Written by Sofia Baloch, M.A. Philosophy Student at Karachi University
“When a woman speaks the truth of her people, she becomes dangerous. To silence her is not justice – it is fear masquerading as power.”
There are moments in history when silence is no longer an option, when to speak becomes an act of rebellion, and when a single voice rises loud enough to threaten an entire regime. In Pakistan, that voice belongs to Dr. Mahrang Baloch—a woman who has come to symbolize the unbroken will of a nation long silenced. Her arrest, her defiance, and the state’s relentless efforts to suppress her illuminate an age-old philosophical truth: fascist regimes are terrified of women who resist.
Fascism, in its essence, is not only political tyranny—it is an existential fear of freedom, as thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Umberto Eco have long argued. It fears the unpredictable, the spontaneous, the unyielding human spirit that does not submit. It fears the one who questions, who speaks, who remembers. A fascist state survives not by the strength of its ideals, but by the force of its forgetfulness. Dr. Mahrang Baloch is dangerous because she refuses to forget. She embodies memory, witness, and resistance—and that is why the state trembles at her name.
On March 21, 2025, Dr. Mahrang was arrested while protesting with the body of a 14-year-old boy—another casualty of a state that sees its youth not as citizens but as threats. She was charged under the colonial-era Maintenance of Public Order (3MPO) law, a legal weapon often used by authoritarian governments to crush dissent without trial. But this act of violence was not new—it was the continuation of a long pattern in which the Pakistani state has criminalized the grief and defiance of Baloch voices.
In late 2023, the killing of a young boy in Turbat, abducted from his home and later murdered by security forces, ignited the collective conscience of the Baloch people. The state’s official narrative claimed a counterattack; the truth, however, lay in the weeping eyes of the boy’s family, who had seen him taken. This moment became a turning point. Led by Dr. Mahrang, thousands marched from Balochistan to Islamabad in an act of moral protest rarely witnessed in contemporary South Asia. The state responded with brute force—cold water in winter, tear gas, harassment, threats, and the machinery of fear. But what the state failed to understand was that it was no longer facing individuals—it was confronting a nation awake.
Dr. Mahrang, a physician by training and a revolutionary by calling, has since become the voice of a people too long denied justice, dignity, and self-determination. The Baloch Yakjaetti Committee (BYC), under her guidance, has organized itself into a powerful platform of solidarity, community, and resistance. Its strength lies not in armed struggle but in truth, in protest, in the refusal to disappear. And remarkably, nearly 89% of this resistance is driven by women—by mothers of the disappeared, by daughters of the soil, by those who carry both grief and courage in their hearts.
To understand why Pakistan’s state apparatus fears women like Dr. Mahrang Baloch is to understand the metaphysics of power. Patriarchal fascism reduces women to symbols—mothers of the nation, carriers of purity, bearers of silence. But when a woman steps out of these roles and dares to speak, to organize, to accuse the state of genocide, she becomes too real for the myth to contain. As Simone de Beauvoir taught us, woman is “the Other” only so long as she is passive. The moment she defines herself, she transcends objecthood—and this, for authoritarianism, is the beginning of collapse.
The state’s fear is not just of Dr. Mahrang’s activism; it is of her meaning. She is not simply a protester—she is an idea. She represents the moral clarity of nationalism that comes from pain, not propaganda. She does not speak for an ideology invented in offices; she speaks for the blood of the disappeared, the bones beneath the soil, the children whose names will not be forgotten. Hers is not a nationalism of flags and anthems—it is a nationalism of memory, identity, and truth. It is a demand that the Baloch people be recognized not as a rebellious province, but as a nation whose spirit remains unconquered.
In this light, the arrest of Dr. Mahrang Baloch is not just political repression—it is existential panic. The extension of her detention under 3MPO, the harassment of her colleagues, and the ongoing attempt to isolate her are not signs of strength, but symptoms of fear. And that fear is not new. It killed Karima Baloch, another brave woman who died in exile for telling the truth. Her murder in Canada was called an accident, but for those who have seen decades of disappearances, the truth was too familiar to ignore. Fascist states kill not out of confidence, but out of terror—because they know that ideas do not die quietly.
And yet, Dr. Mahrang Baloch lives, resists, speaks. She has already been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and rightly so—for peace, in its truest sense, is not silence under tyranny, but the just order that follows truth. Her vision is not just for justice in one case, but for the recognition of an entire people’s right to exist, to govern, to remember, and to dream.
It has been more than seventy years since Balochistan was brought under the control of the Pakistani state, and for three generations now, the youth have resisted. This is not a rebellion—it is a reclamation. The Baloch struggle is not for attention but for existence. And in Dr. Mahrang, that struggle has found a voice too strong to be silenced, and too principled to be erased.
The fascist state is scared of women because women like Dr. Mahrang Baloch remind it of its own fragility. She is everything the state fears: educated, articulate, defiant, beloved. But more than that, she is free. And nothing frightens the oppressor more than a woman who is truly free—free to speak, to resist, and to awaken a nation.
Let history remember this moment not as the suppression of a voice, but as the rise of one. Dr. Mahrang Baloch does not stand alone. She stands with a people, with a history, and with a future that will no longer be denied.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Balochistan Post or any of its editors.