Author: Burz Kohi
Translated by: Ruzhn Baluch
The Punjabi colonial system, since its very inception, is a continuation of that filthy history which, under various faces and languages, has mastered the art of erasing the oppressed. But the Baloch, the inscription of resistance etched onto their foreheads, refuse to accept any ideological or military defeat. This is why the Punjabi state has mobilised its entire machinery: state power, religious sabotage, media fog, and the manufactured intellect born out of collusion between universities and power centres, all aligned against the collective consciousness of the Baloch.
Yet, the issue is not merely one of brute force; it is one of understanding. And the Baloch nation is one that fights a war born from the womb of understanding, a war that is not fought only with blood, but alongside it; not only with words, but alongside them; not only with tradition, but rooted in it.
Our genocide does not exist solely in the form of corpses, it is embedded in our dictionaries, in our educational curriculum, in children’s poems, and in the news broadcast by the media. The issue is not that the Baloch are weak, but that the state has persistently reiterated their weakness until it has attempted to turn it into a reality. And then, it tries to make the Baloch believe in this fabricated reality. This is the precise moment where resistance no longer begins with a gun, but with thought—thought that writes its own identity, narrates its own history, rejects the lies written by Punjabi historians, and fights for its blood through its own language.
Colonialism does not speak only through the gun; it begins by changing the language. Once it takes control of the vocabulary, seizing the land becomes a mere formality. Vocabulary is the covert weapon through which colonialism defines meaning. Resistance becomes crime, slavery becomes loyalty, and exploitation is renamed development. When the vocabulary belongs to the occupier, the oppressed breathe even in their own language using the meanings of the enemy. This is the first battleground the occupier attacks, through words and narrative.
The Punjabi colonial state of Pakistan, too, first seized control of the vocabulary. It confined the meaning of “nation” to only those units that express loyalty to its national narrative. It linked “development” to those projects that demanded the price of Baloch corpses, their land, and their silenced mothers. It interpreted “peace” through the lens of military operations that decimated entire villages. It turned “unity” into a chain meant to ensure that every Baloch is either disappeared, silenced, or submissive.
This is the same vocabulary in which the Baloch is labeled “disgruntled,” the Baloch woman “shameless terrorists,” the Baloch gun “terrorism,” and Baloch thought a “foreign agenda.” In this vocabulary, the Baloch question is seen as sedition, their identity a problem, and their freedom a crime.
Our narrative is no longer captive to this imposed language. Our narrative now emerges from the bullet fired from a gun, from the piercing questions of a woman, from the bodies of the disappeared, and from political imprisonment. We understand that the state does not want the freedom of women, it wants a woman who becomes a poster for the state’s narrative.
But the Baloch woman, who has always been a symbol of resistance, is no longer just a mother, sister, or daughter. She has become a revolutionary being, one who not only resists, but also creates the narrative.
The Baloch nation has now rejected this vocabulary. The language imposed on us, where resistance is crime and slavery is loyalty, no longer holds power. For the Baloch, vocabulary is no longer just a set of words—it is a battlefield. We have snatched back the meanings of words that the Punjabi state had imposed on us. Words like “development,” “national mainstream,” and “national security” are nothing more than constructs used to disguise the looting of our land, our language, and our dreams.
Mahrang Baloch’s arrest is not just an incident—it is a manifestation of colonial fear. When a woman—historically considered oppressed—begins to speak through resistance, shape the narrative, or organise politically, she shakes the very foundations of colonial structures. As Fanon explains, colonial systems are more dependent on a woman’s expected silence than her freedom. Baloch women—whether Mahrang, Sammi, Beebow, Sabiha, or Gulzadi—do not remain silent. They question the foundations of the colonial framework, and it is this questioning that destabilises the entire ideological balance of the state.
The Baloch woman is no longer merely a symbol of “mother” or “sister”—she is active resistance. She is not “sacred”; she is skeptical. And for the state, the greatest threat is a woman who questions, who resists, and who rejects the vocabulary that defines women as either mourners or silent observers.
