Volume 8, No. 10, October 2026
Editor: Rashed Rahman
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Conflicts mean death and destruction for the colonised because the coloniser’s greed and racism is insatiable and knows no limits or boundaries. Moreover, in their arrogance the colonisers believe that with force they will be able to put an end to the people’s resistance to their loot. They think that there is a limit to the price that people will be ready to pay for defending their Motherland and their rights. This is where they make their fatal mistake by underestimating the will and determination of the people. The Baloch have resisted for the past 78 years despite paying a terrible price in terms of lives and of the related consequences of lost opportunities and lost generations and the accompanying traumas and tragedies that death and destruction conflicts bring in their wake.
Death is the consequence of conflicts and it is viewed with a different perspective by the opposing sides. The coloniser thinks that a troublemaker is eliminated while the colonised know it is the price they have to pay for a life of freedom and dignity. Death for the colonised assumes a sacred dignified place because they know that the path they tread for the defence of their sacred land, it is this price that will be exacted from them if they desire a dignified life and a mastery of their resources.
The Baloch people have resisted all sorts of depredations, physical, cultural, social, political, economic at the hands of Pakistan since March 27, 1948 when the Khan of Kalat, Mir Ahmad Yar Khan was forced to sign the Instrument of Accession. From that time onward the Baloch have relentlessly struggled for regaining not only their usurped freedom but also have tried to stop the theft of their resources, coasts, sea and land. This has come at a cost that has kept on mounting increasingly with increased greed and covetousness of the Pakistani state and its attempts to sustain itself by pawning off the Baloch resources.
There have been numerous insurgencies to thwart the loot and designs aimed at erasure of the Baloch by demographic changes, giving a free hand to religious outfits to instil religious fundamentalism for only the Pakistan Studies teaching in schools and colleges is not diverting the Baloch minds towards the interpretation of a nation being based on religion and accepting the Pakistani version of nationalism and is not being successful in erasing the millennials old culture and history that the Baloch are proud of. Insurgencies are conflicts and conflicts mean loss of life.
Because this loss of lives has been for noble goals, they have come to symbolise defiance and dedication to the motherland. These deaths have garnered an aura that transcends sorrow or anguish and is accorded the respect it deserves as it is not thought to have been in vain but for a noble purpose. Death among the colonised epitomises something very different from that of the colonisers, although they label their dead as martyrs and the colonised as ‘terrorists’ and other derogatory terms. The colonised see their dead as saviours and redeemers who deserve not only praise with words but deeds that would show respect more eloquently. These deaths as I have said above are no ordinary deaths; these deaths illuminate the paths of freedom and resistance.
There is a sad aspect that does need urgent attention. There is no consolidated and authentic record of all those who have lost their lives in the 78 years of resistance. Someone should take the responsibility and start this work. It is certainly not a single person’s task or capability to do this because Balochistan is vast and the period of resistance very long. A team of dedicated persons from different areas of Balochistan could do it.
There is a very recent, important and significant example of how important Necropolitics is in the context of the Baloch resistance to oppression and the struggle for decolonisation.
In March 2025, Mahrang Baloch and others were protesting the burials of unidentified persons and extra-judicial killings of those who may have been in State custody before that. A brutal, sustained and severe crackdown was unleashed on them in Balochistan and elsewhere. Some unidentified bodies were brought to the morgue of Civil Hospital in Quetta on March 19, 2025. The relatives of missing persons suspected their loved ones might be among them. So Saeeda Mengal, wife of Shaheed Faisal Mengal, and her sister, whose cousin and nephew are missing, went there and demanded to see the bodies but were denied access. They went there the second day too but were not only refused, all present there were baton-charged and Saeeda and her sister were injured and arrested. This brutality on relatives of the missing resulted in deep resentment among the people.
In the evening of March 21, some activists went and took away a few bodies and started a sit-in, which was also attended by Mahrang. Before that, during the day, the police had fired on a rally and some participants were injured and one boy had been killed. His body was also there among others at the sit-in.
Before dawn there was a brutal assault on the sit-in and Mahrang Baloch, her youngest sister and many others were abducted forcibly and taken away to an unknown place and it was only after the passage of 24 hours that Mahrang’s sister was released as she was a minor. The bodies too had been taken away. It was later in the day that the whereabouts of Mahrang being in jail were known. A fresh reign of terror has been unleashed on the Baloch since then, not that they were being molly-coddled before.
Even the right to know the identity of killed persons prompts the State to excessive use of force for there is a lot that it wants to sweep under the carpet by not allowing the relatives the right to know if among those killed a relative’s body may be there. This continued denial plus the brute use of force doesn’t deter the people from their quest to know about their loved ones and these compounded injustices create even more resentment. Frustrated with the absence of the legal and normal means of justice, many young men and now increasingly women too, resort to desperate measures. It is the State that is to be blamed for the resulting people’s violence.
