After the Jaffar Express train saga from 11 to 13 March 2025, in which the security forces succeeded in rescuing the hostages and killing all the 33 terrorists, the dead bodies of the terrorists were shifted to the District Hospital for their identification and to complete the legal requirement. This legal procedure was carried out to identify the dead bodies and then hand over to the next of kin.
A gang of the Baloch Yekjehti Committee (BYC) barged into the hospital, forcibly snatched the dead bodies and fled. Till the last report, the police after hectic efforts, have been able to recover three out of five dead bodies. Search for the rest of the two bodies was going on. Stealing of dead bodies by the BYC is not a new phenomenon, but it is their old practice. Their real motive is to gain sympathies of the public by putting up fake narratives of missing persons and mutilated dead bodies.
These fake narratives were first coined in 2007/08 which was hyped by the media and Hamid Mir of Geo News was in the forefront. The then Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Iftikhar Chaudary hailing from Balochistan took personal interest and personally heard the case. To gain kudos from the nationalist leaders and the propagandists, he summoned the Inspector General Frontier Core (IG FC) and pressurised him to produce the missing persons and to refrain from this practice.
The accusations were designed to restrain the security forces from chasing the terrorists involved in heinous crimes. These two narratives were then picked up by Dr Mahrang Baloch, who heads BYC. She has become very popular among the younger generation of Baluchistan and her following has increased manifold.
It has been an old custom of BYC to drum up the narratives of missing persons or enforced disappearances, or mutilated bodies, and mass graves. All these terminologies are taken from the pages of Indian atrocities in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IOK) where the Muslim Kashmiris are being ruthlessly persecuted, killed in fake encounters, or put in torture dens for decades.
It has now been amply proven that the theme of missing persons has been politicised and the strength of the missing persons in Balochistan is exaggerated exponentially to gain sympathy of the people.
The Baloch nationalist leader Akhtar Mengal declared on the floor of the National Assembly sometimes back that 6000 are missing. Some gave the figures of 10,000. Whereas the ground checks carried out by successive provincial govts of Baluchistan and the interior ministry give an altogether different picture.
The idea of missing persons was conceived to smoke screen recruitment of young boys of the Baloch tribes into the Baloch rebel groups. On one hand the rebels were projected as freedom fighters and on the other, the new recruits were declared as missing persons. The security forces and intelligence agencies were blamed for their enforced disappearances.
Those who got fed up living in the mountains in Farari camps, or in Afghanistan or in Iran, and wanted to return home, they were killed and their mutilated bodies thrown on the road side. The blame was again put on the security forces. The majority of missing persons cases have been resolved by the courts, and the unresolved cases are not more than a few hundred.
Most of the missing persons were the ones who had left their homes and voluntarily joined the Baloch rebel groups. In a number of counter insurgency operations, the killed terrorists were identified as missing persons. The purpose behind snatching the dead bodies is to hide the identities of the terrorists declared as missing persons from the people.
BYC is the political wing of banned Baloch Liberation Army (BLA). It is actively involved in poisoning the minds of the youth, the students and teachers and the educated class in Baluchistan. Mahrang has been helping BLA in its recruitment, and she incites the younger generation to pick up arms against the state forces and to help BLA in achieving its objectives of making Balochistan a separate state.
Mahrang openly hobnobs with anti-Pakistan foreign agencies, lobbies, undertakes foreign trips frequently, badmouths the state and undermines its welfare projects, states sit-ins, and plays up mostly imaginary grievances of Balochistan. Reportedly, she receives handsome amounts from her patrons.
In many ways, BYC has become more lethal than BLA since it is engaged in subverting the minds of the people and making them hate the federal and provincial governments, Punjab and the Punjab heavy army. It acts as the proxy of BLA and has never condemned its terrorism and criminal activities against innocent people.
A national security committee meeting was held on 18 March to take stock of the fast deteriorating security situation in KP and Balochistan, and to take immediate remedial measures to wipe out the menace of terrorism, which is posing a grave threat to the integrity and safety of the country.
The army chief rightly pointed out that for how long Pakistan will remain a soft state due to weak governance and management, the price of which is paid by the soldiers in blood. It was agreed in principle that Pakistan can no longer afford to act as a soft state since policy of appeasement has proved to be too expensive in terms of human and financial losses.
Softness of the federal and provincial governments towards security matters, and our western and southern borders, encouraged the conspirators, non-state actors, their abettors, financiers and facilitators to bleed our soldiers. BYC has been given a free hand to promote its anti-state agenda. It has a big hand in making the situation of Baluchistan explosive.
Smugglers, drug peddlers, mafias and black money operators took full advantage of soft systems and institutions, and soft border management to fill their personal coffers, but at the cost of the national economy.
A time has come to declare BYC a terrorist group on account of its deep ties with BLA.
