Pakistan was built on one idea. Religion would hold together a country that geography, language and ethnicity never agreed to hold together.

79 years later, that idea is cracking in the 2 places Islamabad talks about the least in polite company: Balochistan and Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, including Gilgit Baltistan. Both regions are done pretending the federation works for them. The signal is no longer subtle. It is bodies, blockades and burnt patience.

This is not a call for war cries or map fantasies. It is a plain reading of numbers, patterns and incentives.

And the conclusion is simple.

A vacuum is opening on India’s western border: If New Delhi does not fill it with quiet, sustained statecraft, Beijing or Tehran will fill it instead, on terms far less comfortable for India.

Balochistan: A Province Treated Like a Colony

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province by land, about 44% of the country’s territory, and its smallest by population share. It sits on gas, copper, gold and a coastline that opens straight onto the Arabian Sea and the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. It should be Pakistan’s richest region. Instead it is its poorest, and the reason is not an accident of geology. It is policy.

Look at the resource math first.

The Reko Diq copper gold deposit in Chagai district is one of the largest undeveloped mineral finds on earth. Pakistan and Balochistan’s provincial government together hold a 50% stake, with Barrick Gold holding the other half, and the project has drawn 3.5 billion dollars in international financing from the Asian Development Bank, the US Export-Import Bank and other lenders in late 2025.

Officials project the mine will generate something in the range of 75 billion dollars over roughly 35 years, with between 7,500 and 13,500 jobs at full production. That sounds generous until you remember whose land this is and who has historically been shut out of its returns. A 1993 deal handed 75% of Reko Diq’s shares to an Australian company, sparking outrage in a province where most people live below the poverty line, and the fight over who profits from Baloch soil has run for 3 decades since.

Then there is the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Nationally, CPEC has pulled in 25.9 billion dollars in investment and created more than 261,000 jobs since it began, with the wider corridor valued at roughly 60 billion dollars. Gwadar port, sitting inside Balochistan, is the crown jewel of this plan, marketed as the future gateway between China and the Gulf. But energy projects make up 60% of announced CPEC funding within Balochistan itself, largely built to enable mining and extraction rather than to develop the province’s own economy. The people living on top of this wealth still face some of the worst human development indicators in South Asia. Roads exist to move ore and gas out, not to connect Baloch towns to hospitals or universities.

This is the oldest colonial trick in the book, dressed up as a national development project. Extract the resource, ship the profit to the capital and to a foreign patron, and leave the local population with dust, checkpoints and a military garrison.

Now look at what the Pakistani state does to anyone who objects.

The numbers on enforced disappearances in Balochistan are not whispered activist rumors anymore. They are monthly, documented, and rising.

Paank, the human rights wing of the Baloch National Movement, recorded 1,355 enforced disappearances in 2025 and 225 extrajudicial killings, with the pattern continuing into 2026 at 82 disappearances in January and 109 in February. A separate monitor put the February 2026 figure even higher, at 234 enforced disappearances including a woman and 9 teenagers, alongside 87 killings that month, with students the single largest group of victims and the Frontier Corps identified as the main perpetrator.

March brought 65 more disappearances and 50 killings, again concentrated among students, with 14 of the dead having previously been reported missing before being found killed in custody.

April added 124 further disappearances, including 8 women and 5 teenagers, and 53 killings, with the Frontier Corps again named as the primary force behind the abductions.

Read that pattern again. Students. Teenagers. Women. Health workers. People picked up from hostels, buses and their own homes, some released after weeks of torture, many never seen again, others returned only as bodies. In just two weeks in January 2026, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee documented 18 people forcibly disappeared in raids across Kech and Gwadar districts alone. This is not counter-insurgency. This is collective punishment of an entire ethnic population for the actions of an armed few.

And the armed few are not going away. In one of the bloodiest stretches on record, Baloch guerrillas, mainly the Baloch Liberation Army, killed at least 42 Pakistani security personnel in 4 days starting July 5, 2026, prompting a major new army operation that claimed 102 Baloch fighters killed in response.