This is the moment where resistance is no longer divided by gender. When resistance becomes a nation, it is no longer about men or women—only those who submit and those who resist remain. And we are among the resisters. The state is disoriented by this refusal. That is why it labels even an imprisoned girl as part of a “conspiratorial network.” It calls the one holding a banner “a suicide bomber,” and the one holding a pen “a foreign agent.” But even within the prison cell, when a woman writes ideology with her eyes, the state’s entire narrative collapses.
Here, Foucault’s idea comes to mind—that power is not only what acts upon the body, but also what imposes lies in the name of truth. The Punjabi state has done the same: it has labeled every wound as justice, every military operation as peace, and every corpse as “a terrorist.” But the Baloch nation has now looked behind all these so-called truths, and we have removed these deceptive, sticky words from our vocabulary.
The most dangerous aspect of the Punjabi state is not the one sitting inside a tank, but the one embedded in vocabulary and discourse. This state does not function solely through physical domination, but by disguising its mental grip in the robes of “national unity,” “religious harmony,” and “developmental interest.” Although the bloodstains on the state’s uniform are visible, the shine of lies on its language is far more intense.
This is the same lie that Wittgenstein, in his philosophical language, describes by saying, “Meaning is born from use.” The state has promoted a usage of terms where slavery becomes loyalty, and resistance becomes rebellion. The Baloch resistance has recognised this ideological manipulation, and now, that very state discourse has become a noose around the neck of the state itself.
Postmodern thinkers like Derrida explain that colonial powers craft a language that renders their identity, authority, and violence “invisible,” turning it into a self-serving truth. The Punjabi state does the same against the Baloch. It drops bodies in the name of “security,” plunders resources in the name of “development,” and silences questions in the name of “national interest.”
Gramsci calls this process cultural hegemony—a system of thought where the state manufactures “consensual subjugation” not just through force, but through institutions, curricula, media, and religion. Schools become the places where Baloch children are taught that their ancestors were “savages,” their culture backward, and their language merely “regional.” As if Punjabi culture is the sole “centre of knowledge,” before which everything else must bow.
This intellectual colonisation is not spread through guns alone, but through columns, textbooks, documentaries, and television anchors. And this is the soft power that doesn’t cut the body, it cuts the mind.
The Baloch nation has now responded firmly to this mental onslaught. We have not only reacted to dead bodies—we have also shattered their “web of words.” We have redefined “development,” reimagined patriotism, and, most importantly, we have stopped calling slavery “discontent.”
Baloch resistance suffers less from bombs and more from the insidious commentary wrapped in polite tones, refined terms, and the salt of “tolerance” in society. On one hand, a body is transported in a military truck; on the other, a “liberal” anchor explains on television that the Baloch issue is merely one of backwardness, and if the state pays a little attention, the “disgruntled brothers” can be brought back to the right path.
We salute such intellectuals, but only with sarcasm. Because they package and sell intellectual slavery with such finesse that even Fanon might smile in his grave. This is the point where sarcasm becomes more than expression—it becomes a weapon. We mock a system that labels our enforced disappearances as “legal detentions,” and then reads a refined funeral prayer of humanity over them through “judicial commissions.” We mock the media that highlights Mahrang Baloch’s arrest, only to parrot the state’s narrative verbatim, thinking this makes them “neutral.”
This neutrality is, in fact, the ideological collusion that Gramsci described as the “forces of civil society that make the ruling narrative popular.” Journalism here is the glove under which the state’s iron grip is hidden.
The state fears not the gun, but the intellectual vocabulary that the Baloch nation has reverse-engineered. In the language of the “innocent Punjabi labourer,” we have seen the colonial mirror that portrays every killer as innocent and every resistor as a beast. But on land where only those who act as state agents are considered workers, the Baloch has the right to ask: What kind of innocence is this, that labours under the protection of a gun?
The Baloch youth now knows that democracy only appears beautiful until its contours are drawn in Baloch blood. We have seen a judiciary that declares “insufficient evidence” over mutilated bodies.
