will rid the country of crimes. However, the resistance of the people for their rights is a different cup of tea. This resistance is not for petty gains like those of petty criminals but for higher goals that are of historic importance to them and their land so they continue to resist. Let it be said that despite the state’s extrajudicial killings by the above mentioned, they are nowhere near controlling crime in the cities.
The mainstream tends to blame the colonised and the oppressed for the violence and they advise and pander to the State logic that this violence would end if the colonised stopped resisting. They give an example of some major incident of violence by the colonised and oppressed as being the reason for the increased and sustained violence by the state.
I will elaborate on this with the example of Gaza and the October 7, 2023 incident when Hamas attacked inside Israel. This incident has been the justification for the destruction of Gaza and genocide of the Palestinians. The world, with a few exceptions, has been complicit in this genocide and shamelessly so. However, though there was no aggression from the Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel has been killing people there, demolishing homes, destroying olive orchards, and setting up new settlements. All those who justify the destruction of Gaza and the genocide there seem blind to the West Bank happenings. States eyeing land and resources don’t really need justification for perpetrating violence against the people but somehow that violence is condoned wholeheartedly while the violence in response to the state violence is condemned.
Although it is the State that is responsible for this perpetual cycle of violence against the people, it is the people opposing that violence who get to be blamed and held responsible. Unless the mainstream understands this basic reality, states will continue to have the impunity to perpetuate senseless violence against the people. Being neutral isn’t a moral position; it is complicity of the first order. Sadly, we live in an era where live-streamed genocide doesn’t get condemned the way a moral world would condemn and put a stop to it. And in the times when there is brutal repression in Balochistan and now even women are being disappeared, not many voices speak up against the travesty of justice being committed there. It becomes all the more necessary and imperative to speak up forcefully against the injustices and exploitation because oppressors cannot be allowed to ride roughshod over the people. The culture of impunity has to be challenged and done away with and that is the responsibility not of the victims of violence but of civil society in particular and society at large in general.
This violence of the coloniser can be only answered by the violence of the colonised, who consider it their duty to defend their resources and their land from being taken over by the coloniser. This resistance to exploitation and land grabbing is answered with brutal force for the coloniser wants to enrich and empower itself at the cost of the colonised. This is how violence begets violence and the perpetual cycle of violence persists.
(To be continued)