On January 31, 2026, the BLA carried out coordinated attacks across more than a dozen cities in Balochistan simultaneously, including the provincial capital Quetta itself. This is not a fringe insurgency hiding in the hills anymore. It is a movement with the reach to strike the seat of provincial government on a single day, in multiple cities at once.

A Pakistani army spokesman was once asked directly about the missing. His answer, on record, was that the state does not “wish that anyone should be missing”. That is the entire official position, offered with a straight face while the bodies keep turning up in ditches.

Gilgit Baltistan and PoK: Taxation Without Representation, Wrapped in Silence

If Balochistan burns, Gilgit Baltistan (GB) simmers, and it has been simmering since December 2023 in one of the longest sustained protest movements in the region’s history.

The trigger was wheat. The Gilgit Baltistan government raised the subsidized wheat price from Rs20 per kilogram to Rs36, after it had already climbed from Rs12 to Rs20 earlier in 2023. In a region with almost no agricultural land, wedged into some of the most mountainous terrain on the planet, wheat subsidy is not a policy footnote. It is survival. GB is rugged and mountainous, contains little farmable land, and depends on the federal government for basic necessities like food.

What started as a bread and butter protest widened fast into something bigger? The Awami Action Committee, an alliance of political, religious and social groups, published a 15-point charter of demands that went well beyond wheat, calling for suspension of the 2022 Finance Act, revocation of new taxes, and restoration of local land ownership rights taken from residents. Load shedding, illegal land occupation and resource exploitation were named as major, long standing sources of anger alongside the wheat issue. The protests became the largest and longest in the region’s history, drawing participants from every district, chanting that autonomy is their right.

Sit with that demand list for a second. Tax without representation. Land without title. Food without subsidy. Power without supply. This is a textbook description of a colony, not a constituent unit of a federation. And Islamabad’s own response confirms it. Government negotiators reportedly tried to fracture the protest movement along sectarian lines by inserting religious political leadership into it, the same divide and rule tactic the Pakistani establishment has run in Balochistan for decades. When people organize around bread, the state’s answer is to organize them around sect instead.

The protest movement has not stopped. It flared again in 2024 over further wheat flour subsidy cuts, and it has since spread its demands into Azad Kashmir on the other side of the same disputed territory, where price protests over flour and rice followed the same trajectory. Two regions, one federal government, one recurring grievance: extraction from the center, almost nothing coming back.

The Establishment’s Real Product Is Not Islam, It Is Control

Pakistan’s founding myth was that a shared faith could substitute for shared governance. Seventy-nine years of evidence say otherwise, and the country’s own establishment knows it better than anyone. That is exactly why it keeps reaching for religion as a management tool rather than treating it as a genuine national compact.

Every time Balochistan or Gilgit Baltistan pushes back on economic exploitation, the response from Islamabad and Rawalpindi is the same playbook. Frame the dissent as a security threat, not a governance failure. Bring in religious clergy to compete with secular or ethnic nationalist leadership for the same street. Pass the problem to the army, whose budget and institutional weight only grow with every internal crisis, because a country perpetually at war with parts of itself always needs a bigger military. This is not faith guiding politics. This is politics wearing faith as a uniform, because a uniform is easier to justify than an argument.

The result is a state where the military establishment answers to no real civilian check, where blasphemy accusations can be weaponized against political rivals and minorities alike, and where an entire province’s population can be forcibly disappeared by the thousand while the loudest domestic voices calling for accountability get branded as agents of India or the West. That is not a religious state. That is a security state that has found religion to be the cheapest available adhesive for public loyalty, and cheap adhesive does not hold when the load gets heavy.

Why This Vacuum Will Not Stay Empty

Pakistan’s internal fractures are not happening in isolation. Two outside powers already have deep, structural interest in what happens next in Balochistan specifically.

China’s stake is direct and enormous. Gwadar and the CPEC corridor sit inside the province Beijing needs pacified to protect its Belt and Road investment and its access route around the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint. Gwadar sits roughly 400 kilometers from the Strait of Hormuz, which is precisely why Beijing has poured money and, increasingly, its own security personnel into the province. A Chinese footprint that started as ports and railways is steadily becoming a security presence, and a security presence in a restive province tends to become a permanent one.

