The Cost of Being Baloch: Ethnicity and Unequal Citizenship in Pakistan

On 3 September 2024, Sardar Akhtar Mengal rose in the National Assembly to announce his resignation. Before he could get a sentence out, members pointed out that the House lacked quorum. The former chief minister of Balochistan, elected from Khuzdar seven months earlier, walked outside and told reporters instead. His letter to the Speaker said his province had been consistently marginalised and ignored by the House, and that his presence there no longer served the people who elected him.

The resignation then went into a drawer. The Speaker accepted it on 11 February 2026, seventeen months later. For a year and a half, one of Balochistan’s sixteen general seats in the National Assembly sat in limbo: vacated in principle, occupied by nobody, and unresolved by the institution meant to resolve it.

It would be easy to read this as a story about one politician. It is more useful to read it as a measurement. When a mainstream, constitutional, electorally successful Baloch leader concludes that parliament is not worth sitting in, and parliament takes seventeen months to notice, the problem is not one a development package can reach.

Start with the numbers, because they are the government’s own. The Economic Survey 2025-26 put poverty in Balochistan at 47 per cent in 2024-25, against 35.3 per cent in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 32.6 in Sindh, 23.3 in Punjab and 28.9 nationally. Six years earlier the figure was 41.8 per cent, so the gap has widened rather than closed. Schooling is worse than income. The Pakistan Institute of Education’s 2023-24 statistics record 3.5 million out-of-school children in Balochistan, 69 per cent of everyone aged five to sixteen, against 27 per cent in Punjab. Adult literacy is 40 per cent against Punjab’s 63. Forty-one per cent of the province’s public primary schools run on a single teacher. In 2022-23, 2.7 per cent of its public schools had all five basic facilities: electricity, drinking water, toilets, a boundary wall and a sound building. The following year Balochistan reported no figure at all, which is its own sort of answer.

One statistic complicates the familiar story. The same survey records Balochistan’s Gini coefficient at 26.5, the lowest of the four provinces. Deprivation there is not concentrated at the bottom; it is spread across almost everybody. This is not a province where a local elite is eating everyone else’s share. It is one where there is very little to eat.

None of that, by itself, proves discrimination, and an honest argument has to concede the point. Balochistan is 44 per cent of Pakistan’s territory and 6.2 per cent of its population. Laying a transmission line or staffing a clinic across that emptiness costs more per head than anywhere else in the country. The provincial government says so itself: in June 2026 it was still weighing off-grid generation for seventeen districts because conventional transmission is impractical. Some of Balochistan’s poverty is arithmetic before it is politics.

The formulas, moreover, tilt towards the province rather than against it. Under the Seventh NFC Award, Balochistan draws 9.09 per cent of the divisible pool against 6.2 per cent of the population, with a federal guarantee to cover any shortfall. Its quota in federal jobs was raised from 3.5 to 6 per cent in 2007; the government told the Senate in July 2025 that 45,809 of 49,162 quota posts had been filled. It holds a quarter of Reko Diq, ten percentage points of that carried free, along with a five per cent royalty. The slogan that Balochistan is simply being looted does not survive contact with the paperwork.

What the paperwork does show is that formulas are the cheap part of federalism. The Seventh Award was signed in 2009 and still governs the divisible pool; the Eleventh Commission, constituted in August 2025, had stalled by early 2026 with most of its working groups yet to meet. Of those 45,809 appointments, 3,908 sit in grades 17 to 22. Public employment skews junior everywhere, so the number is not damning on its own. But a province whose presence inside the federal state is overwhelmingly clerical has very little purchase on it.

Reko Diq repeats the pattern at scale. On paper it is the most generous arrangement Balochistan has ever been offered. In February 2026 Barrick opened a review in light of deteriorating security; by April it had decided to slow development and extend that review to mid-2027, warning that cost and timeline could rise significantly against a target of first production in late 2028. The province’s single largest asset is now hostage to the conflict around it. This is the wall the development argument keeps hitting: you cannot buy off alienation with prosperity when alienation is what stops the prosperity from arriving.

Gwadar makes the same point in miniature. The port meant to stitch Balochistan into the national economy is not connected to the national grid. Makran’s electricity comes across the border from Iran, and when the Iranian supply drops, the port and the international airport go dark along with everybody’s houses.

Then there is the part that is hardest to write carefully.

