Ask any Baloch, and they will tell you: governance here means “kill and dump.” They’re not wrong. In academic language, this is called necropolitics – a mode of rule that governs through the power to decide who lives and who dies. Coined by Achille Mbembe, necropolitics refers to a form of sovereignty in which the state exercises its power by choosing who must die. This is governance through death, not law. It is an architecture of abandonment and annihilation.

You find necropolitics wherever people are reduced to disposable bodies: Black men in the US killed by police, those droned in Waziristan, Palestinians bombed and besieged, Pakhtuns extrajudicially murdered by the likes of Rao Anwar, and those tortured in black sites during the “war on terror.”

To be governed by necropolitics is to be abandoned by all institutional recourse. You do not exist as a citizen. Courts do not respond to you but merely gaslight you. The media does not report your truths. Intellectuals who might speak for you are themselves disappeared. Bureaucracies deny your existence. What remains is a dark state architecture: surveillance, checkpoints, spies, secret prisons, black markets, and – as Manzoor Pashteen put it – “Vigo dala rule.” That is, governance through a Vigo pickup van, the symbol of abduction and death.

This is not simply colonial residue. Necropolitics in Balochistan is a contemporary invention of the Pakistani riyasat. It is the state’s primary technology for governing Balochistan.

Here’s the pattern: a person is abducted by plainclothes or uniformed men – usually in pickup trucks with dubious number plates. Most often, the abductors are from Military Intelligence (MI), Frontier Corps (FC) or Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The victim is taken to a black site. There, they are tortured. The agencies use a colour-coded system: green for release, amber for continued torture and interrogation, and red – for indefinite detention or death.

Some are released after days, others after decades. Many are never released. Their mutilated bodies are dumped on roadsides.

Qambar Chakar and Ilyas Nizar Baloch were among them.

Qambar Chakar had been a student leader in the Balochistan Student Organisation-Azad (BSO-A). A friend of mine met him years ago at Balochistan University, in a study circle on the campus lawn. “He had fire in his eyes,”  my friend told me. “He knew he would be killed, but he refused to stay silent. He said, ‘I will speak my truth for the homeland.’”

Qambar had laid out the Baloch position: “We never agreed to be part of Pakistan; we were forced to join. Since then, we’ve been ruled like a colony. Our natural resources are plundered. Our leaders, poets, and professors are killed: Akbar Bugti, Lala Munir, Habib Jalib, Saba Dashtyari. The Pakistani state has murdered them all.”

He continued: “We demand independence. And while comrades say that would make us pawns of US imperialism, I ask—are we not already slaves of slaves? Pakistan follows the dictates of the US in the War on Terror. Let us at least choose our own slavery, if that means independence.”

That logic-painful, subversive – haunts many from the metropolitan left who ask Third World populations to endure suffering for the ‘greater good.’ But revolutionary politics cannot be calculated that way. When it becomes about the “greater good,” it loses the prefix—revolutionary. Qambar remained revolutionary. And he was killed for it.

Ilyas, too, was a member of BSO-A. He mentored younger students and edited Darwart, a Balochi children’s magazine. On December 21, 2012, while traveling to Turbat from Quetta, he was dragged off a bus at a security checkpoint.

Later, I interviewed Sangat, a comrade who witnessed the aftermath. Herecounts:

“I’d seen many dead bodies dumped on Mard Road. They usually came in sacks, with tags to identify them. When I heard two more had been found, I feared the worst—it had to be Ilyas and Qambar. I didn’t leave the van. I was too afraid. The ambulance staff went to collect the bodies. They were tortured beyond recognition. We found tags in their clothes. It was them.”

I asked Sangat, hesitantly, to describe what was done to the bodies, for necropolitics only allows us tangled bodies by which to understand its working:

“Qambar’s upper body was torn apart—his chest was ripped open by repeated gunfire at the same spot. He had 28 more bullet wounds. His body had burns. Ilyas had also been tortured. He had been shot in the head and chest.”

Qambar and Ilyas were just two of nearly 700 BSO-A members killed between 2009 and 2017. Why were they killed? Because they belonged to a peaceful student organization that demanded Baloch rights. They are killed for advocating for better education, for basic facilities, and against land theft and disappeared persons, and Baloch self determination. Much like Palestinian groups, Kashmiri rights movements, or the Scottish and Catalan independence movements. Bar Israel and India, other countries tolerate such movements. Some even allow referendums. Pakistan does not.  But why does the riyasat off Pakistan use this necropolitical technology rather than allow democratic disagreement? 

Louis Althusser, a French theorist, gives us two useful concepts: states govern through the ideological apparatus (schools, media, religion) and the coercive apparatus (military, police, prisons). Necropolitics begins when ideology fails and the old coercive methods no longer discipline subjects. When a state loses legitimacy, it stops trying to convince—and dominates solely through the coercive apparatus (much like colonial regimes).

When we sing the national anthem, cheer for the cricket team, chant patriotic slogans—we are being “hailed” by the ideological state apparatus. The state doesn’t need to coerce such people, a Punjab mela or cricket tournament is all they need. 

But in Balochistan, the already shaky ideological apparatus collapsed after the assassination of Akbar Bugti in 2006. Since then many Baloch have aligned with the discourse of the Baloch National Movement. The state tried arrests. It tries using feudal lords. It tried torture-and-release. It didn’t try changing itself, it didn’t try negotiating. So, of course, nothing worked. Then, it created its version of necropolitics.

Necropolitics was formally unleashed on 3rd April 2009.  Baloch activists consistently refer to this date as the beginning of systematic use of kill and dump. That day, Lala Munir, Ghulam Mohammad Baloch, and Sher Mohammad Baloch – key activists in Turbat – were abducted by men in plainclothes after being released by an Anti-Terrorism Court. They were taken from the office of Advocate Kachkol Ali.

Five days later, their bodies were found 40 km from Turbat. Shot in the head. All signs point to intelligence agencies. The message was clear: ideology is over. Death will now speak for the state.  It is a method of rule that has been systematised and that is why we must resist it.

Necropolitics as a mode of rule has failed.  One generation was killed and another took its place. Now, it seems this generation too will be subject to necropolitics, but then another will rise.

Where necropolitics rules, the social contract has been torn apart. Resistance becomes the only means to be human. Foreign powers gain the opportunity to intervene. Nothing citizenry holds. 

To end this crisis, the Riyasat of Pakistan must abandon necropolitics. It must initiate a new social contract with the Baloch – one that is drafted by the Baloch. Not imposed on them.  A good start would be to release the imprisoned and missing Baloch activists. 

It is our collective responsibility – those of us who live in the “zones of being,” the realms of citizenry – to speak out. As we protest Israel’s necropolitics in Palestine or India’s necropolitics in Kashmir, we must also protest Pakistan necropolitics in Balochistan.

We must stand against it for it is no way to govern but let me also remind you that the technologies that are developed in Balochistan also find their way to Lahore and Islamabad.  PTI experienced it first hand and so will others.  We must demand an end to necropolitics and instead move to a politics based on dignity, justice and citizenry rights for all.