For most of us here in England, the news barely registered. A train was hijacked in a far-off province of Pakistan. 400 plus hostages were taken, some of whom were killed, though the number of fatalities was a matter of much contention. The insurgents called it lawful acts of armed self-determination under International Law, claiming strict ethical limits, targeting only military personnel and sparing civilians, but the army disputes this. There is a war raging in Balochistan, with a spiral of violence that features appalling state terror, thousands of enforced disappearances and ongoing guerrilla warfare.
Pakistan’s military immediately blamed India for the Jaffar Express train hijacking, just as New Delhi habitually attributes virtually every flare-up in Kashmir, like the recent Pahalgam incident, to Islamabad’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). This tit-for-tat rhetoric obscures an uneven evidentiary record. Numerous investigations document the ISI’s long-standing support for militant camps inside Pakistan, whereas no credible proof has emerged of Indian training bases or financial pipelines for Baloch insurgents. In short, both states trade accusations, but the available evidence seems to run in one direction.
History of oppression
Balochistan sprawls across almost half of Pakistan’s landmass, yet barely 5% of its citizens reside there – a lopsided reality that makes the province far more strategic than Islamabad would care to admit. It is a treasure-trove of mineral wealth, gold, copper and natural gas, crowned by a coastline of undeniable strategic allure. Now Beijing plans to drive a multibillion-dollar economic corridor straight through its heart – yet most of the province’s own people reject the venture outright. They instead strive for self-determination against their situation of internal colonialism vis-à-vis the Pakistani state.
This ambition is rooted in a deep history of oppression, dating back at least to the birth of the Republic. The province was once the Princely State of Kalat. It was annexed – forcibly, many insist – in March of 1948, shortly after partition. While Balochistan is not a classical colony under an external European empire, many Baloch nationalists view their relationship with Islamabad as comparable to an internal colonial arrangement: political power being centralized in the Punjabi-majority province.
Unmet promises of autonomy, economic exploitation, revenue-sharing disputes, cultural marginalization and heavy military deployments have spurred several waves of insurgency, the most recent triggered by the assassination of a popular politician by the name of Akbar Bugti in 2006.
Baloch insurgent factions encompass a variety of groups, some of which emerged during earlier waves of militancy in the 1970s and 1980s. Since the early 2000s, these groups have intensified their activities, calling for self-determination or full independence. Over the past decade, the conflict has evolved, with multiple splinter factions- most prominently the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF) and Baloch Liberation Army (BLA)– carrying out attacks primarily on state forces, government installations, and sometimes on what they perceive to be exploitative economic projects, such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
Further amplifying Islamabad’s anxieties is the emergence of BRAS (Baloch Raaji Ajoi Sangar), a military alliance forged in 2018 that unites several Baloch insurgent factions for the first time under a single coalition.
Structural violence
Some factions see Islamabad as a neo-colonial power increasingly aligned with China’s interests in exploiting Balochistan’s natural resources and in establishing a potential future Chinese naval presence in Gwadar – near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a crucial artery of global shipping and energy trade – which unsettles Washington.
Meanwhile, left-leaning insurgent discourse has long intertwined with strong nationalist themes. Yet internal class dynamics complicate matters: Baloch tribal elites – who have long dominated local politics – may not welcome changes that threaten their authority. Consequently, the movement is far from monolithic, combining progressive currents with some reactionary registers.
Baloch insurgents operate in a milieu where political avenues have been systematically curtailed, and the region’s resource wealth has been harnessed for the benefit of a distant or external elite
Divided by tribe and by language, a sense of Baloch peoplehood has nevertheless percolated, and is spreading quickly among the nascent educated middle class. It is as if the violence associated with the struggle for self-determination were at the birth of the nation. A conscious Baloch nation, forged in fire and in blood.
Many are quick to dismiss the insurgents in Balochistan as ethnic separatists and, even worse, as terrorists. But in this case, as in so many, terror cuts both ways, with state terror from above well outweighing insurgent terror from below. When it comes to the ethics of political violence, one must not forget, as the peace scholar Johan Galtung reminds us, that the first violence is structural in nature, it is a feature of endemic poverty and political oppression.
Recent developments in 2025 underscore that some Baloch factions are evolving their methods. The Noshki Bus Attack indicates a shift toward more sophisticated or lethal suicide attacks, a method historically associated with organizations like the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). This evolution, and the inclusion of women guerrillas, raises fresh concerns about whether Baloch insurgents are diverging from previous strategies.
The turn to arms
Baloch insurgents operate in a milieu where political avenues have been systematically curtailed, and the region’s resource wealth has been harnessed for the benefit of a distant or external elite. This context does not automatically justify the turn to arms, but it underscores the environment in which such a decision is made. As Fanon and Cabral explained, a purely legalistic or moralistic condemnation of insurgent violence often neglects the prior violence – structural or direct – that shaped the insurgent’s rationale.
Right now, as we write, the Baloch people are facing a ruthless wave of repression in retaliation for the train hijacking a few weeks back. There are mass arrests, people are being held incommunicado, people are disappearing yet again. Even voices in the diaspora are not beyond the coercive apparatus of the Pakistani state, as there have been multiple cases of transnational repression, including the murder of activists exiled in Europe and North America, in recent years.
The way forward, for both sides, entails a political resolution. Neither side can win with weapons. A stalemate of sorts can be declared. Even if the Pakistani state looks for inspiration in the case of Sri Lanka, where the Tamil movement was devastated, not to mention what the Israeli state is trying to do to the Palestinians as we speak. The temptation to opt for ever-escalating violent repression is certainly palpable.
Meanwhile, the repression breeds hatred, and steely, murderous determination to unleash vertical violence against the agents of the state, even against those perceived to be its accomplices. Both sides seem committed to pursuing the spiral of violence to the bitter end.
