By Shahab Baloch
There is something deeply painful happening within our own conversations today. It is not happening in courts or prisons, but in drawing rooms, on social media timelines, and inside our hearts. We have started measuring loyalty through handcuffs, and courage through prison walls.
Dr. Mahrang Baloch is in jail. Other leaders of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee are in jail. Their imprisonment hurts us, and it should. It is heavy to watch young, principled people punished for speaking about missing bodies, broken families, and unanswered graves. Dr. Mahrang’s absence from the streets feels like a wound. Her silence behind bars echoes louder than many speeches ever did.
But somewhere along the way, another wound has opened one we are inflicting on ourselves.
Sammi Baloch is not in jail.
And because she is not in jail, people have begun to talk.
They talk about her dignity as if it is fragile. They talk about surrender, compromise, forgetting the cause. They say she only tweets now, as if words have suddenly lost their weight, as if memory itself has become meaningless. They ask why she is free, as if freedom itself is evidence of betrayal.
This way of thinking is not strength. It is fear dressed as judgment.
Let us be honest with ourselves for a moment. Did anyone ever say that leadership comes with one fixed shape? Did history ever promise that every voice of resistance would be silenced at the same time, in the same way? Oppression does not work like that. It chooses. It delays. It isolates. Sometimes it cages a voice to scare the rest. Sometimes it lets a voice breathe just long enough to watch who listens.
Not being in jail does not mean being safe. And it certainly does not mean being sold.
Sammi Baloch did not wake up one day and forget her people. She did not erase the disappeared from her memory because she is not behind bars. If anything, being outside a prison means carrying a different kind of burden the burden of being watched, doubted, judged, and still expected to speak carefully, responsibly, and constantly.
Why do we treat tweets as if they are nothing? In a time where streets are blocked, gatherings crushed, and microphones confiscated, sometimes words are the only thing that survives. Sometimes a sentence reaches places a protest cannot. Sometimes a name written online is the only proof that a person once existed.
Not everyone is meant to be arrested to be honest. Not everyone is meant to suffer publicly to be sincere. Prison is not a badge that proves faith, and freedom is not a stain that proves betrayal.
We must also ask ourselves a difficult question: when did we become so quick to turn on our own? When did we decide that pain must look only one way to be real? When did we begin demanding that every leader sacrifice their body before we accept their voice?
This thinking is dangerous. It breaks movements from the inside. It turns solidarity into suspicion. And women, especially, pay the highest price for it. Their choices are questioned more harshly. Their silence is seen as weakness. Their survival is treated as guilt.
Dr. Mahrang Baloch’s imprisonment is a symbol of courage, yes. But it is not a monopoly over truth. It does not erase the efforts of those who are still standing outside, trying to keep the story alive. A movement needs people in cells, and people outside them. It needs those who endure silence, and those who refuse to let silence win.
If everyone is jailed, who will speak their names?
If everyone is silenced, who will remember why they were taken?
The faith of a nation is not forgotten by those who remain free. It is forgotten when we start destroying each other with suspicion. It is forgotten when we confuse different paths with wrong ones. It is forgotten when we decide that only one form of suffering is pure.
This is not about choosing between Dr. Mahrang and Sammi. This is about understanding that resistance is not a competition. It is a shared weight, carried differently by different shoulders.
History will not ask who was jailed first.
It will ask who refused to forget.
Who kept speaking when it became uncomfortable.
Who stayed human when anger demanded cruelty.
And most importantly,
who did not abandon their own.
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.