A Cry for Justice

Balochistan is clichéd as the largest province of Pakistan with the smallest population and with vast natural resources. This is indeed true. It is also true that with just 1.5 million families, Balochistan—at one job per family—needs just 1.5 million jobs. Yet the province is abjectly under-developed, with virtually absent physical infrastructure and abysmally low social development indicators. Unemployment and poverty, even hunger, is rampant. Local discontent and anger over the state of affairs has repeatedly boiled over into insurgencies, with one under way currently.

A Cry for Justice empirically documents five different aspects of under-development and deprivation in Balochistan: gas pricing, federal development expenditure, federal social protection, federal civil service, and structure of electoral representation. It is the first attempt to detail the facts of systematic economic exploitation, discrimination, and neglect that Balochistan has shouldered and continues to face—minus the fiction of imagined wrongs.