Imprisoned for life: Mahrang Baloch’s struggle calls for a stronger global conscience

Imagine yourself at sixteen. And one day your father is taken away by unknown people; that too on his way to the hospital. You protest, to no avail. A few years later, he is taken away again, only to be found dead in an abandoned hospital, bearing clear marks of torture. That’s the abbreviated story of Mahrang Baloch, a 33-year-old doctor turned activist, arrested in March 2025 and remaining thereafter in prison. She has now been sentenced by an Anti-Terrorism Court in Quetta to lifetime imprisonment. That court is the wrong one. Mahrang has never been associated with terrorism in her life, only subjected to its state version.

The case is simple. The court sentenced Mahrang and Sibghatullah Shahji to life imprisonment in connection with the death of a Frontier Corps (FC) official during stone-pelting at a protest held in Gwadar in 2024. That was “Baloch Raaji Muchi", a massive show of strength, which really brought Mahrang into the forefront as a leader. Many who participated have been similarly punished, but no criminal case has been registered over the deaths of three Baloch protesters during the same event. Since then, the Baloch movement has only gathered strength, with other political parties forced to show a measure of support for them or risk becoming irrelevant.

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Mahrang, the Fighter

Mahrang is from an influential political family and a doctor from Bolan Medical College. Her father was Abdul Ghaffar Langove, associated with the Balochistan National Party and a strong defender of the rights of the Baloch himself. That was clearly a bad move. It was not just that he got picked up, but his son, Nasir Baloch, was also picked up in 2017, which led to year-long protests by his sisters, to be eventually released a year later. As more young people were picked in ‘enforced disappearances’—Balochistan has evolved unique terminologies for its agony—formal groups like the Bramsh Yakjehti Committee were formed, first after the outrage following the killing of a young woman, Malik Naz, in 2020, and her four-year-old child. It was at first thought to be a robbery attempt. But one of the culprits was caught, and it turned out to be an ISI operation by armed goons. And that’s how the ISI operates. The hashtag #JusticeforBrahmsh soon spread, and the whole movement eventually turned into the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), which has been at the heart of protests since then.

Balochistan’s Past Catches Up

That's, of course, in recent years. The Baloch have been at war with the Pakistani state since 1947, when the Khan of Kalat declared independence, ironically with Mohammad Ali Jinnah as legal counsel, and retained that for more than 200 days, until the state was literally starved into acceding to Pakistan. Distrust of Pakistan has early origins, with the ‘father’ of the country proving to be a turncoat to the Baloch. In addition, the Baloch are of an entirely different ethnicity and speak Brahui, a Dravidian language that has been preserved for millennia. Even more notably, the Hindu Sewa Dynasty ruled over portions of Balochistan, particularly in the region of Kalat. The name of the Sibi Division, created from Quetta and Kalat Divisions in 1974, is derived from Rani Sewi, a queen of the Sewa dynasty.

In later years, the early Sardars ruled over large portions of Iran and Afghanistan, eventually, during the British era, emerging as four princely states: Makran, Kharan, Las Bela, and Kalat. What this history means for all practical purposes is that the Baloch are present across the borders into Iran and Afghanistan even today and that they tend to divide themselves according to those early tribal identities and loyalty to their Sardar heads. All that has now changed. The Baloch movement is now firmly in the hands of students and former student leaders and concentrated in urban areas. The insurgent arm, the Baloch Liberation Army, pretty much operates across the state, moving like ghosts across the deserts and ravines, and is received with open arms by locals as heroes. Add to all that that Balochistan is Pakistan’s most resource-rich state, and that its education, health, and other indices are the lowest in the country, and you get the idea.

The Simple Cause

Not that all Baloch are separatists. In fact, in early iterations of the insurgency, they had only asked for greater autonomy and rights. In fact, there is no record of Mahrang calling for independence, nor did prominent leaders like Mama Qadeer specifically launch a separatist movement. The main demands of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) have been outlined by Sami Deen Baloch—a committee member of the BYC whose father was also abducted in 2009 and disappeared—in a hearing in the Sam Lantos Committee in the US Congress. It is essentially simple in the extreme. The BYC wants rule of law. That means an end to the lifting and killing of Baloch youth, some 1200 of whom have gone missing in 2025 alone. They also want a say in the management of their immense resources, including the largest gas reserves, copper, gold, and now apparently other critical minerals, which are to be mined by US companies. Till now it was just the Chinese who mined precious metals and monopolised fishing off Gwadar, a project that has left hundreds of fishermen without a livelihood. So when Mahrang calls for a march, almost every section of society responds. And now she has been declared imprisoned for life. It is almost as if the Pakistani state is prepared to let go of Balochistan for good.

Why does all this matter for the international community? It is because that community, in recent years, has hardly been known for taking a moral stance on anything. Wars have killed thousands in Iran, Lebanon, and Ukraine, including young children, sometimes deliberately targeted. More than 17 million have been displaced, including 3 million internally displaced in Iran alone. It is time to bring back a degree of morality into the international discourse. Fighting for Mahrang is a fight for all those men, women, and children whose lives have been destroyed by avenging states, in this case their own military. The Pakistani state epitomises the disregard for human life and even minimal rule of law. True, much of the world is also guilty of excesses, but few follow targeted killing and looting as a principle of state policy. Stand up for Mahrang and, in that process, grow a collective conscience. That would probably be the best medicine for their own mauled and disillusioned societies.

(The writer is Director [Research and Analysis] at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)