It's not about one Mahrang.... People like her and Mama Qadeer are controversial ... nobody is turning them into saints.... But that's beside the point.... We can disagree with them and still hold that they are entitled to a fair trial... right up until the moment they pick up a gun against the state.... At that point a militant becomes a legitimate target.... Before it, they are citizens...
And notice what she was actually convicted of.... Not being a BLA operative.... Not being an Indian agent.... Neither was proven in court.... She was convicted for incitement at a rally that turned violent and cost an FC man his life.... Now ask yourself honestly: a state whose agencies even record the private moments of judges couldn't produce a shred of evidence tying her to terrorism? If it existed, they'd have used it.... It didn't, so they convicted her on incitement in a trial that local activists and Amnesty alike called a sham... and in doing so, handed the movement a hero it couldn't have manufactured on its own...
Or maybe because the real problem is deeper than any one case?. It's the colonial mindset of an establishment that places itself above the law.... and that is not confined to Balochistan, or to "tribal people"..... We watched it play out from Islamabad to Lahore to Karachi after 2021... the constitution treated as "raddi kaghaz", elections engineered openly, defendants convicted at multiple locations simultaneously on charges obviously farcical, press conferences performed under duress, tens of thousans arbitrary detentions across the country and a government handed to a party that had won only 17 seats...
The content of the charges was never the point.... The message was: we are above the law, we own the courts, we own the Election Commission, we own the country, we can do whatever we want, however we want and the lowly civilians can do nothing about it....
That is one pattern with two outlets.... Educated people in the cities take to social media and forums to vent their dissent.... Tribal people pick up guns... The grievance is the same, only the tools differ ... a state that refuses to let its citizens govern themselves and denies them their basic rights...
So until that underlying problem is addressed, stability in Pakistan stays a fantasy.... The military establishment keeps firefighting a blaze it lit itself, and then acts baffled that the house won't stop burning.....