Pakistan’s own Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances reported receiving 10,636 cases between March 2011 and September 2025, with 1,650 still under investigation. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan considers such totals vastly understated. The commission’s own tally to the end of 2024 deserves a pause: among those traced, 1,011 were found in internment centres and 687 in prisons. Set aside every contested allegation, and the state has still repeatedly located missing citizens inside its own custody.

In June 2025 the Balochistan Assembly passed the Anti-Terrorism (Balochistan Amendment) Act, permitting preventive detention for up to three months without charge. Chief Minister Sarfraz Bugti defended it as the cure rather than the disease, arguing that anyone arrested would now be produced before a magistrate. HRCP called the powers sweeping and unacceptable. Two months later Parliament passed a national version, which blunts the charge of legal asymmetry. The statute now reads the same in Rawalpindi as in Panjgur. Where the asymmetry survives is in application.

Consider Mahrang Baloch. Detained in March 2025, she was sentenced to life imprisonment on 22 June 2026 by an anti-terrorism court in Quetta over the death of a paramilitary soldier at a Baloch gathering in Gwadar in July 2024. Prosecutors argued incitement; the court said eyewitness and medical evidence supported the case; the chief minister welcomed the verdict as justice for the soldier’s family. The accused and their lawyers boycotted proceedings held inside Hudda Jail, calling it a faceless trial, and an appeal to the Balochistan High Court was announced. HRCP asked for an immediate review. A reader is entitled to withhold judgement on how the soldier died. What is not disputed is that the country’s most visible Baloch civil rights campaigner was tried inside a prison, without counsel of her choosing, and is serving life.

The smaller episodes may be more revealing, precisely because nobody disputes them. In July 2025 Akhtar Mengal was offloaded from a flight at Quetta airport under a travel ban; that September the Balochistan High Court declared the ban illegal. In February 2026 mobile internet was suspended across parts of the province for five days, and trains were halted. In 2022 the Islamabad High Court directed the interior secretary to build a mechanism to end the ethnic profiling of Baloch students and appointed a commission to investigate their complaints; in 2024 the federal government went to court to challenge those orders.

The state’s case has to be put at full strength, because it is strong. The violence is real, organised and escalating. ACLED recorded 2,425 militant attacks across Pakistan in 2025, against 658 in 2022. In March 2025 the Balochistan Liberation Army hijacked the Jaffar Express in the Bolan Pass; the army put the final toll at 31 dead among passengers and personnel, with all 33 attackers killed. A month earlier its men had pulled seven Punjab-bound passengers off a bus in Barkhan and shot them. In January 2026 coordinated assaults across the province triggered Operation Radd-ul-Fitna-1, which ISPR reported killed 216 militants at the cost of 22 security personnel and 36 civilians. In August 2026 an ambush in Ziarat killed thirty people, twenty-seven of them policemen. Fighters who check identity cards and shoot passengers for being Punjabi are practising ethnic violence themselves. No government could stand aside from this, and it would be strange to ask Pakistan’s to.

So the question was never whether the state should act. It is which instruments it reaches for and who absorbs their cost. An intelligence-led operation is targeted by design. A five-day internet blackout is not. Neither is a checkpoint regime, a profiling habit, nor a power to hold a man for ninety days without telling a court why. These are collective instruments aimed at an individual threat, and their weight falls on 14.9 million people, almost none of whom have touched a weapon. That is the mechanism by which security policy becomes an ethnic experience. It requires no prejudice from any official. It requires only tools that cannot tell one Baloch from another.

Pakistan’s federation has been generous in its formulas and exceptional in its procedures. It gives Balochistan a larger share of the divisible pool than its population warrants and a smaller share of the ordinary presumption of innocence than its citizens are owed. The first is a line in a budget document. The second is what citizenship actually feels like from the inside, and no finance commission can allocate it.

Which leaves a narrower and less comfortable question. Does a nineteen-year-old from Panjgur studying in Lahore expect the same treatment from a policeman as his classmate from Sahiwal? And if he does not, does a court order saying he should mean anything? A federation can survive an unequal budget. It is much harder to survive the suspicion that the law means one thing in Lahore and something else in Panjgur. A formula can be rewritten in a single budget session. The suspicion will not begin to lift until the state can name one case in which someone was held to account for getting it wrong.

Muhammad Bin Ishaq is a writer and researcher interested in politics, governance, society and public policy in Pakistan. His writing focuses on the relationship between institutions, citizenship and the everyday impact of public policy, with particular attention to issues affecting marginalised communities and Pakistan’s federal structure.