Iran’s interest is quieter but just as real. Its own Sistan and Baluchistan province, directly across the border, shares ethnicity, language and a parallel history of Baloch grievance against a distant capital. Tehran has every incentive to shape outcomes on the Pakistani side of that border rather than let instability spill uncontrolled into its own restive province, and it has the religious and ethnic channels to do so without ever needing to send in a division of troops.

Neither Beijing nor Tehran is doing this out of sentiment. Both are doing it because vacuums get filled by whoever shows up with resources and patience. Right now, that is not India.

What India Should Actually Do, Without the Theatrics

This is the part that gets lost in television debates and dramatic hashtag campaigns. Leveraging this moment does not mean flags, slogans or promises of liberation delivered from a studio. It means quiet, sustained, unglamorous statecraft, the kind that takes years and gets almost no primetime coverage.

First, information and documentation. India should be the most reliable, most cited source of verified data on enforced disappearances and rights violations in Balochistan and PoK, feeding international human rights bodies, the United Nations, and global media with material that is accurate and defensible, not exaggerated. Credibility compounds. Propaganda does not.

Second, diaspora and exile engagement, done through institutions rather than through visible state theater. Baloch and Gilgit Baltistan activists living abroad need platforms, protection and a hearing, but this works best through universities, think tanks, and civil society channels rather than official government photo ops that let Islamabad dismiss every grievance as an Indian plot.

Third, economic and development diplomacy aimed at the region’s actual population, not just its rulers. Scholarships, trade access study, healthcare partnerships and cultural exchange programs built for Baloch and Gilgit Baltistan communities create long-term goodwill that no press release can manufacture overnight.

Fourth, patient multilateral pressure. India has diplomatic capital in Gulf states, in Washington, and in European capitals. Consistently and calmly raising documented human rights data in these forums, without theatrics, builds an international paper trail that outlasts any single news cycle.

Fifth, and most important, strategic restraint on rhetoric. Every time an Indian politician gives a fiery speech promising to “liberate” Balochistan, it hands Rawalpindi exactly the propaganda it wants: proof that Baloch grievances are an Indian conspiracy rather than a homegrown demand for dignity. The most effective thing India can do is stay credible, stay factual, and let Pakistan’s own documented record do the talking. Baloch and Gilgit Baltistan activists have said this themselves, more than once: they want solidarity and honest documentation, not a foreign flag draped over their movement.

The Honest Counterpoint

None of this is simple, and anyone pretending it is deserving skepticism. Pakistan’s establishment still frames Balochistan and Gilgit Baltistan as core sovereignty and security issues, not governance failures, and that framing has real support inside Pakistan itself, not just among the generals. Any visible Indian involvement risks the opposite of what it intends. It can rally Pakistani nationalism around the flag, hand the army a justification for even harsher crackdowns, and make ordinary Baloch and Gilgit Baltistan civilians the ones who pay the price for India’s optics.

China’s economic weight in the region is also not going anywhere soon regardless of what India does, given the scale of capital already committed. And there is a legitimate question of double standards that critics will rightly raise, since India’s own record on internal dissent and minority rights is not spotless either. A serious approach has to hold both truths at once: Pakistan’s record in these regions is documented and damning, and India’s response has to be built on patience and credibility rather than satisfaction at a rival’s discomfort.

Pakistan spent 7 decades trying to paper over ethnic and economic fault lines with a religious nationalism it never actually delivered good governance to match. The bill for that shortcut has come due in Balochistan and in Gilgit Baltistan at the same time, and the numbers, the disappearances, the resource math, the protest charters, tell a consistent story that no ministry statement can spin away.

A vacuum is opening on India’s western flank. China is already inside it. Iran is watching it.

The only question left is whether India treats this as a serious, patient, long-horizon strategic opportunity, or whether it lets the moment pass while the debate stays confined to studio lights and hashtags. History rarely waits twice.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

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