Baloch Women Lead the Fight for Rights: A Simple Summary of the Movement, Its Leaders and the State’s Response
In a province where few women appear in public life, women have become the face of Balochistan's largest protest movement. This plain-English summary explains who they are, what they ask for, what the state says about them and where matters stood in 2026.
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⚡ The short answer
The largest protest movement in Balochistan today is led by women. Most of them are the daughters, sisters and wives of men who, they say, were taken away by the security forces and never charged in any court. Their best-known leader, Dr Mahrang Baloch, a physician born in 1993, led a march of some 1,600 kilometres to Islamabad in 2023. The state says her organisation is a front for armed separatists, which it denies. She has been in custody since March 2025, and in June 2026 a court sentenced her to life imprisonment in a case she calls unjust. Her lawyer said she would appeal.
- ✅ The movement: the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, founded in 2020
- ✅ Main demand: an end to enforced disappearances, and trials in open court
- ⚠️ The state’s position: the group is linked to militants; it denies this
- ⚠️ June 2026: its leader sentenced to life imprisonment; appeal announced
Why women?
Balochistan is the most conservative part of Pakistan. Fewer than four women in ten can read. In much of the province a woman does not go to the market alone, let alone lead a rally.
So the sight of thousands of women marching down a highway, with young women in their twenties speaking from the stage, was something the province had not seen before.
The explanation they give is simple. The men were gone.
They did not set out to lead a movement. They set out to find their fathers and brothers. The movement is what happened when thousands of women discovered they were looking for the same thing.
What “enforced disappearance” means
An enforced disappearance is when a person is taken into custody by agents of the state, or by people acting with its support, and the state then refuses to say where the person is or to admit that it holds them. There is no charge, no court and no visit. Families may wait years. Some of the missing return. Some are later found dead. Many are never heard of again.
Two very different accounts are given of what has happened in Balochistan.
| What families and rights groups say | What the state says | |
|---|---|---|
| Scale | Thousands have been taken over two decades | The numbers are exaggerated; many cases have been resolved |
| Who the missing are | Students, teachers, activists, ordinary men | Many joined armed groups, went abroad or were killed fighting |
| Who took them | Security and intelligence agencies | No policy of disappearance exists; individual abuses are investigated |
| Remedy sought | Produce every detainee before a court | A commission of inquiry already examines each case |
An official commission on disappearances has existed since 2011 and has received more than ten thousand complaints from across Pakistan. It says it has traced most of them. Families and rights groups, including the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, say it has punished no one.
This article cannot settle that dispute. It can describe the movement that grew out of it.
How the movement grew
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2009 onwards | Families of the missing begin camping outside press clubs in Quetta and Karachi |
| 2013 and 2014 | A small group, mostly women and children led by an elderly man whose son had disappeared, walks from Quetta to Islamabad by way of Karachi |
| 2020 | The Baloch Yakjehti Committee is formed. A prominent exiled activist, Karima Baloch, is found dead in Canada; police there say they found no evidence of a crime, and her supporters dispute that |
| 2021 | Women turn out in very large numbers for Gwadar’s protests over water, fishing and checkpoints |
| Late 2023 | A young man dies in the custody of a counter-terrorism unit in Turbat. Police say he was killed in a shoot-out; his family say he was taken from his home and killed. The long march begins |
| July 2024 | The “Baloch national gathering” in Gwadar |
| March 2025 | The committee’s leaders are detained |
| June 2026 | Two of them are sentenced to life imprisonment |
The long march
In December 2023 several hundred people, most of them women, set out from Turbat, near the Iranian border. They walked and drove some 1,600 kilometres through Balochistan and Punjab to the capital, gathering crowds on the way.
On reaching Islamabad in winter they were met by police with water cannon and arrests. Most were released within days after the courts intervened. They then camped outside the National Press Club for about a month. The caretaker prime minister of the time, himself from Balochistan, criticised those who supported them. Few ministers came to listen.
They went home without what they had asked for. But they had been seen, on television and on phones, by the whole country.
Gwadar, July 2024
The following summer the committee called a gathering in Gwadar, the port at the heart of the Chinese-financed corridor. The authorities blocked the roads. There were clashes on the way and in the town. People died, among them protesters and a paramilitary soldier. Each side blamed the other for the violence.
That soldier’s death became the basis of the case that, two years later, sent the movement’s leaders to prison for life.
The leaders
Dr Mahrang Baloch
She was born in 1993 and trained as a doctor at Bolan Medical College in Quetta. By her account, her father, a political activist, was taken away in 2009, when she was sixteen, and was found dead in 2011. Her brother was detained for some months in 2017.
She first came to notice leading a students’ protest over admissions to her medical college. By 2023 she was the committee’s chief organiser and its most recognised voice.
In 2024 an American magazine named her among a hundred rising figures worldwide, and a British broadcaster included her in its annual list of a hundred women. When she tried to fly to the United States for the magazine’s event, she was stopped at Karachi airport.
