Pakistan’s authorities have decided that Imran Khan’s sisters are a threat to public order. Aleema Khan was detained in Lahore on September 20, ahead of a protest planned for September 27 to demand the former prime minister’s release. Her sisters Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi were detained as well. The state did not need to establish that the women had committed a crime. Under the Punjab Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance, it could hold them for 30 days on the grounds that they might disturb the peace.

The danger they posed was political influence. With Imran Khan in prison, his sisters had become public voices for him and a point of contact for his supporters. Detaining them before the march serves two purposes: it removes people who might help mobilise the protest and warns others that even family ties can become grounds for punishment. Preventive detention turns a prediction about what someone might do into a reason to imprison her now.

The case also exposes a weakness in Pakistan’s familiar account of its security problems. There is no insurgency to invoke here, no remote border district in which the ordinary rules have supposedly become impossible to apply. These are three women speaking about a jailed politician in Lahore. Yet the state has reached for a measure designed to keep them out of public life at precisely the moment their voices matter.

Three days before the first of those arrests, human-rights lawyer Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir and her husband, Hadi Ali Chattha, encountered another version of the same logic. The Supreme Court suspended their 17-year sentences in a case concerning social-media posts. Within hours, they were re-arrested in connection with an older protest case. A court could order their release; the authorities could find another way to keep them in custody.

Mazari has represented Baloch students, families of the forcibly disappeared, journalists and others who have tried to make the security agencies answer for their actions. Her work gives people whom the state can ignore individually a route into court and public debate. Her re-arrest therefore carries a message beyond her own case. Legal victories may be temporary when the institutions a lawyer challenges can keep producing new grounds to detain her.

In Balochistan, women have lived with that imbalance for decades. When men disappeared from homes, universities and checkpoints, their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters were left to search for them. They went to police stations, filed petitions and carried photographs of the missing into the streets. Enforced disappearance was meant to spread fear through families. It also made women the most persistent public witnesses to what had happened.

That change has proved difficult for Islamabad to manage. Mahrang Baloch, Sammi Deen Baloch and thousands of other women have moved the question of enforced disappearance beyond private grief and into national politics. The march from Turbat to Islamabad forced the country to look at families who had spent years asking where their relatives had been taken. Roadblocks, arrests, water cannon and tear gas supplied the state’s answer to a demand for information.

The authorities now have another way to describe Baloch women: as a security threat in their own right. On August 27, the Balochistan government circulated photographs of nine women from Gwadar, Jiwani and Turbat, declared them highly wanted and offered rewards for information leading to them. It alleged links to Fitna al-Hindustan, the label used to cast the Baloch insurgency as an Indian project. It supplied no publicly verifiable evidence explaining the women’s alleged roles or the legal process behind their designation. In a province marked by disappearances, publishing names, faces and cash rewards has consequences even before a case reaches court.

The notice followed reports that 20-year-old Safia Baloch had been taken from Quetta during a night operation. Earlier in August, 17-year-old Aqsa reportedly disappeared with her father after a raid in Khuzdar. At the end of July, three other women were reportedly detained at a Frontier Corps checkpoint near Quetta and had not been seen since. These accounts require investigation. They cannot be answered by declaring that women, as a category, have become suspect.

Some women have joined Baloch armed organisations. Since Shari Baloch’s 2022 attack on the Confucius Institute in Karachi, the Baloch Liberation Army has deployed other female suicide attackers. The state is entitled to investigate armed operations and prosecute those responsible. That fact does not make a protester, a missing student or a relative asking questions an insurgent. Evidence must establish the difference.

The language of counterterrorism makes that distinction easier to erase. A woman organising a demonstration can be called a facilitator; a lawyer defending a suspect can be portrayed as hostile to the state; a disappearance can be presented as an unexplained episode involving someone already under suspicion. Once every form of opposition is placed inside the same security story, the authorities no longer have to explain each action on its own merits.

Imran Khan’s sisters show how far this method travels. Their detention uses none of Balochistan’s insurgency vocabulary, but it follows the same calculation: women who can keep a political cause visible must be prevented from speaking and organising. Mazari’s case shows what happens when a woman tries to challenge that calculation through the courts. In Balochistan, the families of the disappeared have been confronting it for years.

Pakistan has repeatedly removed men from political life through imprisonment and disappearance. The women left behind kept their causes alive, carried their cases into court and made their absence visible. The state now appears determined to treat that persistence as a threat too.