The gavel in Quetta does not sound like justice. It sounds like a heavy door clicking shut in a room where the lights have already been turned off.
When the Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) recently scribbled the names of twelve Baloch activists onto the list of "proclaimed offenders," it wasn't just a legal filing. It was a digital erasure. To be a proclaimed offender in this corner of the world is to become a ghost while your heart is still beating. You are no longer a citizen with a grievance; you are a target with a file.
Consider a young woman—let’s call her Zala—walking through the dust-choked streets of Quetta. In this hypothetical but reality-grounded scenario, Zala isn't carrying a weapon. She is carrying a memory of a brother who went to the market three years ago and never came home. She carries a megaphone. She carries the audacity to stand in the public square and ask a single, terrifying question: Where is he?
Now, because of a stroke of a pen in an air-conditioned courtroom, Zala is no longer a sister. She is a fugitive.
The Architecture of Silence
The legal mechanism used here is Section 87 and 88 of the Criminal Procedure Code. On paper, these are tools to ensure that people accused of crimes don't skip town. In the hands of a state feeling the heat of a grassroots movement, they become a social guillotine.
By declaring these twelve individuals—many of them leaders and vocal members of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC)—as "proclaimed offenders," the state isn't just looking for them. It is stripping them of their right to exist in the sunlight. Their properties can be confiscated. Their bank accounts frozen. Their families can be pressured to hand them over.
It is a slow-motion strangulation. It's not a bullet, but it's just as final.
Consider the BYC's recent Long March—a massive, dusty, exhausted trek across provinces. They didn't have tanks. They had blisters. They didn't have high-tech weaponry. They had banners. The Quetta ATC’s ruling is a direct response to that movement. It's the state saying, "We heard you, and now we will make you disappear."
The Hidden Cost of Speaking
To understand why this matters, we have to look past the dry reports of "ATC declarations." We have to look at the invisible stakes.
When a name like Sammi Deen Baloch or Mahrang Baloch is dragged into a court docket as a fugitive, it sends a ripple through every tea stall and every classroom in Balochistan. The message is clear: if you speak, you are a criminal. If you demand a trial for the disappeared, you will be the one in the dock.
The state relies on the exhaustion of the observer. They hope that after ten, twenty, fifty names, we will stop caring. We start to see these human beings as a statistic, a recurring headline that we scan and then scroll past.
But imagine for a moment being one of those twelve. You aren't "absconding" because you're a bank robber or a murderer. You are in hiding because you believe in a version of your home that doesn't involve your friends being picked up in the middle of the night. You're a fugitive for the crime of wanting a future.
The Courtroom as a Stage
In Quetta, the courtroom isn't a place of impartial weight. It is a stage. The judge, the prosecutor, and the "proclaimed offenders" are all part of a play where the script was written before the first witness was even called.
The ATC's intensifying crackdown is a sign of a deeper rot. When a state can no longer convince its people, it can only command them. When it can no longer command them, it must criminalize them.
The twelve activists aren't just names on a PDF. They are the sons and daughters of a land that has been defined by its silence for too long. By declaring them offenders, the court is trying to turn the public against them. They are being branded as "terrorists" or "anti-state" to make their eventual arrest or disappearance more palatable to the rest of the world.
The Weight of the Gavel
If we look at this through the lens of history, we see a pattern. It’s a pattern of a state that is terrified of its own people. It’s a pattern of using the law to break the spirit.
But here is the thing about a spirit: it's hard to catch. You can't put a soul in a jail cell. You can't declare a dream a "proclaimed offender."
The BYC and the twelve individuals named in the Quetta ATC's ruling are part of a lineage that stretches back decades. They are the latest in a long line of people who have decided that the risk of speaking is less than the cost of staying silent.
As we look at the names on that list, we should ask ourselves what it would take for us to risk everything. What would it take for us to be "proclaimed offenders" in our own homes?
The answer is simple, and it’s the same answer that Zala has as she walks the streets of Quetta. It’s the same answer that the twelve activists have as they wait in the shadows.
It’s love. Love for a brother, love for a friend, love for a land that deserves more than a gavel and a dark room.
The names on the door of Room 12 aren't just names. They are the sound of a country waking up, even if the state is trying to put it back to sleep.
