The Baloch Yakjehti Committee: Centering Women in the Nationalist Frame

Abstract

Established in 2020, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) has emerged as the leading social movement advocating for the rights of the Baloch in Pakistan. While the BYC initially focused on direct state violence in the form of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, it has since expanded its range of concerns to include the systematic suppression of Baloch identities and livelihoods by the Pakistani state, which is framed as a colonial force. One of the most remarkable aspects of this movement is the fact that it is being led largely by young women. Even before its formation, however, women had been taking an increasingly public, political role, with mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of forcibly abducted men coming out on the streets and on social media advocating for the release of their male kin. Baloch women’s political participation has been partially driven out of necessity given the Pakistani state’s brutality against Baloch men. However, I argue that a narrative of necessity simplifies a more complex and profound gender transformation taking place, with more women gaining access to higher education along with the rise of social media as a forum for political expression. This paper explores the modes of knowledge production and transmission that have accompanied the rise in Baloch women’s political participation. Through an exploration of social media discourse, literature, and university spaces, it explores how women are being positioned as leaders of the Baloch nation by drawing on examples of figures such as Banadi, a 16^th century female warrior, as evidence of women’s historical role within the Baloch nation. The construction of a national narrative, which frames women as leaders and warriors, responds directly to Orientalist discourses (both by the British and Pakistani states) which frame the Baloch as ‘tribal’ and ‘backwards’. This alternative imagination uses women’s historical leadership as evidence of the progressive character of the Baloch nation and as a foil to the regressive, patriarchal Pakistani state. This paper explores the content and circulation of counter-discourses regarding Baloch women’s leadership as part of a wider project that resists multiple forms of colonial erasure and imagines a more egalitarian national future.