On August 27, the Government of Balochistan published what looked less like a police notice than a licence for collective suspicion. Nine Baloch women from Gwadar, Jiwani and Turbat were declared highly wanted, with rewards of between one and 1.5 million rupees offered for information leading to them. Their alleged offence was affiliation with Fitna al-Hindustan, the term now routinely employed by the Pakistani state to describe the Baloch insurgency while simultaneously attributing it to India. The women may or may not have links to an armed organisation. The government offered no publicly verifiable evidence, no indication that they had been formally charged and no explanation of the judicial process through which they had acquired the status of wanted militants. It supplied names, photographs, cash prizes and a promise to protect informants. In Balochistan, where people have disappeared for considerably less than a formal accusation, the message required little elaboration. The timing was particularly convenient. Four days earlier, 20-year-old student Safia Baloch had allegedly been taken from Quetta during a night operation involving the Counter Terrorism Department and the Inter-Services Intelligence. On August 5, 17-year-old Aqsa had disappeared together with her father, Abdul Qudoos Zarakzai, after security personnel raided their residence in Khuzdar. At the end of July, Rafia Bibi, Tania and Javeria had reportedly been detained at an Frontier Corps checkpoint near Quetta and had not been seen since.

A poster depicting nine women as agents of an Indian-sponsored terrorist conspiracy therefore served a purpose larger than identifying nine suspects. It provided a narrative within which the disappearance of Baloch women could be presented not as an escalation of state repression but as a necessary response to an emerging security threat. First women vanish; then the state explains why women should be feared. This reversal of cause and effect is hardly new in Balochistan. For decades, enforced disappearance has operated as an unofficial component of Pakistan’s counterinsurgency doctrine. Men are taken from homes, universities, roads and checkpoints, held outside the law and sometimes released after months or years. Others reappear as mutilated bodies, while many do not reappear at all. Courts are bypassed because the objective is not merely to punish individuals but to discipline families and communities through uncertainty. What has changed is the gender of some of the direct victims. The Human Rights Council of Balochistan documented 23 cases involving women between January and July 2026. The Baloch Yakjehti Committee had recorded at least 12 women and girls forcibly disappeared during 2025, among them students, health workers, minors and an eight-month-pregnant woman. These figures come from Baloch rights organisations and are difficult to verify independently in a province where journalists, lawyers and witnesses operate under constant pressure. The absence of independent scrutiny, however, is not evidence that the disappearances did not occur. It is one of the conditions that make them possible. Historically, Baloch women experienced disappearance indirectly. When a husband, brother or son was taken, they were left to maintain the household, search police stations and military camps, petition courts and sit for years beside photographs of the missing. The violence was directed at men, but its social and economic consequences were transferred to women. That arrangement also produced something Islamabad appears not to have anticipated: women became the public face of the Baloch struggle. Mahrang Baloch, Sammi Deen Baloch and thousands of other women moved the issue of enforced disappearances from isolated homes into streets, protest camps and national debate. The march from Turbat to Islamabad transformed private grief into a political indictment. It also undermined the state’s preferred depiction of Baloch opposition as an exclusively armed enterprise engineered abroad. It was considerably easier to invoke Indian conspiracies against gunmen in the mountains than against mothers carrying photographs of their sons. Pakistan responded to the march with roadblocks, arrests, water cannon and tear gas. This revealed the central problem. The state did not merely object to Baloch militancy; it objected to any form of Baloch political agency it could not control. Peaceful activists were treated as auxiliaries of the insurgency, while demands for legal accountability were recast as attacks on national security.

The participation of a small number of women in armed organisations has now given the authorities a more useful pretext. Since Shari Baloch attacked the Confucius Institute in Karachi in April 2022, the Baloch Liberation Army’s Majeed Brigade has deployed several female fidayeen. Their appearance marked an important evolution in the insurgency and demonstrated the BLA’s ability to recruit educated women for operations carrying enormous symbolic value. The state has seized upon that development to erase the distinction between combatant, activist, relative and suspect. There is, of course, no legal or moral immunity conferred by gender. A woman who plans or carries out an armed attack is as much a combatant as a man, and the Pakistani authorities have both the right and the duty to investigate her. What they do not have is the right to seize women without warrants, conceal their whereabouts and later use statements obtained in custody as substitutes for evidence presented before a court. The case of Mahal Baloch illustrated the method. Detained during a night raid in Quetta in February 2023, she was accused of possessing explosives and preparing a suicide attack. Her family denied the allegations, and the authorities failed to produce substantial evidence despite keeping her on physical remand for 55 days. A video confession eventually appeared while she was still in police custody. In Pakistan’s Balochistan policy, detention frequently precedes both evidence and narrative; the latter can be manufactured at leisure.

The bounty announcement pushes the process one step further. By publicly designating women as members of Fitna al-Hindustan, the provincial government is constructing a category broad enough to accommodate almost anyone. The terminology is deliberately political rather than legal. It does not identify a specific organisation or offence; it places the accused within a state narrative according to which Baloch resistance is not rooted in decades of military operations, political exclusion, extraction of resources and enforced disappearances, but is merely another Indian plot.

India is the indispensable character in Pakistan’s explanation of itself. It transforms rebellion into foreign aggression, governance failures into sabotage and demands for accountability into treason. Most importantly, it relieves Islamabad of the tiresome obligation to ask why young Baloch men and women continue to join organisations willing to send them to their deaths. The militarisation of Baloch women is nevertheless real, and it should disturb the Baloch movement as much as the Pakistani state. Suicide attacks are not emancipation, and turning young women into instruments of spectacular violence does not become progressive simply because their cause is rooted in genuine oppression. But neither can a handful of female attackers be used to treat an entire female population as a potential extension of the insurgency. That is precisely the direction in which the state appears to be moving. Baloch human-rights organisations reported hundreds of disappearances and extrajudicial or custodial killings during the first half of 2026 alone. The figures vary according to the documenting organisation, reflecting the secrecy surrounding detention and the difficulty of collecting evidence, but they describe the same structure: people are removed from the protection of the law, while the institutions accused of taking them deny knowledge or refuse accountability.

The targeting of women therefore represents more than an expansion of the victim pool. It signals the erosion of one of the last restraints on Pakistan’s counterinsurgency campaign. It is also an admission that women-led mobilisation has become politically dangerous to the state. A gunman can be killed and described as a terrorist. A mother asking where her son has been taken poses a more complicated problem, because her question exposes the system behind the war. By conflating her with the gunman, the state solves that problem rhetorically. Every activist can become a facilitator, every missing woman a clandestine militant and every demand for due process a contribution to Fitna al-Hindustan. Once the categories have been collapsed, disappearance itself can be sold as prevention. Pakistan claims that female militancy has forced it to adapt its security response. The sequence suggests something darker. After decades of making Baloch men disappear, the state helped create a movement led increasingly by the women left behind. It is now attempting to make them disappear as well.