Sammi Deen Baloch
Her father, a doctor, disappeared in 2009, when she was a child. She has spent most of her life since at protest camps, and in 2024 received an international award for human rights defenders. She was detained for a time in 2025.
Others
Dr Sabiha Baloch and several younger women have led the committee since its senior figures were jailed. Some of them have themselves been detained or have had relatives detained.
What they ask for
The committee’s demands, as it has stated them, are these.
- Produce the missing. Anyone held by the state should be brought before a court.
- End killings in custody, and investigate those that have occurred.
- Disband irregular armed groups that, it alleges, operate with official backing.
- Let people protest without arrest.
- Give Balochistan control over its own resources.
It describes itself as a peaceful movement for rights and says it does not seek to break up the country.
What the state says
The government and the army take a very different view. Their case is as follows.
- Balochistan faces a violent insurgency. Armed groups have killed soldiers, police, labourers from other provinces, teachers and Chinese engineers, and hijacked a passenger train in 2025.
- Those groups have used women. In 2022 a woman carried out a suicide bombing at a university in Karachi that killed three Chinese teachers.
- The committee, officials say, does not condemn such attacks, glorifies dead militants as “missing persons” and blocks roads and hospitals in the name of protest.
- In May 2025 the army’s spokesman called the committee a proxy of hostile foreign intelligence and its leader a proxy of terrorists.
The committee rejects every part of this. A former senator who heads a human rights committee in one of the governing parties warned at the time against calling anyone a terrorist without a trial.
⚠️ Keep three things apart
There are armed separatist groups in Balochistan, which are banned and which kill civilians. There is a protest movement, led largely by women, which says it is peaceful. And there are families who simply want to know where a relative is. The state often speaks of the three as one. The movement insists they are different. A fair reader should treat any claim that links them as something to be proved in an open court, and should treat violence against civilians as a crime whoever commits it.
Arrest and trial
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 22 March 2025 | Dr Baloch is detained in Quetta during a protest and held under a public order law |
| 2025 | Further cases are registered; a court in Karachi acquits her in one of them; she remains in custody |
| 23 May 2025 | The army’s spokesman denounces the committee |
| Early June 2026 | She and other detainees stage a sit-in inside the jail, demanding an open trial |
| 22 June 2026 | An anti-terrorism court in Quetta sentences her and a colleague to life imprisonment over the soldier’s death at Gwadar in 2024 |
| 24 June 2026 | The committee calls a province-wide strike |
The prosecution’s case, as reported, was that her speech incited the crowd that attacked a security vehicle.
The defence’s case, as reported, was that the soldier was struck by stones in a crowd disturbance and that no one set out to kill him. She and her co-accused, with their lawyers, boycotted the hearings, which were held inside a high-security prison, and described them as a trial without a face.
Reactions. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan called for the verdict to be reviewed. Provincial officials said the trial had been fair. Her lawyer said the verdict would be challenged in the High Court. Whether that appeal has been heard was not found.
💡 Tip: what an appeal means
A conviction by a trial court is not the end of a case. Under Pakistani law a person sentenced by an anti-terrorism court may appeal to the High Court, and from there to the top court. The higher court can uphold the verdict, reduce the sentence, order a new trial or acquit. Until that process is finished, the right way to describe the position is: convicted at trial, sentence under appeal.
How the movement works
The committee is not a political party. It has no offices, no membership cards and no candidates. That is both its strength and its weakness.
Its methods are few and simple.
- The photograph. At every gathering, relatives hold framed pictures of the missing. The image needs no translation and has travelled far beyond Balochistan.
- The sit-in. Families camp outside a press club, sometimes for months. One such camp in Quetta has been kept going, on and off, for more than fifteen years.
- The road. Marches along highways, and blockades of them, force attention in a province where a single road may link a whole region to the rest of the country.
- The phone. Speeches and videos spread on social media within minutes. When the authorities shut down mobile internet in a district, which they often do, the movement goes quiet there and louder elsewhere.
Why women at the front makes a difference. In a tribal society, violence against women in public carries a heavy cost for whoever commits it. Organisers believed that police and paramilitary forces would be slower to use force against a crowd led by women and girls. For some years that seemed to hold. The arrests of 2025 suggest it no longer does.
What its critics say. Not all the criticism comes from the state. Blocking a highway for days stops ambulances, food lorries and labourers as well as officials. Traders and transporters in Balochistan have complained of the cost. Some Baloch politicians who share the movement’s grievances argue that a campaign with no elected leaders and no negotiating position can protest for ever and win nothing. Its supporters reply that those who did sit in assemblies achieved no more.
Its relations with the older parties are uneasy. The province’s established nationalist parties have lost ground to it among the young. In 2025 the leader of one of them resigned his seat in the National Assembly and led a march of his own towards Quetta, demanding the release of the detained women. It was stopped on the road.