This is the moment where Baloch intellectual sarcasm is not mockery, it is rational resistance. We laugh so that we do not weep. And whoever fears this laughter has already lost the battle before the weapon is even drawn.
When the state hides oppression in its words, murder in its verdicts, and genocide in its development projects, resistance is no longer just a slogan, it becomes the reclamation of language itself. Baloch resistance is no longer merely a response to bullets, it is an intellectual movement that has placed a question mark on every “truth” the state has manufactured.
This is where Foucault’s idea that, “power does not merely act on bodies, but governs the production of truth”—emerges in full force. The Punjabi state did not only deploy tanks in Balochistan—it sent narratives, school curricula, media discourse, even the concept of kinship into a red zone. But the Baloch did not just identify this violence—they also rejected the very “truths” the state crafted.
So now when a Baloch youth asks, “Is this a country or a military corporation?”basically they are echoing Wittgenstein’s claim in the Baloch mountains: “Language is the casing in which reality is trapped.” And we have shattered that casing.
The arrests of Mahrang Baloch, Sammi Deen Baloch, Beebow Baloch, Gulzadi, and dozens of other women revolutionaries reflect not just the brutality of law, but the panic of a colonial system where, after the man, the woman too has rejected servitude. These arrests are not just signs of legal cruelty, they are glimpses into colonial fear. The fear that the narrative has slipped from the hands of the state. The fear that a woman is no longer just a symbol of honour but a conscious force of vengeance. The fear that every scream is now an intellectual indictment, and every arrest a sign of discursive defeat.
This is where every Baloch speech or essay of resistance becomes like a gun. It may not fire bullets, but it finds its mark, and that mark lies in the very heart of the state’s narrative, where it sees itself as civilised, democratic, and progressive.
We know now that this “progress” arrives with bombs, that this “democracy” places a ballot paper over mutilated corpses, and that this “civilised state” labels a woman sitting in jail as a terrorist. But the Baloch vocabulary has changed. Here, the terrorist is the one who steals identity; progress is what steps forward against oppression; and patriotism is the rejection of the colonial state.
This is a collective declaration from the Baloch nation, we reject the colonial state’s vocabulary. We shut every door of the narrative where slavery is disguised as loyalty. And we accept only those truths that are written in the blood of our martyrs, not the ones typed into the teleprompters of state-aligned news channels. We believe that the only vocabulary that survives resistance is the true vocabulary. And that vocabulary, the Baloch have begun to write with their blood.
This war is no longer just a struggle for Baloch land, it is a war over intellectual sovereignty. And the day a nation claims ownership over its language is not just a political event, it is an intellectual revolution. The Baloch nation has done just that. It has rejected every metaphor, every claim, every sacred lie fabricated by the state, and created a new vocabulary from its pain, its questions, and its resistance. A vocabulary where a “silent woman” is an organiser, a “disgruntled youth” is a philosophical historian, and the “terrorist mountain” is a monument of suffering.
This resistance is not born of explosive powder, it is the intellectual detonation placed at the roots of language itself.
When the Punjabi state talks of “mainstreaming,” we ask, does that stream include those whose sons’ corpses are thrown at their doors in the dead of night? When it preaches “development,” we ask, development through graveyards? And when it speaks of “law,” we simply laugh, because we know that the law only serves those who accept power as law.
This is a decision that cannot be reversed by the gun. This is a refusal that cannot be undone by prison bars, court rulings, media narratives, or the silent papers of the United Nations. Because we are not only alive, we are participating in the act of writing language.
We do not call our killers “labourers.” We do not call our imprisoned women “sacrificial symbols.” We call them political metaphors. We do not call the state a “mother”, we call it a colonial occupying administration. We do not see freedom as a dream, we consider it an overdue reality.
We know that slavery does not end only with bullets, slavery dies the day the oppressed begin to write their own language. And now that we, through endless sacrifice, have become the authors of our vocabulary, the war is no longer only for freedom, it is for the sovereignty of meaning. And this war, we have already won.
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.