The State’s response to the atrocities and injustices it commits is not aimed at providing justice because it results in more and more blatant brutality and flagrant injustices. The State kills without remorse and when people demand answers they are targeted with brutal assaults and incarcerations. Mahrang Baloch, Beebow Baloch, Gulzadi Baloch, Bebarg Baloch and Sibghatullah Shahjee have been kept in jail since March 2025 under one draconian law or the other. They think keeping people in jail would break their spirit or dishearten the Baloch Nation.They are mistaken for the Baloch have seen a lot of their dear ones killed and maimed and have also suffered injustices across the physical, political, economic and social spectrum for the last 78 years. However, they have continued to resist despite the losses suffered.
As the sacrifices of the past are of importance not only for today but for the coming times as well, so when those who have sacrificed their lives and are laid to rest, the place, i.e. the graveyards, become equally important a symbol and conveyors of a message of defiance associated with the love for the land and the people. We can take as an example “Chashma Qabaristan” in Kalat at a distance of about two kilometers from the Kalat Bazar where Babu Nauroz Khan Zarakzai and the seven martyrs of July 15, 1960, who were hanged in Hyderabad and Sukkur Jails, are buried. This is a place for homage for many Baloch and their sympathisers who hold this place in deepest esteem and honour those buried there. Graveyards too become symbols of defiance and enter into the glorious annals of history of resistance.
It should be mentioned that the four Shaheeds martyred at Hyderabad Jail, namely, Shaheed Wali Mohammad Zarakzai, Shaheed Bhawal Khan Musiyani, Shaheed Masti Khan Musiyani and Shaheed Jam Jamal Khan Zehri, their bodies were transported to Balochistan under arrangement made by my paternal uncle Mir Rasool Bakhsh Talpur. Moreover, when Nawab Nauroz Khan died on December 25, 1965 in Civil Hospital Hyderabad, his body was received by Mir Rafique Ahmed Talpur, son of Mir Rasool Bakhsh Talpur, and transported under instructions of Mir Rasool Bakhsh Talpur to Kalat.
The graveyard of Shaheeds and the grave of Nawab Khair Bakhsh Khan Marri at New Kahan on the outskirts of Quetta is very significant and has a very important place in the Baloch resistance history for many important reasons which show the attitude of the Baloch people to their leaders and martyrs and the fear that the dead create and instil in the minds and hearts of the State.
When the Baloch mostly from Marri tribe who were living in exile in Afghanistan since 1975 due to the 1973-1977 insurgency returned after the takeover of Kabul by the Mujahideen in 1992, they made their homes on the outskirts of Quetta and this place came to be called “New Kahan” after the “Kahan” town in Marri area, which was the traditional centre of the Marri Sardars.
The confrontation between the Baloch and the State was for some time dormant but not dead. The State continued provocative actions with the arrest of Nawab Khair Bakhsh on false charges of killing Balochistan High Court’s Justice Mohammad Nawaz Marri in the year 2000. Under Musharraf’s military rule, the dormant confrontation became active again and slowly the repression unleashed against the Baloch prompted resistance and in the resulting conflict there were casualties on the Baloch side as well and the martyrs were buried there near New Kahan.
As deaths mounted the place came to be named as the “Shuhada Qabaristan” (graveyard of Martyrs). This prompted the State to try and deter people from frequenting it. They once desecrated the graves by upturning the tombstones but the people continued to bring their Shaheeds there. It had become a symbol of defiance and paradoxically these deaths instead of demoralising people, inspired hope and the graveyard became a place worthy of their respect.
When Nawab Khair Baksh Marri died on June 10, 2014 in Karachi and his body was brought to Quetta, the government had plans to bury him in Kahan in the Marri area because it would be inaccessible to a vast majority of people who respected him and his ideology of defiance and his dream of an independent Balochistan. The people wanted him to be buried in the “Shuhada Qabaristan” and it was the Baloch women present there that day who took the initiative and picked up his coffin and marched for New Kahan. The authorities knew if they try to stop the Baloch women who were now joined by a multitude of people, they would have to face a lot of trouble for at that time violence against women had not become official policy as it is today.
The Baloch women defied the son of Nawab Sahib and the authorities who were bent upon having Nawab Sahib buried in ancestral Kahan to keep him away from public reach and the public eye. The Baloch gathered there that day fully understood the importance of the graves and the significance that the graveyards hold in history and legacy of resistance. Such graveyards give dignity and respect to the dead and become the symbols of defiance and resistance to the people who though their loved ones are not buried there but feel spiritually and historically associated with these because these graveyards in their silence narrate the glorious history of resistance and defiance which words sometimes fail to express.
The dead, the graves and the graveyards have an aura, character and mystique that has a profound influence on the lives, characters and actions of the surviving. These become beacons that illuminate the paths of resistance but that does not in any way mean that there is worship of the dead; it is just respect, which they deserve and which is accorded.
(To be continued)