Beyond the protest camp
The disappearances are the sharpest issue. They are not the only one. Baloch women live with the worst figures in Pakistan on almost every measure.
| Measure | Balochistan | Pakistan as a whole |
|---|---|---|
| Women who can read | Roughly a third | Roughly a half |
| Deaths of mothers in childbirth | The highest of any province | Lower |
| Girls out of school | A majority in many districts | About a third |
| Distance to a hospital | Often hours | Much less |
There has been movement on paper.
- The provincial assembly has seats reserved for women, and women have served as ministers and as the assembly’s deputy speaker.
- The province passed a law against domestic violence in 2014 and one against workplace harassment in 2016.
- In November 2025 it passed a law setting 18 as the minimum age of marriage, treating a child marriage as void from the start.
- Women have been appointed as district administrators and police officers in places where none had served before.
Women also led the peaceful protests in Gwadar in 2021, where the demands were for drinking water, electricity and the right to fish.
Why it matters for the rest of Pakistan
Three reasons.
It is a test of the law. The demand at the centre of the movement is that people accused of crimes be charged and tried. That is not a Baloch demand. It is what the Constitution promises everyone.
It is a test of politics. Balochistan’s elected parties have lost ground to a movement that works outside the assemblies. When people stop believing that voting changes anything, they look elsewhere.
It is a test of the state’s judgment. Jailing the leaders of a peaceful movement, if that is what it is, risks proving the militants’ argument that peaceful means are useless. Tolerating a front for militants, if that is what it is, risks lives. Only open courts and evidence can show which it is.
✅ Key point
Whatever one concludes about the organisation, the image at the heart of this story is hard to dismiss: women who had never spoken in public, in a society that expected them not to, standing on a stage holding the photograph of a missing man. They have changed who speaks for Balochistan. The answer the state has given them so far is a prison sentence. The question they asked, about where their relatives are, remains.
Words used in this article
| Term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Enforced disappearance | Detention by the state, or with its support, that the state will not acknowledge |
| Missing persons | The common Pakistani term for those so detained |
| Long march | A protest journey to the capital |
| Sit-in | A protest in which people occupy a place and refuse to leave |
| Anti-terrorism court | A special court for offences under the anti-terrorism law |
| Public order detention | Being held without charge, for a fixed period, on the order of an official |
| Proxy | Someone said to act on behalf of another |
| Shutter-down strike | A protest in which shops and markets close |
What to watch next
- The appeal against the June 2026 convictions.
- Whether the government opens talks with the movement’s remaining leaders.
- The work of the commission on disappearances, and whether any official is held to account.
- Whether the movement remains peaceful, and remains led by women, with its founders in prison.
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Frequently asked questions
❓ Who is Mahrang Baloch?
A physician from Balochistan, born in 1993, who leads the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, a movement that campaigns against enforced disappearances.
❓ What is the Baloch Yakjehti Committee?
A protest movement formed in 2020. It says it is a peaceful campaign for human rights. The government and the army say it is linked to armed separatists, which it denies.
❓ Why are women leading the movement?
Most of those reported missing are men. The campaign to find them has been carried on by their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters.
❓ What was the Baloch long march?
A protest journey of about 1,600 kilometres from Turbat to Islamabad in December 2023, led mainly by women, followed by a month-long sit-in in the capital.
❓ Is Mahrang Baloch in prison?
Yes, as far as this article could establish. She has been in custody since March 2025. In June 2026 an anti-terrorism court sentenced her to life imprisonment. Her lawyer said the verdict would be appealed.
❓ What was she convicted of?
Offences connected with the death of a paramilitary soldier during the gathering in Gwadar in July 2024. She denies responsibility and boycotted the trial.
❓ What does the government say about missing persons?
That the numbers are overstated, that many of those listed joined militant groups or left the country, and that an official commission examines every complaint.
❓ Are the protesters separatists?
The committee says it seeks rights within the law. Armed separatist groups also operate in Balochistan and are banned. The state alleges links between them; the committee denies any.
❓ What rights do women have in Balochistan?
The same constitutional rights as elsewhere in Pakistan, and provincial laws against domestic violence, harassment and child marriage. In practice the province has the country’s lowest female literacy and highest maternal death rate.
Sources
- Wikipedia, “Mahrang Baloch” — read in part; last edited 29 July 2026. Contested page.
- Wikipedia, “Baloch Yakjehti Committee” — read; last edited 21 July 2026. Contested page.
- Reuters, via The Star, “Pakistani rights activist Mahrang Baloch sentenced to life in prison” — 24 June 2026.
- Nukta, report on the anti-terrorism court’s verdict — June 2026.
- AsiaNews, “Mahrang Baloch, Balochistan’s most prominent activist, sentenced to life in prison” — 23 June 2026.
- Government of Balochistan, The Balochistan Child Marriages Restraint Act 2025
- Human Rights Commission of Pakistan — for its statements and annual reports.
- Aaj English, “Thousands protest in Gwadar against shortage of drinking water, illegal trawling” — 2021.
