A PHOTOGRAPH OF Mahrang Baloch has been doing the rounds on social media over the past few weeks. It was taken on a cold winter morning in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province, in January 2024, and it features Mahrang, the founder of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), standing before thousands of people – most of them young and many of them students. Mahrang had just returned to Balochistan after a month-long sit-in outside Islamabad’s National Press Club to protest the enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings of Baloch people. The gathering in Quetta was to welcome Mahrang back and recognise her determination in the fight for Baloch civil and human rights. Flanked by other women leaders on the stage, Mahrang addressed the crowd, saying that the was revolution underway in Balochistan for its very survival.
Mahrang was 31 years old when the photo was taken, and already one of the most important political figures to emerge from Balochistan in a generation. A doctor by training, she started the BYC in 2020 and has long been on the frontlines of the fight against human-rights abuses and enforced disappearances in the province. In 2024, Time magazine included her in TIME100 Next, its annual list of the most influential leaders across the world. The BBC also named her in its 100 Women list that same year. She was said to be in contention for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025. In March that year, the Pakistan government detained Mahrang after a non-violent protest and charged her with terrorism, sedition and murder. In June 2026, an anti-terrorism court in Quetta convicted her and sentenced her to life imprisonment – a move her supporters and human-rights organisations have decried as politically motivated.
For years, journalists and commentators have treated the fact that Mahrang is a woman as the most interesting thing about her. They are not wrong to notice this, but they are often wrong about exactly why she, as a woman, has emerged as the new face of Baloch resistance.
Mahrang is one of many women now at the forefront of the Baloch movement, which has struggled against the Pakistan state for decades with varied demands spanning economic grievances, human rights, the preservation of Baloch identity, greater autonomy and outright independence. Karima Baloch served as the first female chairperson of the Baloch Students Organisation–Azad, formed in the early 2000s to campaign for Baloch independence. There are also now women involved in the armed resistance with the Balochistan Liberation Army – such as Shari Baloch, Mahil Baloch and Shaynaz Baloch – where earlier Baloch militants were all men.